Page 22 of Reclaiming His Lost Mate
It felt like a compulsion, and nothing like the mate pull or what I felt for Selina. It felt dark, vile, and nauseating, and the only time where I remotely felt like I was in control of myself was when I was a long distance away from Marissa. So, one week later, with all the resolve I could garner from decades of training, I was taking desperate strides away from my pack, leaving Rhys in charge as I sought to search for a way to loose myself from Marissa’s chains.
As soon as I crossed the borders, I verbally severed all alliances with Nightwing Pack, but to say that getting away from my pack and Marissa was tough would be painting it nicely with a complementary bow on top. That first night, I couldn’t close my eyes to sleep withoutdrowning in my dreams or falling into a terrible nightmare with Marissa repeatedly stabbing me to my demise. When I forced myself to stay awake, I was either conjuring real-life images of her, or my insides would feel like a volcano eruption. My wolf suffered irrational fits of rage, misery roping its sharp jaws around my neck. The claws of Marissa’s dark spell on me haunted me to go back to her, but as I went farther and the night turned into many, it became bearable, only echoing in a corner of my mind as a dull nibbling ache.
Suzanne, a friendly witch, was the woman I first met to help me, but she was shocked by how much dark magic was in my system, unable to flush it out without draining herself. She suggested another witch in a smaller valley town only miles from her, Lyvia, and recognition struck me at the mention of the name.
Lyvia was the witch who helped Roman, Kyle, and Leah of the Blood Moon and Moonlight Packs a little over half a decade ago in taking down their oppressive ruler, Reginald. Suzanne had offered me shelter for the night, but I couldn’t sleep when this much darkness was soaring within me.
I didn't know how much time I had left.
My trek to Matsuna began at dawn. I couldn't shift; I lacked the trust in my wolf to handle the madness that surged through us. So, I trudged onward on foot, agonizingly slow, my strength being sapped by the grip of dark magic.
Days blended into one another, the scenery shifting from the gently sloping valley to a landscape with steeper, icier cliffs. The cold air stung my lungs, and hunger gnawed at my resolve. I fought against exhaustion, pushing through the fatigue and the constant echo of Marissa's vile magic threatening to swallow me.
Finally, I reached the next frozen valley over from Suzanne's—and hope kindled. I dragged my leaden feet through the snow, marveling that I was finally in the town Suzanne described—Matsuna—but it wasn't the witch who I saw first.
It was a girl.
I stopped in front of the six-story house seared into a cliff—where Lyvia should have been, but it was a child, clueless and no more than five years old, who bore an uncanny image to myself of over two and a half decades who I met.
Crouching low, in wonder, I asked, "What's your name?"
"Mia," she replied as the many symptoms I'd felt for the weeks leading up to the moment all faded away, everything diminishing to the volume of a barely beating heart.
"How old are you, Mia?" I asked.
"I'm four," she said proudly.
Astonished, I stared into her eyes, the only features that struck me as different from mine. They were a stormy shade of forest green, just like Shadow Moon Pack's forests usually reached after a wild night blessed with Igaluk's cloudburst.
Just like Selina's eyes.
They called to me, drew me in, and held me captive. The only captivity I ever craved.
Even the animals had scrambled from my presence when I startled them in the woods on my journey here, but not this angel. This child, Mia, had clung to my hand, purifying every dark corner of my heart with her essence as she obliviously led me to her mother. Even before we arrived, even before I heard a woman draw in a sharp, stunned gasp on seeing me approach with her daughter, I’d felt her. I smelled her.
My Selina.
It only took a second for the resemblance the child bore with me, as well as her having Selina's mesmerizing eyes, to take up meaning in my head.
Selina's night with me didn't just end as the singular best night of my life.
We made a baby together that night.
And I'd been absent for five years of it.
The question was out of my lips before I could put a lid on, even though low enough that only I heard it. "What the hell have I done?"
Chapter 10
Selina
The very moment my heart started beating again, it felt like I'd held my breath while sprinting to catch a hen on a scorching day. Sweat formed in the cool evening air, trickling down my back, and my heart bounced like a pendulum between my spine and lung, racing from my ribcage to my throat, then thundering right on the tip of my tongue on taking in Alexis hand in hand with Mia. A wave of dizziness hit me to my core.
Five years.
Half a decade and all that time wasn't nearly enough because the maddening drag I felt toward Alexis right this moment as he stood below the steps on the porch of our cozy log cabin home was still as intense as the first time I saw him. He looked even more handsome than I remembered, his features now more sharply defined and manly than they were before. And the mate bond…Goddess.
I hadn't been able to sever the mate bond after Mia's birth because her symptoms from the Warring Wolves condition started almost immediately after she was born. Finding out that the dynamics between me and her father was a key cause of her sickness, I couldn't bring myself to ask Lyvia to perform the severance ritual. The pull hadlessened with the distance and time, but right now, seeing his overgrown black hair falling to his lethal apex predator face, his perfect Cupid lips, and sturdy body radiating nothing but primal dominant heat, I wavered on my feet, chastising myself from thoughts of tearing the sun-beat clothes off his body.
