Chapter 168

EVE.

My Mum's words settled differently from everything else she had said. Her voice shifted, and the softness of the reunion pulled back immediately.

"What problem?" I asked with furrowed brows.

She looked at me for a moment before she answered, "You have two mates, Eve."

"I know, Mum."

"And you know that's a problem in this pack..."

I exhaled, "I never knew until Saint mentioned it to Kyrie passively. I..."

"It's a taboo. One woman, one mate. That is the law. It was written into the pack's founding covenant. And if this ever gets out — and things like this always get out, you know how this pack works, you know how fast word travels — they will require you to make a choice." She paused. "Accept one bond and reject the other, formally and publicly before the elders."

I felt the cold of it settle slowly into my chest. "And if I refuse?" I asked, even though I could already feel the shape of the answer coming.

"Banishment," she said simply. "You and both men will be made rogues. And not just rogues, Eve. The elders have the authority to put a curse on your bloodline. On your children's children. A generational consequence that follows the blood, not just the person."

"Oh, God..." I whispered, "Why me?"

My eyes turned blurry as I struggled to see through the tears forming rapidly in my eyes.

"How do I choose? I... I'll need time, you know...? But what if people have already found out? What if..." My thoughts were disoriented. I didn't even know what to think.

My mother's expression shifted in a way that told me she had been dreading this particular part.

"Fate already made a choice for you," she said softly. "Kyrie marked you first. In the eyes of the pack law, his claim was established before Saint's. If the elders find out, they will not ask Kyrie to step aside." She stopped. "They will require Saint to reject you."

Something cracked open in the center of my chest.

"No," I said.

"Eve—"

"No." I shook my head, and I felt the tears coming again. "No, that's not — I don't want that. I don't want Kyrie. I don't want his mark, and I don't want his bond, and I didn't ask for any of this; he forced it on me, he..." My voice broke. "He's a monster, Mum. You don't understand everything he's done. You don't know what he..."

"I know more than you think," she said quietly, and the steadiness of her voice was the kind that comes from someone who has been crying alone with information for long enough that they've moved past the crying stage into accepting reality. "Saint told me. Not everything, perhaps. But enough."

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.

"I want to reject Kyrie," I said. "Right now. Today. I don't care how it's done. Tell me how to do it, and I'll do it."

My mother looked at me with an expression that broke my heart. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen on her face — the smile of a woman who loves you enough to tell you the truth even when the truth is the most unhelpful thing in the world.

"Baby," she said gently. "Do you understand who Kyrie Graves is?"

I opened my mouth.

"Not what he's done," she said. "Who he is. What he is built from. That man took you across continents just so that no one would find you. He killed for you without hesitation. He reorganized his entire life around the single objective of having you, and he has never once, in all the time you've known him, shown any sign of being capable of letting go." Her voice was quiet and even and absolutely devastating. "A rejection requires both parties. He has to receive it. And Kyrie Graves will never — never — consent to receiving your rejection. He will fight it with everything he has. He will find a way around it, under it, through it. He will come back from it and come back from it until there is nothing left of either of you."

Even though it was painful, that was the truth.

Kyrie was never letting me go.

I pressed both hands to my face, and I cried into them, quiet and exhausted and furious, because this had always been the shape of my life — every door that should have been an exit always turned out to be a wall, every solution revealed a deeper problem behind it, every moment I thought I had found ground turned out to be water.

My mother sat with me and didn't rush it.

After a while, when the crying had run its course, and I was left sitting in the emptiness that follows it, she reached over and took my hands away from my face and held them in hers.

"There is one other option," she said.

I looked at her, hoping this wasn't going to be another wall.

"What's the option, Mum?" I asked.

"You have to run."

SAINT.

Kyrie was certainly going to return. He might already be on his way for all I knew, and the thought of it sat in the back of my mind like a lit fuse, requiring attention I did not currently have available because the words coming out of Meryk's mouth were occupying every functional part of me.

I had used my Alpha command on Kyrie before I could get Eve out of that room. It was the first time in fifteen years I had used it on him. I had always assumed that there are some lines you draw not from weakness but from the respect of knowing what a man is and choosing not to weaponize your advantage over him.

That respect had died in a room in Africa, along with everything else I thought I knew.

"You have more than one problem on your hands, Alpha," Meryk said, "And they both have heavy consequences."

I stood with my arms folded and my back to the wall beside his door.

Meryk had been the seer and the wizard of our pack for as long as the time of my Grandfather.

He had the laws and secrets of this pack in the palm of his hands. No one. Absolutely no one visits him without a specifically tangible reason.

I had come with several.

He was the only one, aside from my father, who knew about the cure to my curse.

I let him speak because Meryk did not respond well to being rushed. And if he says there is nothing else I can do as long as Eve was concerned, then it meant there was truly nothing else I could do.

"There has to be something," I bit out, feeling the rage and frustration eat through my bones.

"If the pack learns that you and Kyrie are both mated to one woman," his baggy, ancient eyes lifted to mine slowly, "you know the consequence. You know the law. It was written before either of your fathers drew breath, and it will stand long after both of you are in the ground." He paused. "Perhaps this is the more merciful path, Alpha. Kyrie has already marked her. The claim is established. Reject her. Sever the bond cleanly and let the goddess assign you a second-chance mate. It is not the end."

"Stop saying that!" I growled, punching the wall behind me, "I will never reject my mate." The rawness of those words cost me something I had not budgeted for. "Fuck pack law. Fuck the curse. Fuck every second-chance the goddess thinks she owes me. I will not stand in front of an elder and tell the bond to die. I will not hand Kyrie that."

My hands were trembling.

"His mark has contaminated the ritual," he said. "You were meant to mark your mate as part of the cure, Alpha. A willing bond. Uncorrupted. The mark was not incidental to the process — it was the process. The chosen connection in its purest state is the only thing the Blood Moon curse cannot metabolize. That window is gone now." He set his hands flat on his knees. "She belongs to another in the eyes of the bond. What Kyrie did the night he marked her did not only take her from you. It took the cure from you."

I paced his small living room restlessly, my head spinning with each step I took.

Kyrie had drawn a line none of us would ever return from. Never.

I pressed my hand flat against the wall and stopped walking.

I needed to think past the betrayal. I needed to think past the rage and the grief.

"And what happens if Kyrie dies?" I finally stopped pacing and turned to face him, "Can she still be the cure I need?"

Meryk observed me for a moment before he spoke again, "No, Alpha. She can't."

I let out a brief, unamused laugh, shaking my head slowly.

Kyrie fucking Graves...

I always thought that I was two steps ahead of Kyrie. But no. He had always been a thousand steps ahead of me.

And a thousand steps are never easily retraceable.

I was quiet for a long moment, running every possibility and consequence in my head until I settled for one thing.

One thing that might leave everyone asking the same question in the end...

I turned to Meryk again, slowly settled on the couch where I was sitting before, lacing my fingers together with my head bowed.

I needed a second more to look at this last option from every angle. To measure its risks against its alternatives. To decide whether the thing I was about to ask was a question I actually wanted the answer to...

Slowly, I looked up at him again and asked, "What happens if I don't break my curse?"

The silence that followed was long enough to be its own answer.

He couldn't hide the shock and surprise on his face. He had not seen this question coming. The fact that he had not seen it coming told me something about how far outside of reasonable behavior it sat.

Even I was shocked at my own question.

But I wanted to know.

"The curse will eat you up slowly. You will become a danger to everyone inside your borders and eventually to yourself, until it eventually kills you."

He let that sit for a second before he added, "You will not live to celebrate your fiftieth birthday, Alpha Saint."

He paused.

"You will die at forty-nine."