Scars Before the Bond

Episode 3 Aeron's POV

I expected to meet her today, but I wasn’t ready for what happened when I did.

Lynaria Knight — her name had haunted my thoughts for weeks. I knew her on paper, in clipped emails and polite updates, but nothing could have prepared me for the force of her presence in person. And nothing could have prepared me for the way my wolf, Jarek, roared the moment I saw her.

When she opens the door, my breath seizes. Jarek presses against my skin, pacing, snarling.

Mine.

The word crashes through my mind like a war drum. She looks up, wide-eyed and trembling, her vulnerability shining like moonlight over dark water. She’s wearing an oversized pale blue hoodie that slips off one shoulder, revealing a delicate collarbone that draws my gaze like a magnet. Black leggings hug her curves, each line of her body igniting something primal inside me. Her bare feet shift anxiously, as if ready to flee, and her hair, tied in a messy knot, frames her face with soft waves that make her look even more heartbreakingly human.

Jarek growls, a deep rumble vibrating through me. "Touch her," he commands, his voice wild and filled with heat. "She is ours. She needs to feel us, to know the truth."

But I hesitate. My mind is a battlefield. Every rational thought collides with instinct, torn between the human logic I’ve cultivated for years and the raw, ancient demands of the wolf inside me.

"Claim her now! Bite her! Mark her before she’s lost!" Jarek snarls, his voice a blade slicing through my chest.

"She doesn’t know," I grit back, pain shooting up my spine. "If we scare her now, she’ll run. We’ll lose her."

"You are weak," Jarek spits, his growl echoing in my bones. "The Moon chose her for us! We were made to complete each other. Without her, we wither. You feel it — the emptiness. The ache. You have felt it every night beneath the stars, every full moon when her absence gnawed at us."

And he’s right. Even before I knew her face, before I saw her standing there with storm-filled eyes and trembling hands, I felt her absence like a wound. The bond is not just desire — it is a gravitational pull, a soul-deep magnetism that promises healing and threatens destruction in the same breath. Without her, I am hollow. With her, I could be whole — or unravel completely.

The bond between mates isn’t just a romantic notion in shifter lore — it’s a sacred connection woven by the Moon Goddess herself, forged through the marrow of our bones and the fire of our souls. For shifters, finding a true mate is rare, almost mythic. And for one to be human? Even rarer. The odds are unfathomable. But the bond does not care for logic or lineage — only truth. And the truth is her.

"What if she rejects us?" I whisper inside, my throat tight with terror I haven’t felt since my first shift. "What if she looks at the monster beneath my skin and runs? What if she sees Jarek, sees the beast, and she can’t love us?"

"Then we will die as we were born — alone and longing," Jarek answers, his voice quieter now, edged with grief. "But at least we will have tried. We will have given her the truth. I would rather burn under her rejection than rot in this waiting."

My chest aches as though something is tearing free inside me. My human side wants to protect her innocence, shield her from the shadows of my world. But my wolf howls for her touch, her scent, her acceptance. This battle rages inside me every heartbeat, every breath, a storm that threatens to shatter me from within.

I force a weak smile onto my lips. “Uh… sorry about that,” I say out loud, my voice shaking with the weight of everything I’m not saying.

She clutches her hand to her chest, her gaze locked on me, shimmering with questions and fear. She doesn’t know she holds my life in her hands. She doesn’t know that with a single word, a single look, she could either save me or destroy me.

"She is fire and moonlight," Jarek whispers, a reverence in his tone that quiets even my panic. "She is the promise of every dawn we have survived to see."

I close my eyes briefly, struggling to push the chaos back into its cage. “Well… we should probably get started,” I manage, stepping aside to let the movers pass. But even as I move, I feel as though I am leaving pieces of myself behind with her, pieces I might never reclaim. As I watch her move, every careful step a testament to her resilience, Jarek prowls inside me, a restless, wounded sentinel.

We load the truck in near silence, my eyes following her every motion. I keep my distance, but the pull is maddening. When her fingers brush against mine passing a smaller box, Jarek goes still — reverent. She jerks her hand away as if scorched, blinking rapidly like she’s trying to process something that doesn’t make sense. My heart races.

“Thanks,” she says softly, and I nod, biting my tongue against the urge to say more, to reach for her, to ask if she felt it too.

"She will know us," Jarek vows softly now, grief and longing coiling through his words. "She will feel our devotion, our need. We will show her the moon, the forest, the bond. She will know that she is not alone — not anymore."

After we’ve packed the last of it, I tell her we’ll meet her at the house. She nods, clearly overwhelmed. As I walk away, my hands clenched at my sides, Jarek whispers again.

"Soon. She will see what lies beneath. And she will not run. She is brave. She is ours."

I don’t know how I’ll tell her. I don’t know if she’ll flee or stay. But I know one thing with a certainty that cuts deeper than any blade: she is my mate. She is the only one who can quiet both my storms and Jarek’s wild hunger. And I will protect her with every breath — even if it means protecting her from myself, from the truth, until she’s ready to claim every piece of what we are.