The mate I hate

Chapter Two – The Bond I Never Wanted

ELARA's POV

"Father, don't leave me." I grabbed his arm. My nails bit into the fabric of his sleeve. "Get the healers! Please someone, help him!"

All around me the ceremony disintegrated into chaos. The students moved back from him, talking quietly. Some of them shifted automatically, sensing the poison in the air. I couldn't hear anything the officiant was shouting except the silence of being ignored.

My father breathed heavily. "Elara, listen."

"I'm listening, just keep holding on until help gets here—"

"Your mother." He tightened his grip on my wrist. "Her wolf has kept this curse from killing me for twenty years, containing it. But when I die tonight, there won't be anything left to stop it."

"I don't care what curse you're talking about right now; I care about—"

"You should care." His eyes fixed on mine, clouded by pain, but more sharply than I wanted them to be. "Because your mother will be the first it kills. And then it will come for you."

As if he called it into existence, I felt it—a vicious wrenching in my ribcage, my wolf straining and snarling, as if desperate to tear itself free of a tiny cage that didn't contain it. I doubled over with a sharp gasp.

"Elara!"

It was my mother's voice. She pushed her way past everyone toward him. Her formal robes caught around her ankles, and her face went bone-white before she even reached us.

"Evelyne, stay back—" one of the healers warned her.

"That is my husband," my mother growled and dropped to her knees beside him. Her hands hovered over his chest, trembling. "Darius. Darius, look at me."

"I'm sorry." He looked at her, and for one confusing instant I almost thought he really meant it. "I didn't have another choice."

"What did you do?" my mother whispered.

I beat him to it. "He poisoned himself," I choked out. "Because I would not submit to his mate selection. He knew you wouldn't let yourself die because of it."

She began to cry, and I could see the wolf struggling underneath her skin as she resisted some force I could not yet understand but felt reflected inside my own body.

I hated him in that instant. I really, genuinely hated him. Not in the way I'd only ever allowed myself to hate him for all the wrong things he had done to my mother all these years. This was hatred for a calculated and cold act.

"Elara." She held out a trembling hand to me. "Please."

I shut my eyes tightly.

"Fine," I said. "Fine. I accept the mating."

The shift in the atmosphere around me was instant. The way the tension released through the crowd was unmistakable, as a healer came forward to talk to my father quickly and forcefully, putting something into his mouth, and the trembling of his hands began to diminish.

I hated that it worked. Hated that saying four words could reverse whatever poison he had drunk, as if the whole of his body waited until I had surrendered to start repairing itself.

"Someone go find the Prince," the officiant said, straightening himself out in his robes, though his hands were still shaking. "Tell him that the arrangements have been made."

I did not have to wait long.

Kael approached me across the hall without any of the calm and unhurried pace that marked him normally. He assessed my father quickly before coming over to me, and for the first time that night, his controlled demeanor seemed almost painful to him.

"Elara," he said.

"Don't." I stepped back, before he could come any closer. "I do this not because I wish to. I want you to know that now, before anything else happens."

"I understand."

"I do not forgive you," I told him, my voice shaking in its conviction. "For Seren, for anything you've done to us. No matter what, I won't pretend."

Something flickered behind his eyes—something that was neither rage nor self-defense, but something quieter.

"I would not ask that of you," he said.

I was not expecting that response. I did not know what to say to it, so I said nothing at all.

The subsequent ritual went by in such a whirlwind that it was impossible for me to follow all the details, which seemed like a mercy. I remember the officiant pronouncing the incantations. I remember my mother, pale and scared, observing from afar as the healers managed to stabilize my father so that he could sit. I remember standing beside Kael in front of everyone gathered in the hall, with my spine straightened and my expression composed despite the rage that was boiling inside of me.

As soon as the bond was sealed, I felt it.

It was anything but gentle. It was not that warm and golden feeling that people spoke about in legends about true mates meeting. It was as if I was struck by an electric shock, with Kael's wolf touching my own and causing an awakening of something ancient in me that I did not ask for and definitely did not want.

I felt trapped. Not comforted. Trapped as though I've been shut into a cage with no way to open it.

Kael must have sensed my reaction to the bond because as soon as the ceremony ended he stepped back, giving me room even though I did not ask him to do it.

"You need to get some rest," he said quietly. "Someone will escort you back to your room."

"I will make my way."

Kael did not try to argue with me. Instead, he only nodded and let me go.

---

When I closed the door behind me in the room in the residence of the academy, it seemed that the room became smaller. The walls felt like they moved closer as I sat down on the bed and stared at nothing, reliving the events: the vial, the face of my father, the bond sealing between us.

But then another thought appeared in my mind, chilling me with its clarity.

Access. I was now his mate, and no one would dare to question why I needed to be close to Kael, why I was asking about Seren, why I could walk the palace freely if we decided to move there.

I stood up and walked to the trunk I had brought with me from home, which was still mostly unpacked in the corner. Then I knelt to dig around inside it. I had left whatever little I had managed to collect in this over the past year inside it: copies of the closed investigation report, one page of notes in my handwriting, and some pictures I had taken from Seren's room before my father could clean them out.

I found the pictures towards the bottom, bundled together by a ribbon that Seren used to wear in her hair. I felt my throat close up as I untied them and began to go through the stack.

I had seen most of them a hundred times. Pictures of Seren laughing at her mating ceremony, pictures of her and Kael together at some formal function, where his hand had rested at her back. Pictures of Seren alone, looking absolutely beautiful, just a few months before she died.

Then I came across one picture towards the bottom that I hadn't taken.

In this picture, Seren and Kael were together, undoubtedly at some sort of a formal get-together of sorts, with both of them in the middle of a conversation, not posing. The picture looked like it had been taken a little while before she had died.

I almost put it down among the others.

But then I noticed the third person in the background.

He was slightly blurred and partly turned away from the camera, but he was there nonetheless, looking at the two of them from a few feet away. I held the picture closer, my heartbeat speeding up.

I knew that face. I had seen it many times before, standing beside Kael at official events, always right behind him.

I reached to turn the picture towards the light.

There was a knock on my door.

I froze.

"Elara," Kael said, his voice muffled through the door. "It's me. We need to talk about the bond."

I stuffed the picture behind my back and grabbed for the doorknob.