Chapter 20

TWENTY

Rinan

My fucking chest feels like it's going to cave in. Every time I try to pull in a breath, it hurts. It burns. It feels like I'm being consumed from the inside out. She's gone. Gone in the blink of an eye, leaving behind damage she could've never imagined.

And she left with him . The speed of my footsteps increase on the winding mountain path, and I feel Arlys and Drogo move to match my pace, even though we're all exhausted. We have to get to her. We have to reach her.

But I'm dying inside. I'm in more pain than I've ever been in in my life. I don't know what to do with myself, but I'm scared I'm going to lose my mind.

We've been trying to track Tara since we discovered her missing in the late hours of the night, and we still haven't found them. Fuck, we haven't even found a trace of her, other than the occasional whisper of our scent. A scent I'm beginning to think we're imagining.

"Where the fuck are they?" Arlys hisses in a low, guttural voice, clenching his fists and breathing hard. His eyes are wild and bloodshot, darting around as he searches for any sign of Tara.

"How did they get so far? I can't smell her at all," Drogo says, turning and punching the trunk of a tree, leaving a splintered mess.

Their pain is my pain. I can feel it through our connection, and it only makes the painful hollow feeling inside of me even worse. If we don't get Tara back, we'll never be whole again. We'll never drag in an easy breath again.

And we only have ourselves to blame.

"This is our fault, sticking to that goddamn plan despite how we feel. We hurt her. We made her think we don't care about her," I tell them.

We should have given her a chance. A real chance. I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on her, but brotherhood above all clouded my mind. And hatred for the witches and a desire to return things to normal clouded theirs. Now we are paying the ultimate price for our stupidity.

Arlys pauses on the path, and we sit back to look at him. His long hair is tangled. His skin is flushed. And his expression is lost and desperate. "We need to rest. Our minds aren't right because we're tired."

"But if we stop we might not find her," Drogo says, his words breathless. Exhausted.

"If we keep going, we still might not find her," Arlys tells us softly.

We reluctantly pause our search. I sit on the ground, my shoulders slumped. My entire body aches. Arlys runs a hand through his disheveled hair, while Drogo paces back and forth like a caged animal. The early morning sun casts a cold light on the scene, shadows stretching our figures like dark tendrils.

My blood hums through my skull. The sound of Drogo's footsteps beat an uneven rhythm in my mind. I feel something unfamiliar building inside me. I see it on Arlys' face. He's about to snap.

Then he does. "Sit the fuck down! You're making me crazy with that damn pacing!" Arlys yells, hands curling into fists, like he's ready for a fight.

Drogo responds with a low growl, and I hop up to stand between them, even though dealing with their shit is the last thing I want to do. "There's no need to fight. We're all feeling exactly the same, like our hearts are ripped out of our chests. But we're going to find her. No matter what we have to do."

To my surprise, Drogo turns to me with desperate eyes. "What if we don't? What if she's using her magic to throw us off her scent? She has to be! That's the only reason we wouldn't be finding her scent. What if they're going down the mountain and not up?" He looks crazed. Wild. "He's going to take her away from us and disappear into bear territory. Hell, what if he already has?" He stops moving and quietly asks, "What if we never see her again?"

I look at him, surprised. This whole time, he's trusted her the least. How is it that he's now worried about never seeing her again?

Arlys stares at Drogo. "Isn't that what you wanted? Your whole goal was to get rid of her. You made sure we stuck to our plan nearly every step of the way. Every chance we had to change things with her and our relationship, you put a stop to it." There's no accusation in his face, just curiosity and confusion.

Drogo looks like a man being tortured. "No, this isn't what I wanted! Okay? Shit. No! I can never be rid of her. She's wormed her way into my heart and my fucking soul."

Then it hits me. It hits me so hard that I collapse to my knees. "Fucking hell," I whisper, shaking my head in disbelief. What fools we've all been.

Drogo and Arlys turn to me, a question in their eyes.

The words come tumbling from my lips. "She's our mate. If we'd had sex, we'd know it without question. But this feeling, this terrible pain, it can only be explained because she's our mate. Because we love her. Because she's our everything."

"She's… our mate?" Drogo asks in complete disbelief.

Arlys looks thoughtful, his hand moving to his chest. "She's our mate."

It's like the air has been sucked out of the space we're in. Like every color has changed its hue. Like every sound has changed its tune. She's our mate. That's why, despite everything, we wanted her and loved her so deeply. We, our wolves and our own hearts, have claimed her as their own.

All the pieces fall into place, and we all understand what we've been feeling and fighting since we met her. But it's like for one minute we're happy, just bathing in the knowledge that the little witch we can't resist is our mate, and the next we remember that she's run away. From us. Because we told her this marriage was a sham and that we were going to throw her away.

Because we screwed up over and over again.

"We hurt her," I say.

Arlys' shoulders sag. "We doubted her and were unkind to her every step of the way."

"And even after all we did, when given the chance to betray us with her mother, she didn't. Given the chance to run away and not fix the curse, she kept going up the mountain. She's not just our mate because fate has deemed her to be, she's a good person who deserved better than the way we treated her," I say.

Drogo puts his face in his hands. "I was such an ass. Such a fucking ass."

My heart aches for him. "She'll forgive us. We won't stop trying until she does."

Drogo looks at me, tears in his eyes. "I was aggressive with her. I was cruel with my hands and my words. My little mate deserves better than me. I don't deserve any of her forgiveness."

"None of us do," Arlys says, a determined note to his voice, "but we need to spend our lifetimes working to earn it."

"We have to fix this. Now," I tell them. "We have to find her and mate her, to make sure we won't lose her. To finally make our marriage real and show her that she's ours, forever."

Drogo nods and stands up straighter. "First, we find her. Then, we grovel. We grovel like no men have ever groveled before."

"You can do that?" I ask, eyebrow raised.

His dark eyes meet mine. "I can do that. What I can't do is to ever feel this way again. It'll destroy me."

Arlys' shoulders go back. "So, we find her, we grovel, then we love her forever."

I nod. "Sounds like a plan.

Please just let us find her.