Chapter 97 NADIA KNOWS

Chapter 97 NADIA KNOWS

Ava's POV

I woke up when Maya opened the door and Nadia walked in and looked at me and said, "we need to talk."

I sat up and pushed my hair back and looked at her and she looked back at me with that particular directness she had that reminded me of Adrian, and said, "alone."

Maya looked at me and I nodded and she picked up her phone and went to the bathroom and closed the door and Nadia sat in the chair across from the bed and crossed her legs and said, "I grew up on the edges of this world. Not fully inside it, not fully outside. My parents knew things, I absorbed more than they realized, and I've spent the last ten years reading everything I could find about bonds and marked bloodlines."

"Why," I said.

"Because of Adrian," she said. "He's been in Dominic's world since he was fifteen and I've always known that one day something connected to it would affect him directly, and I wanted to be prepared." She paused. "I didn't expect it to affect you directly as well. But here we are."

"What did you want to tell me," I said.

"What happens if the bond breaks," she said. "Not the version Dominic or Elias would tell you, the complete version."

I pulled my knees up and said, "tell me."

She told me and it was worse than I'd understood, not just pain and loss but a permanent physical change, the body having accepted the bond at a cellular level meaning a break didn't return you to what you were before, it left you as something in between, incomplete permanently, your biology reaching for something that wasn't there anymore and never stopping.

"Your mother didn't have a completed bond when it was severed," Nadia said. "It was still forming. That's why she got sick slowly. A completed bond breaking is faster and more total."

I sat with that and said, "so walking away from Dominic isn't just ending a relationship."

"No," she said.

"It's permanent damage," I said.

"Yes," she said. "To both of you. The bond goes both ways."

I looked at my hands and thought about the elevator and Adrian's mouth and the guilt that had been sitting quietly in my chest since and said, "Adrian sent you."

"Yes," she said.

"He could have come himself," I said.

"He said he didn't trust himself to say it without saying more than that," she said, and I looked up at her and she held my gaze and didn't look away from it.

I sat there for a moment and then said, "what else."

"The bond is doing something new," she said. "I felt it when I arrived, before I even met you properly. A completed bond has a signature, a particular quality to it, and yours has developed something beyond what the records describe."

"Something beyond how," I said.

"Stronger," she said. "More layered. I think the combination of your bloodline and what Dominic is specifically created something that hasn't existed before, not in any documented case." She leaned forward slightly. "Which means nobody knows exactly what breaking it would do. The damage could be significantly worse than anything recorded."

The room was quiet for a moment and I pressed my hand to the mark on my shoulder and felt it warm and steady and thought about Dominic at that window, about the warehouse in New York where I'd stepped toward him instead of running, about all of it.

"He should have told me about my mother," I said.

"Yes," Nadia said. "He should have."

"That doesn't go away because the bond is strong," I said.

"No," she said. "It doesn't. And I'm not here to argue it does. I'm here so you have the full picture before you decide anything."

I nodded and she stood and said, "Adrian also said to tell you he's not asking you to forgive Dominic, just to know what walking away actually costs."

"How long has Adrian been in love with me," I said, and the question came out before I'd finished deciding to ask it.

Nadia looked at me for a long moment and said, "long enough that he stopped noticing when it started," and went to the bathroom door and knocked and said, "okay Maya, you can come out."

Maya came out and looked between us and said, "should I be worried."

"No," I said.

"Should I make tea," she said.

"Yes," Nadia and I said at the same time.

Maya went to the small kettle and Nadia sat back down and I sat on the bed and the three of us settled into a quiet that was almost comfortable and I thought about Dominic upstairs not sleeping and thought about what Nadia had said and felt the bond pulse warm in my chest like it was listening.

"One more thing," Nadia said, not looking up from her phone.

"What," I said.

"The bond evolving the way it has," she said, "means it's trying to do something, to complete itself further, to become something even more permanent than it already is." She looked up. "Your body is going to start pushing toward him regardless of what your head decides. You should know that before you spend another night in Maya's room."

I stared at her and she looked back at me completely calm.

"I really like her," Maya said from the kettle. "She's my favourite person who has arrived in this chaos.”