Kai

  “Clare?” I called out when I arrived at her hospital room and found her bed empty.

  I’d been feeling antsy all day, which was why I’d returned earlier than usual, taking a half-day break from work. Seeing her empty room made my heart start racing as my mind raced with ideas of where Clare could be. Could Remy have snuck into the Supernatural Council to take her? No, that was impossible. This hospital was nearly impenetrable and each patient’s family members had their own IDs for visiting. And there was no way he was sneaking into anywhere related to the Supernatural Council when we had a bounty on him.

  I was about to step out to call a nurse when a sudden, sharp scent hit me—earthy, metallic. Blood.

  The realization sent me sprinting to the bathroom inside Clare’s ensuite hospital room where I found her on the floor with her bleeding wrists over the toilet seat and her pale face propped over the toilet seat by those same arms.

  I knew what had happened immediately because we’d been afraid it would. Her doctor had already told me countless times that she was in a bad mental space and had told me to keep an eye on her. But she’d been eating better and waking up with fewer nightmares in the past three days that I’d thought I would just pop into work and get some things done at her insistence that she wanted to be alone for a bit.

  I wasn’t foolish enough to move her without a doctor’s help, so with trembling hands, I took out my phone and called her doctor. Less than five minutes later, she was surrounded as they did some quick first aid to stop the incessant bleeding so they could move her to her bed.

  It took a few hours for them to extract the tiny shards of glass from the tile she’d broken off the bathroom walls and haphazardly used as a razor.

  And in those moments of sitting right outside the waiting room, all I could hold on to was the little note she’d written for me that seemed more like a diary than a letter:

  "I’m sorry I thought I could try to cope for you and them, but I can’t hold on anymore.

  It’s too much. It’s too much.

  Every time I close my eyes, I go back to that house. I'm always in that room and he's always with me there. And even when I'm not, I feel his heavy breathing on my neck. My skin crawls now when someone tries to touch me.

  I wish I could forget. I wish I can go back to before I knew...before I remembered.

  But I can't. Those memories are branded in my mind. Just when I think I could get over one, another one resurfaces. And there's always a new scene in my nightmare every night. I'm tired of that. I'm tired of feeling nauseous every time I remember the things he put in my mouth.

  Right now, I feel that every second I live, I have to relive this over and over. I thought it would stop hurting after a while, but it still hurts today as much as it hurt when I first remembered. Especially since I then get to relive the memory of tearing those men’s souls apart.

  This literally feels like hell.

  Every second I’m awake, I feel sick to my stomach.

  I’ve always hated being sick and now, it seems like I always feel sick to my stomach no matter how hard I try not to.

  I’m sorry. I know this isn’t the way. I know there can be a better way. Everyone keeps saying I can recover and that one day, I wouldn’t feel so awful, but why do I keep feeling like this feeling will never go away? Why does the voice inside my head keep telling me I’m never going to feel better? Why do I feel so filthy? Why do I feel so ashamed when anyone looks at me as if they can see me as the shameless wh*re who seduced her mother’s husband?

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  It’s not getting better. I just feel worse and worse every day.

  I’ve decided. Instead of letting you sit by my side all day long, losing sleep, trying to get me to eat and stay alive with the doctors and nurses, it would be better for me to disappear. It would be better for them too. This way, they don’t have to pretend to still love me when they find out how filthy I am.

  This is the best option. I get to stop feeling so terrible, and all of you can breathe a deep sigh of relief and go back to your regular lives.

  Thank you for helping me. I’m sorry for wasting yours and the Supernatural Council’s time and resources but I just can’t.

  To Kai

  Clare Parker.”

  I wished she could be awake and I could speak to her. I wished I could tell her everyone was rooting for her to stay alive and how much she meant to me. Although I had no intention of completing our mate bond, I wanted to tell her how important her happiness was to me as her true mate. I wished I could tell her how I felt when I first met her and realized that even scum like me could have a true mate and how her existence itself was what gave me hope that I could still redeem myself for the things I did in my past. After all, the Moon goddess had deemed me fit to have a soul mate and fate had deemed it fit for us to meet in a world where only 30-40% of supernaturals meet their true mates.

  “Kai?”

  It took a second for me to return to my own body as I looked up to meet Dr. Saul’s attentive green eyes that always made me uneasy because staring into them always made me feel like he understood something about me that even I didn’t.

  “Dr. Saul? How is she? She’s fine, right?”

  “She’s fine. We’ve stitched her wrists and they’re no longer bleeding. She’s stable now, but she’s refusing to wake up.”

  “I thought you said she was stable?” I asked, standing up so I could look the doctor in the eyes and also to give myself something to do other than just tapping my hands on my pants.

  “She’s physically stable, but she’s doing something we sometimes see in supernaturals. Her mind keeps pulling her back under whenever she gets close to waking up, almost like she’s avoiding consciousness on purpose. There’s nothing any doctor or psychiatrist can do. Only the loved ones of these kinds of patients can pull them out.”

  “Dr. Saul, how about we just…do what I suggested earlier and erase the memories of what her stepfather did to her?” I asked the second time.

  He sighed and then placed his hands in his pockets. “Come on, let’s go to my office.”

  We reached his office in no time, and after handing me a cup of warm water and grabbing one for himself, he began to speak. “When you asked the last time, I just told you that it was better for her overall well being that she learns to deal with those memories, but I didn’t tell you that burying some of someone’s memories has adverse effects. It’s different from an individual burying their own memories. Depending on how strong the person whose memories is being buried is mentally, they’ll keep recalling it, which means we have to keep bringing them back in to get the memories buried and each time, she would feel as awful as she felt when she just remembered her memories this time. And there’s also the problem of mental scarring caused by burying the memories over and over. As her doctor, I sincerely don’t recommend it.”

  He was right. If that was how that procedure worked, I didn’t want Clare to be tortured over and over by those memories. “So, what do we do now?”

  “I want you to first try speaking to her first, but if that doesn’t work, you might need to use your mate bond to tether her. Dr. Harrison and I think it would not only help to bring her subconscious back to the surface but also help her stop feeling so empty and alone. Once that is solved and she has you as a tether that can hopefully grow into an anchor, we think she is strong enough to paddle through the other problems that will come up. She is strong enough. She just needs your mate bond as a constant reminder that she’s not alone.”

  “I…” I was somewhat speechless because what he was saying wasn’t wrong, but…

  Dr. Saul sighed. “Listen, I understand that you think your life and work at the Supernatural Council makes you a dangerous mate for her, but your mate bond is the only tangible thing we can use to give her some assurance right now. Just like her existence gave you hope, your bond can be her hope. How about I give you a few days to think about it?”

  I sat up in my chair. “No need. If that’s what she needs, I don’t mind forming a bond with her.”

  “Alright, let’s do it this way. Try talking her out of it for the next two days and if she still doesn’t wake up, we’ll try the mate bond.” He concluded.

  ***

  Talking Clare back to consciousness didn’t work. However, the mate bond did work from the moment I sank my canines into her neck. I tried to avoid biting deep enough to draw blood, but I still did and thus, a one-sided mid-level mate bond was formed between us, rather than the shallow bond I'd intended.

  The effects were instant as she opened her eyes, which were glowing such that they were almost a powdery blue color. Then, taking me by surprise, she wrapped her hand around my neck, turned my head to the side, and bit down with her werewolf canines, instantly forming a fully established mid-level bond between us. Something I’d hoped we could’ve discussed first.