Twenty-one times.
I've signed the mate bond with Kael Nightshade, Lord of the Black Panther Clan, twenty-one times.
And dissolved it twenty-one times.
Not because we didn't love each other.
But because every few months, she comes back.
Seraphine. His first love. The angel who shattered her wings saving him, leaving her mind fractured and fragile.
"Seeing the mate mark sends her into psychotic breaks," he'd say, burning the bond from my skin. "I owe her my life."
So I'd erase the mark. Burn the contract. Pretend we were never bound.
The first time, I cried and begged. He backhanded me: "Cut the bullshit. We'll rebond once she's back in the sanatorium."
The thirteenth time, I followed them to a tavern and watched him tenderly kiss the scarred stumps where her wings used to be. When I confronted them, he knocked me down and locked me in enchanted restraints for seven days straight.
Sign. Burn. Erase. An endless cycle I couldn't escape.
Until the twenty-first time.
Fire engulfed the manor. Seraphine and I were trapped in different wings. Kael could only save one of us.
"Kael!" I collapsed at the window, smoke choking my lungs. "I'm pregnant—please—"
He shifted into his panther form and bolted toward her room.
The guards dragged me out thirty minutes later. Third-degree burns across my back, lungs filled with ash, blood pooling beneath me.
No heartbeat.
Kael stood in the safe zone, holding an unscathed Seraphine in his arms. From the moment the flames erupted until they pulled me from the rubble, he never looked back.
Not once.
The twenty-first dissolution was my choice.
There won't be a twenty-second.
