Her Mortal Mate

Chapter Thirty Three: Seeing Your Light

Adam

I couldn’t explain it, how she just… opened her mind. But it wasn’t just opening, because I could feel her very essence seeping into me. I felt the edges of her mind, her thoughts like trails of mist, tangling with mine as she melded our minds together. And I swore I felt her mind caress mine and I felt it deep within my soul. She had already been addicting, and this just added to that already growing and heady need.

I thought the closest I could ever get to another was during s*x. But this… this was on a whole different level. How could one ever come back from sharing something so profound? She was ruining me entirely and completely. She was making me hers and hers alone, forever and always.

While this should have scared me, it didn’t. I was surprised by how calmly I was taking all of this. How open I was to it.

But perhaps that was due to Jadea.

I could feel her calmness seeping into me, helping regulate my body’s response. My heart rate was slowing. I wasn’t hyperventilating anymore by the complete shock and enormity of being so intertwined with another.

“Do you feel my love for you?” Her whisper caressed me in ways I’d never been touched before. She enveloped my soul and infiltrated my very blood. It sent a shiver of pleasure down my spine. And not the s****l kind. It was intimate. It was a different kind of earth shattering awareness.

Yes. I did. I felt how deep and intense it was. I felt every single aspect of what I meant to her and how I made her feel in turn. The butterflies. The comfort. The familiarity and sense of home. I could feel her deep affection and taste the fringes of fear over losing me, my love and trust.

“Why do you think I would ever leave you, Jadea?” I couldn’t get a clear read on that part. It was flitting around like a hummingbirds wings. It was more a blur of emotions than clear, precise thoughts and feelings.

It amazed me how her mind shifted focus. How it paused and hesitated as she latched, released and reattached onto thoughts. It was fascinating, if I was being honest. “Because I am a loose cannon. I’m …”

A monster.

The words echoed in her mind, though she hadn’t necessarily uttered them.

“You’re not a monster.”

But the way I’d looked at her when she’d come back … I’d been scared. Guarded. Distrustful. If she could attack Lance in such a way, what was stopping her from doing it to others? Her thoughts echoed those I’d had myself.

I wasn’t sure how to respond because I had thought of those very things when she’d attacked him. But Lance had said something to her… something along the lines of: as far as excuses went, hers was very good.

So what kind of excuse did she have?

Her thoughts spiraled into inky darkness as her mind reached into the depths of her memories for the answers. I felt her nervousness as flashes from her childhood played out in my mind’s eye. How her blood family had treated her, abused her. It was abhorrent what she had suffered at their hands. I could taste her very real fear of her father, Hans. And her brother, the one who had most likely orchestrated this attack on me, had made her life a living hell. I saw how he had slowly and meticulously turned her father further against her. How Harley played games until, finally, her father snapped which then led to her being sterilized and thrown out into the world alone.

But that wasn’t all…

So many other memories remained locked away. Repressed and in remission, just waiting to be shaken free.

She was afraid of what she would remember. She had this feeling there had been something big, something far more terrible than what she could remember happening to her…

All of this, plus what she’d just witnessed as her brother cold heartedly killed her horses, led her to the conclusion it was best to turn herself over to them. To surrender to them alone, so everyone she loved was safe from them. She felt she couldn’t ask her pack to sacrifice themselves to such masochistic wolves, especially when she knew what would happen to them.

Flashes of Blade’s and Briar’s youth gave me a small glimpse into what they’d gone through. It would be very nearly the same as what they had suffered in their youth if she took them with her. She would be subjecting them to the same kind of abuse they had survived and escaped from at such a young age.

My gaze slowly refocused on her as I realized the extent of responsibility and thought she’d put into her actions. She knew I would be safe with her father’s pack. And, I had to agree with her about not asking her pack to surrender themselves over to her blood family.

When she’d attacked Lance, it had been out of desperation and love for everyone else. She had been solely focused on saving everyone around her by sacrificing herself. She hadn’t had time to think about what her abandonment would possibly do to the rest of us. When she’d attacked her childhood friend, she did so in such a way to injure him just enough so his pack would place their focus only on him and allow her to escape.

When my gaze refocused on her, I saw my proud and strong Jadea drooping. Her shoulders sagged, her head turned down. I felt her pain. Her fear for everyone she loved and cared about and how utterly terrified she was for me and my children. I hadn’t realized the depth of her feelings for us before, how she already viewed us as family, how her pack had accepted us as their own. Our time apart had been just as hard on her as it had been on me.

Her words from the previous year, when we’d had our final fight came back… “You do not get to tell me how I feel. You don’t get to dictate my emotions. And while I may not be able to have children, that doesn’t mean I am incapable of loving my future adopted children as deeply as if they were my own…” I felt the punch of guilt once again for my harsh words that day. Her response, this response, hadn’t hit me the way it was hitting me now because I now fully understood the depth of her feelings.

She had been just as terrified and scared as I had been for my children when her and her pack searched for them at Mrs. Lindsay’s a few days ago. She already saw them as hers. Had already accepted them into her whole heart and soul. It was something I wasn’t used to seeing in someone other than myself because of the abuse my ex wife had put my children and I through.

But Jadea was not Leila.

She was everything Leila hadn’t been and more.

She would be the best mother Aidan and Anika could ever have. And Jadea would push me to be the best father I could be as well. I saw it there, all laid out in her mind and heart and soul how she brought out the best in everyone else because she saw what they themselves couldn’t see. But the difference was, was she had an ability to make them see their own potential and goodness too. She could make others believe in themselves.

“You have a problem seeing the good in yourself, though.” I stated, remembering a different conversation from last year….

***Flashback***

We had been having a heavy conversation about our potential future. This conversation had taken place before the big fallout. It had been when our worlds had been so full of potential…

“What is your definition of love?" I asked her gently.

Those light green eyes bored into mine, searching. "I guess it would be when someone accepts someone else for all they are and all they have been. It is trusting someone indefinitely with your deepest and darkest secrets and skeletons, knowing when you bare them all they won't go running. They will embrace all of you. It is accepting someone's darkness as well as the light and understanding you can't have one without the other. It is being gentle with someone when they make mistakes, even when you are holding them accountable for their actions. It is being someone's safe space to go when you have nowhere else to turn to."

Well if she didn't hit the damn nail on the head, but I agreed with all of what she had to say on the matter. "Jadea?"

"Yeah vanilla?"

I almost chickened out asking this next question. But it was something that had popped up earlier and I couldn't shake it. Taking a deep breath, I gathered my courage and asked, "Do you feel as if you do not deserve to be loved?"

It had taken her some time to answer as she mulled through her own thoughts and feelings. “I don't want to say that I don't deserve love, because I believe everyone deserves to be loved. Which would then include me. However, because of my own experiences with love, it is hard for me to trust someone who says they love me. I am instantly put on guard the moment that word is mentioned."

***End Flashback***

As the memory flitted through my brain, I felt her reaction to it and what had all transpired within that conversation. And as she worked through all those emotions again, I learned even more about her: how she had been opposed to love before she’d met me, why she had such opposition towards it, and why she had to rely more on actions than words alone when it came to trusting someone when they threw out the L word.

I once thought I knew her. I once believed I had learned many of her secrets. However, she was more complex and deep than any individual I’d ever known. While I’d already loved her before this mind meld, I felt myself falling for her all over again because I now saw her, the complete and utterly naked Jadea, without any of her filters in place. Here, as our minds converged, she couldn’t hide, she couldn’t pick and choose her words.

“Perhaps I do have an issue seeing my own goodness,” she agreed to my earlier statement. “But that is where you come in. You do for me what I do for everyone else. You make me believe in myself. You make me see myself through your eyes. You allow me to see what others see. Because of you, I know I can learn to love myself. Because of you, I am a better woman.”