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I remember who I am. What I was, what I should have been, I remember it all. I wish I didn’t.
—Nyssa’s Journal
It took everything I had in me to peel my eyes open. They didn’t want to listen. Sleeping would be easier, simpler. Too bad I never took the easier route. Ever.
The lights were off, everything dark. I wasn’t sure where I was. I drew in a breath, and sighed when I realized my phoenix was still there, and I wasn’t dead.
She was relaxed. Content. Almost happy. And it rubbed off on me.
I moaned and tried to sit up. My body refused. I was able to turn my head and take in the IV lines going into my arm. Frowning, I glared at it, wondering how long I was out for.
The bigger question was why wasn’t I dead? I should be dead. I definitely felt like I was.
“You’re awake.”
I blinked and tried to understand what I was seeing. Landus. At my side.
He looked exhausted, like he aged an extra two hundred years. Redness swelled around his eyes and his hair was in complete disarray.
I licked my licks, trying to find enough moisture to combat the dryness in my mouth. He noticed the struggle and disappeared for a moment. The next breath, he was back at my side with a glass of water and a bendy straw sticking out of it. He stuck the straw into my mouth and I drew in the ice-cold water.
Sighing, I closed my eyes. Before slept took me over, I opened them again, refusing to go back under. It had taken me too long to climb my way out of it and I wasn’t ready to do that battle again, no matter how much my body demanded that I sleep.
“You have wrinkles,” I said.
He tried to smile, his silver eyes dark with pain, turning them a murky cloud of misery. “You’ve been asleep for a long time,” he finally answered.
“How long?”
“Three months.”
“Huh. Feels like it all just happened.”
He shook his head. “No. It was a miserable three months.”
Confusion must have been all over my face because he sighed and grabbed my hand squeezing it. My arm jerked at the feel of his energy as his jumped along my skin. He let go. “Sorry.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Our bond.”
“We don’t have a bond.”
He flinched. “We do.”
I shook my head. “You want nothing to do with me.”
“That’s a long story I think you need to be more alert to hear. Go back to sleep.”
“No thanks, I’m fine.”
“Nyssa,” he growled. “Go back to sleep.”
“What if I don’t wake up again?”
His expression softened and he reached for me again. This time squeezing as the energy hopped from him and into me. “You will. I’ll make sure of it.”
I snorted.
Using his free hand, he covered my eyes. “Sleep, Nyssa. You need more rest.”
Somehow, he worked some kind of Prime shifter mojo on me, because I fell asleep.
~*~
The next time I woke up, Landus was the one sleeping. He still held my hand as he snored softly at my side. I let him sleep, instead enjoying the touch of him. The room was still dark, but it wasn’t because it was dark outside. Curtains were drawn closed, almost blocking all the sunlight out. There was a halo of light around the curtains, so we had to be well into the day.
Letting time pass, I stared at Landus. His fingers flexed and I automatically squeezed in response. He jumped up before I even finished releasing my grip. His eyes were alert, focused on me.
“I’m not dead,” I said, feeling more clear-headed now, almost like myself.
“No. I wouldn’t let you.”
“Why?”
He sighed and sat back down, still holding my hand. “I’m not even sure how to answer that. It was all a blur frankly. You made your grand retirement speech and took off from what I heard. That prompted Slade and Cecil storming into my office. Cecil nearly killed me then and there and it took a lot of screaming and yelling from her before she calmed down enough to tell me what was going on.”
“Then the idiot took off, not filling us in on anything,” Cecil said as she slipped into the room. Tears pooled down her face and she dove into bed, wrapping her body around mine. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she whispered into my neck as she squeezed as tightly as she could.
“Why are you thanking me?” I asked.
“Because you could have chosen to die. You did choose to die. But then you fought and you gave us a chance to fix it.”
“Fix it?” I was so confused. Cecil pulled away, her eyes puffy, her nose red, cheeks spotty.
“We fixed it. We formed the connection between you and your mate.”
I glanced at Landus. “What is going on?” Cecil went back to crying as she held me and I was able to move enough to rub her back. She snuggled into my side, holding me like I was one of her lovers, telling me how much I really did scare her.
“I didn’t know you were her. That memory is fuzzy, it was a long time ago, and after they told me you had disappeared, I tried tracking you, but I couldn’t find you. I found things...evidence that you may have been killed. The black market at the time would have used every single part of your body, so there would have been nothing left. If I knew who you were, I would have made the connection.”
I blinked at him as all the memories I had remembered through the pain came back up.
“You remember?” he asked, seeing my expression.
I nodded. “You gave me away. I told you exactly who I was and you dismissed me.” I looked down at our hands, at the way his energy supplemented mine.
“You were a little girl, Nyssa. This little thing that talked like an adult. I didn’t know what to do with you. And at the time, I had been furious. I wasn’t an Alpha at the time. I was just a Prime lashing out at the hunters. All my energy went to hunting them down. I didn’t realize you were my mate, even when you told me. I thought you were just doing what children did, when they tell their dads or brothers that they’re going to marry them when they’re older. I thought you were just being a cute child.”
“You lost me,” I said in a small voice that was completely unfamiliar to me. “They didn’t want me. I didn’t fit. I was a child, but I’m a phoenix. I knew all along and you gave me away. I trusted you to find me, knew you would have, but you didn’t. And then it was too late. The Woodlands, they are not kind.”
His hands squeezed mine as a growl erupted from him.
“I had to learn to survive and surviving doesn’t leave room for much else. I had to do what I needed to do and that meant purging my memories so I could fill them up with information I actually needed.”
“And now?” Cecil asked, lifting her head up to look down at me.
“I remember everything.” I bit back a sob. “I remember my family. My mamma. My dad. My little brother. I remember everything.”
The sobbing escaped, a hard ball forming in my throat as I cried hard. I never had the chance to mourn my family, and now, centuries later, I finally had the opportunity. I let it all out. Cecil pulled me closer, and Landus crawled into bed. He cradled me to him until I was snuggled between two of the most important people to me. Neither of them said anything and I appreciated it all the more.
~*~
It took a while for me to calm down, but once I did, letting out the last hiccup that I had in me, I tilted my head up to look at Landus. At some point, Cecil had slipped out of bed to give us some privacy, having sensed that I needed time with just him. Landus was staring down at me, his expression twisted in pain.
“What happened after they told you about me?” I asked, wanting to hear the rest of the story.
“I hunted your ass down. You had shifted and flew a day’s journey and it took a while for me to find you. I was worried we wouldn’t get there in time. When we did find you, you were almost gone. I almost lost you. Cecil and the witches did a last-ditch effort, a Hail Mary so to speak, and did a ceremony they use to bind witches together to a coven or in a marriage. It was enough to snap our mate bond back into place.”
“You were in my head.”
He nodded. “That was after they did the spell. I didn’t wait and came right in. I needed to get you to want to live, to fight to live. It worked.”
I glanced around the room, not recognizing it. Everything smelled like Landus too, so I wasn’t sure where we were. It wasn’t Cecil’s place or mine. Not his place either.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I have a cabin in the Woodlands. I had it built a long time ago so I had a place to escape when I needed time to myself. I knew the Woodlands felt like home for you, so I brought you here, hoping to make you as comfortable as possible.”
Nodding, I patted his chest. “Good man.”
He chuckled and the sound sent flutters through my body.
“I want to see,” I said.
“You should rest more.”
“Apparently, I rested for months. I want to see your little haven away.”
He sighed. “Okay, but I’m carrying you.”
“I can walk.”
“No, you can’t. You’re pretty much sticks and stones right now after a long time of inactivity. I’m carrying you. If you don’t let me, you don’t get to see where we are. Simple.”
I moaned, but nodded.
Chuckling, he scooped me up into his arms and we headed out of the room. Dark red wood surrounded us, with simple artwork lining the wall. He brought us down a gorgeous wooden stairwell to the first floor. Not giving me a chance to look around, he went out the front door and onto a massive patio.
“Holy shit, you built this?” I asked.
“Yes. Years ago. I think a part of me knew I was going to have someone special in my life to share it with, someone who would appreciate the Woodlands and what it had to offer.”
I nodded as he brought me over to a porch swing. He sat down, still keeping me in his arms. At that point, I didn’t fight him. I could already feel sleep pulling at me. I wasn’t going to be awake for much longer.
We stayed like that, cuddling on the swing for hours, neither of us saying anything or feeling the need to. I dozed on and off. It was nice. I wanted it to stay like this forever if possible. If this was the rest of my life, I’d be content.
My smile melted away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sensing the change in my body as it tensed up.
“We’ll have to go back, won’t we?”
“Go back where?”
“To the city.”
“Only if you want to.”
I frowned. “But you have your pack and going back and forth would be exhausting for you. They’re a needy bunch. Don’t even know how to wipe their own asses if you don’t give them an order to do it.”
He chuckled and shook his head in disbelief.
“It’s true. They strive for order, to have a master giving them a command to do everything.”
His body shook as he broke out into full laughter. Once he calmed down enough, he tilted his head down and kissed my forehead.
“I already talked with the pack. I’m stepping down.”
“But you can’t do that.”
He smirked. “I can and I already did. That city nearly cost me my mate. I only ever took the role because the previous leader was completely insane and I wanted to help them get over it. I never intended to keep the role.”
“Who’s Alpha then? If you made Slade Alpha, he’s going to go crazy. That isn’t for him.”
“And he would agree with you. No, he’s not Alpha. There was someone else more than capable of taking over. I passed it along to him. He’ll make a good Alpha.”
“So, I don’t need to go back.”
“You don’t need to go back.”
“But—”
“Cecil is more than welcome to visit. So is Slade or anyone else you want.” Landus sighed. “So much could have been avoided if you felt comfortable enough to tell me that you were a phoenix. I have to admit, it hurt to know that Slade knew, and I didn’t.”
“I tried to tell you multiple times before everything went to shit. Then everything went to shit and it was over between us.”
“So much suffering could have been avoided,” he whispered and pulled me closer. He pecked my lips.
“My mouth tastes like a family of skunks made it into a den.”
“You taste delicious to me,” he said and kissed my forehead.
If he didn’t mind, then I didn’t mind. So I didn’t hold back and did what my body ached to do.
I kissed him. Hard. A growl rose out of my throat. He responded instantly, murmuring apologies and hopes of the future with me, strengthening our mate bond with his sweet words.
My memories from my past had definitely came back, crystal clear. It was indeed a very long childhood. It took me so long to mature, and yet at the same time, not long enough as the Woodlands robbed me of the rest of it. When I finally came out of the forest, I had lived for lifetimes already and I hadn’t noticed. The forest kept my sense of the world timeless, the years passing by while I focused on surviving.
Life was not kind to me. I had lost my family in a brutal way, found my mate, and lost him too, then the Woodlands took everything else from me.
But I was there now and so was Landus. He promised to stay. We were going to build a live together now. My phoenix had all of the Woodlands to explore, and maybe, a long time down the road, I might, just might, consider children. For now, I just wanted Landus.
And as he worshipped my body, every one of his touches told me he only wanted me too.
I was okay with that.
