Hekate’s Bride

I stay in my seat for the rest of the game, numb and nearly dead to the world around me.

Chaos is my world inside and watching him has my hackles rising higher and higher. I’m so mad, I’ve been sitting still for hours. I’m not even in the right frame of mind to watch the games anymore.

All I hear is a roaring in my head. If it is from me or Sloan, I cannot tell. I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to vent. My skin feels too tight for me right now. Too hot. I consider peeling off my jacket, but I know it won’t get rid of the crawling under my skin.

I’ve been here before. It doesn’t ever go away.

I clutch the book so tight, I no longer feel it. I channel most of my strength into keeping my breathing steady and halfheartedly answering questions from my parents without revealing how lost I am.

As if sensing my agitation… like he knows something is wrong, he suddenly looks up at the podium from where he stands on the field, and all the way from here, I see his eyes narrow. His hands move to the pocket of his pants, feeling for something–no doubt the book in my grasp.

His face pales and he is suddenly dashing toward the podium. Towards us. Towards me.

Fuck. I can’t handle this.

Not now. Not today.

I stand from my throne, sucking in a deep breath. “Father…” I start, but my voice is breaking and my ragged breaths sound like sobs.

Father’s gaze is instantly on me… and the walls are closing in on me again. The walls in my mind, my head. My guts are rising to my throat and if I don’t leave here now, I’m going to puke.

“Astrid,” Father says carefully, rising from his seat of power. “Why–”

I smile but I’m sure it resembles a grimace. “I just need a minute. I’ll be back soon.”

I don’t wait for his approval, neither do I let my gaze meet mother’s. I start down the steps, taking the journal with me–because no one else can see this. No one else can know this.

The truth.

Even I don’t understand what it is, but I guess I’m about to find out, because he is following me.

His steps are too light, too quick behind me, but he doesn’t say a word until I am in the empty hallway that leads to the Star Hall. “Astrid–”

I whirl and hurl the book at him, too fast for him to perceive or catch. It slams into his forehead, leaving a cut as it falls. He catches it before it gets past his midpoint and he wipes the red rivulets forming on his forehead.

“What is… Oh Goddess,” I whimper, shaking so hard, my bones feel brittle and near breaking point. Despair weighs heavily on my like an immovable boulder and I can’t get it off. I can’t breathe. “What is that?!”

My voice echos off the walls, returning to me in a cry of outrage.

Rune assesses me, gaze hard and unreadable. “Nothing.”

I grip either sides of my head tight and Goddess help me, I need to trash something. Anything. I need to–my fist hits the wall and I feel it all the way to my shoulder.

His hands grab my forearm and he forces me to look at him. His eyes are wide and exposed. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

I blink. Slowly. Then my hands move and my body follows, moving without my brain’s coordination. I slap him, hit his chest, over and over again, sobbing. “Nothing?! Screw you, Rune! Since when do you care?!”

But he doesn’t let go. No matter that my claws have slid out and I’m leaving marks on him, even if they are rapidly healing.

He pulls back from me when I wear myself out and takes steps away from me, putting enough distance between us. I slide down the wall, crouching with my knees hugged to my chest. I rock myself back and forth, muttering words that don’t make sense to me.

“You never should have seen that. It’d be best if you pretend it never happened–”

“Why not compel me to forget it instead?”

“I can’t compel you. It doesn’t work on you,” he mutters, rubbing the spot between his brows.

“Why do you have those drawings? How? How can you see into my dreams if you’re not… him?”

Rune paces over to the wall and leans his back against it, looking at the wall in front of us with a forlorn expression. “I always thought you looked beautiful. From the first day we met. You smelled divine. You were a child, and you didn’t even know your letters yet, but when you looked at me the first time and smiled, I knew it was you. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t want to. Not when I’d begun dreaming.”

I’m not entirely sure I am breathing. His words… what he is insinuating, I don’t want to consider it; don’t want to believe it. He’s a liar. I tell him so.

But he looks down at me, exhaustion lining his features and his lips are drawn in a bitter line. “You may pretend, if it makes it easier, but you know this bond we have goes deeper than–”Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

I am on my feet before I know it, baring my teeth at him and snarling in a voice that isn’t particularly mine. “There is nothing between us and there never will be. Nothing binds us together.”

To that, he says nothing, instead choosing to continue in his storytelling. “Every year I saw you, you’d grown a little more. Beautiful. Stunning. I hated that I could hardly look away from you. I hated that I couldn’t control myself.” He pauses and snorts. “I thought you’d look less inviting if I cut your hair, but simply cutting your hair could not undo what had been done.”

“Stop talking. Stop lying to me–”

He grips my shoulders hard, staring deeply in my eyes as he declares, “It is you, Astrid. You’re my Erasthai.”

The word clicks through me, leaving my mind in shambles.

Erasthai.

Not a passing affair. Not ‘nothing’. Not mate. A bond deeper that that, irrevocable. Unbreakable. He chose me, and he’s hurt me at every step, knowing and understanding why I feel the things I feel. He’s always known why staying away from him was hard. He’s always known why the pain that came from him leaving me in my room, in my ruined dress was too hard to bear that I’d run to Orion to take it away.

He has known all along, and he let me hate myself for feeling these things I had no control over. He had let me suffer, every solstice, watching him bang other women, until I had become numb to it. He’d chosen me as his Erasthai without even asking me the proper way, despite the fact that he knew that once the choice was made, there was no rejecting or going back on it.

“Get your filthy hands off me!” I cry, slamming my fists into his chest, knocking back from me. “I’d rather die than be that to you. You’re a bastard and I want nothing to do with you. How could you do this to me?”

“It wasn’t my choice!” His voice booms in my ears, causing me to flinch. “Had I known this would happen, I never would have looked your way–and I have tried to rectify that, every day! Asking Darian to–” He stops and cusses under his breath when my eyes widen with disbelief.

“Darian asking me to be his Erasthai, that was you?”

His next words are careful and more of a growl. “You deserve better.”

“Oh my Goddess,” I whimper, sobbing uncontrollably now. “You are the worst.”

The height of his lies and deceit, hiding it from me, getting betrothed to Ginevra, even if he already knew what I was to him, offering me to Darian like I was something to be given away, like I am nothing… I can’t take any of it.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Astrid.”

“WERE YOU EVER GOING TO TELL ME?!”

Panic flickers in his green orbs and he is unable to meet my gaze as he says, “No.”

There is a sharp pain in my chest and I clutch it hard, breathing fast as I will it to go away, but it won’t. My chest is caving in on itself.

The edges of my vision starts to blur and I know it is happening again. Panic attack. “I deserved to know,” I rasp, stumbling forward, shaking my head right and left to diffuse the darkness as I try to navigate my way someplace else. I just need to get away from him.

“Deserved, perhaps. But knowing doesn’t always come with entitlements. Sometimes it comes with consequences–” He stops mid-sentence as if sensing where his words lead.

I whirl, mind racing. “The black painting, it is the Void,” I say, more of a confirmation than a question.

“Do not ask questions to which you already know the answers, Astrid.”

I storm toward the Hall beyond, leaving him standing in the hallway. I feel his gaze on me the entire time. It feels like a brand on my skin, very much like the invisible brand Hekate left in my neck when he bit me.

Or shall I call him… Rune?