Chapter 94: I Think He Is My Mate

Azura’s POV

The ceiling was not familiar, that was the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes. Wrong shape. Wrong color. Wrong everything. I lay completely still and stared up at it and waited for my brain to catch up with the rest of me.

The last thing I remembered was Torin’s back. The warmth of the fur under my hands and the rhythm of his movement through the dark and the trees blurring past on both sides. I must have fallen asleep somewhere between the pack house and wherever this was, because there was a significant gap between that memory and this ceiling, and I had no idea what was in it.

I sat up slowly.

The room was unfamiliar in every direction I looked. Bookshelves along one wall, packed full and slightly unorganized, the way shelves get when the person using them actually uses them rather than arranging them for appearances. Weapons in the corners, axes and blades in various sizes, some mounted and some just leaning. Maps pinned to the wall above the desk, some rolled and stacked beside it, one spread open with something marking a spot near the edge.

Bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling and sitting in small groups on the side table, the kind used for treating wounds rather than cooking. The whole space had a particular energy to it. Lived in. Functional. Completely masculine.

I turned my head.

Liona was beside me on the bed, still completely asleep, one hand curled under her cheek. She had a small frown on her face like whatever was happening in her dream was the worst thing that had happened to her in a while.

I sat with that for a moment.

Then I heard the sound.

Coming from somewhere beyond the door. Steady and rhythmic and completely unbothered. I pushed the blanket back, stood up, crossed to the door, and opened it.

A small sitting area. A dining table off to the side, simple and worn in a way that felt comfortable rather than neglected. Cozy in the way spaces get when someone has actually lived in them for a long time. The sound was not coming from here. I followed it to the next door and pushed that one open too.

Fresh air hit my face immediately.

Torin was outside.

He was in the open space in front of the dwelling with his back partially toward me, shirtless, working through a stack of wood with a large axe. He set a piece on the block, swung, split it clean, stacked the halves, and moved to the next one. Over and over with the easy practiced rhythm of someone who had done this enough times that it required no particular thought.

I stood in the doorway and watched without saying anything.

I had seen him without a shirt before. In the Wraithfen and during training and various other moments that came with traveling through a cursed forest with a group of people for an extended period. But I had not really looked. Not properly.

He was well built. That was just a fact and I was simply observing it the way I would observe any other fact. Broad across the shoulders in that way that came from actual use rather than deliberate effort. The kind of build that made sense on someone who had been fighting and moving and living hard for most of his life.

Then my brain produced a comparison I had not asked for.

I still preferred Rhydor’s build.

I stood there in the doorway with that thought sitting in my head uninvited and completely unhelpful and wondered what was wrong with me. Why did I even have a preference? Why was that the thought my brain decided to offer me first thing in the morning after waking up in a strange room in an unfamiliar place after running away from my own pack house?

I pushed it away firmly and focused.

Torin glanced over his shoulder and saw me standing there.

"You are awake," he said.

"How long were we sleeping?" I asked.

He set the axe down and turned properly. "Long enough that I started wondering if the two of you were planning to sleep through the whole day."

"What time is it?"

"Morning is gone," he said. "Well into the afternoon now."

"Oh."

The door behind me opened and Liona appeared, squinting hard against the light, scratching the side of her nose, her hair doing something complicated on one side of her head. She looked like a person whose body had woken up but whose mind had filed a strong objection.

Torin looked at the two of us standing there and something moved across his face that was almost amusing.

"Bathhouse," he said. "Both of you. Go and freshen up before we eat."

I looked at him because I had absolutely no idea where anything was in this place.

He understood immediately. "Go back inside. Through the sitting room. Door on the left side. Follow it straight through. You will find it."

"Thank you," I said.

"When you are done come back out here." He was already reaching for the axe again. "I am making something for lunch."

We went back inside, and I found the door on the left, and we followed the narrow passage it opened into until the sound of water reached us and the air changed to something warmer and slightly steamy.

I noticed it on the walk there.

Liona was quiet.

Not the comfortable kind of quiet she sometimes had around me, the kind that did not need filling because it was just two people existing comfortably in the same space. This was different. This was the pulled inward kind. The somewhere else kind. Like she was walking right beside me, but the part of her that was actually Liona was somewhere far away, dealing with something she had not invited me into yet.

She had been like this since before we left the pack house. Even during everything, the attack and the smoke and the running and all of it, she had been present in body but somewhere else entirely in herself.

I had been waiting for her to come back on her own.

But she had not come back yet.

The bathing room was simple and warm. A large stone basin sunk into the floor, filled with water that steamed gently at the surface. I undressed and stepped in and the warmth of it moved through me immediately, working through everything that had been sitting tight in my muscles since the ceremony and the fight and the running and all the hours in between.

I sank down until the water reached my shoulders and exhaled for what felt like the first time in days.

Liona got in across from me. She sat in the water and looked at nothing in particular, her eyes unfocused, her expression sitting somewhere I could not reach from here.

I watched her.

She did not notice. Or if she noticed she did not acknowledge it.

I waited a little longer.

Then our eyes met by accident and she blinked and came back slightly.

"What?" she said. "Is something on my face?"

"You have been quiet since before we left the pack house," I said. "Even when everything was happening. You were not really there."

"I am fine," she said.

"Liona."

"I said I am fine, Azura."

I moved closer to her in the water. Not aggressively. Just closing the gap between us until she could not comfortably look past me anymore.

"Are you trying to replace me?" I said. "Like, are you trying to find someone else and get rid of me? Is that what is happening?"

She looked at me like I had just said something that required a moment to fully process for how strange it was.

"Why would I replace you?" she said. "Why would I replace a Luna? That does not even make sense."

"I do not know," I said. "But you have been quiet the whole way here. You are acting like you want to get away from me or something."

"Oh stop it," she said. "Stop saying nonsense."

"Then why are you pushing me away? Why are you not talking to me?"

"I am not pushing you away. I just." She stopped.

"You just what?"

She looked at the water.

"Liona." I leaned forward slightly. " You know you can tell me anything. If something is wrong I want to know. Maybe I can actually help."

She exhaled. Long and slow. The kind of breath that had been sitting in someone’s chest for a while and had finally found a way out.

She looked at the water for another moment. Then she looked up at me.

"The man," she said. "From the pack house."

Something shifted in my chest immediately. "What about him? Did he do something, use something on you, some kind of magic you did not feel or felt ?"

"No," she said. "He did not."

"Then what? What about him?"

She was quiet again. But differently this time. Like she was trying to find the exact right words for something that did not have exact right words. She looked at the water and then at her hands and then somewhere past my shoulder.

Then slowly. Like each word was being chosen carefully before it was allowed out.

"I think," she said.

A pause.

"He is."

Another pause.

"My mate."

My brain heard the first two words and my mouth started moving before the rest of it arrived.

"Oh do not worry, you are not..."

And then it landed.

All three words together, finally, hit the part of my brain that understood what they meant when they were in that particular order.

I stopped talking mid-sentence.

I looked at her.

She looked back at me.

"What?"

Just then my brain went chaotic.