space or explain myself now and get it done with. Conflicted, I remain in place, my eyes fixed on my courting gift, which now seems quite foolish on my part.
A loud sigh escapes her after several minutes of very tense silence, and she rubs her temples with her fingertips.
“All of this craziness and I don’t even know what an ahandral is,” she mumbles.
“It means you are my magic-born mate. The one who is fated to be mine, whose power calls to my magic,” I reply just as quietly. “You hold a portion of my magic within you now.”
She expels a sharp breath, a look of surprise lighting her eyes.
“Okay, so what if we ignore it? There’s nothing that says that anyone has to go through with things just because fate decrees it. Maybe it will just go away.”
She sounds so hopeful that I can’t help but smile at her.
“It would,” I agree, and the relief on her face is hard to see. She doesn’t even want to give me a chance. I swallow against the nausea that threatens to choke me. “If we stay apart, a terminated mating will block my magical connection to my well. Unicorns are beings of magic… No magic means death for my kind,” I say.
She tries to look unaffected, but her eyes widen slightly, and that flicker of emotion is enough to ease my own rising despair.
“Like…what? You would only have a century or two left to live instead of five?” she asks with a weak note of forced humor.
“Three lunar cycles,” I correct her gently. “By the time the light of the third full moon rests upon my well, if I am left unbonded and with my connection lost, I will return to the magic of the well.”
“Shit,” she mumbles beneath the hand she sweeps over her face. “This is hardly a fair choice.”
I grimace at her choice of words. Remembering that my mating gift is still in my hands, I hold it out to her, silently beseeching her to take it. She won’t even look at my mating gift. Instead, she gives a mute shake of her head and looks away. Uncertain of what to do, I set the gift on the table close to me with a frustrated sigh. Perhaps if I leave it there, she will take it later. I stare down at it anxiously and look back at her.
She makes no move toward it. Instead, she glares at me with suspicion.
“Tell me the truth: are you just fucking with me to get your way?” she asks.
“This is, unfortunately, quite true,” I reply.
Lost in thought, she doesn’t meet my eyes, but when she finally speaks her words cut into my heart. They are filled with such anger, defeat and… sadness. That hurts most of all. I don’t want my ahandral to be sad.
“Great,” she mutters, “so my choice is to be your mate and give up my life or sentence you to death. What sort of fucked up options are those? It’s no fucking choice at all because I’m not the kind of monster to just say too bad, go die.”
A choice…
A glimmer of an idea hits me. I have a slim chance being presented to me to get my mate to my grotto. All I have to do is make her think she has another option—a situation where she can choose what she wants without the guilt.
I don’t want her to come with me just because she is guilty, I want a real chance to woo my mate, to show her the magic of my grotto and make her fall in love with me.
So… I will deceive her so she feels no guilt or pain over this.
I give her a tiny, earnest smile.
“There may be one way. If we go to the Heart of the Wells, deep in the forests of Lehamenin, the eldest unicorn Beforal dwells there. He has incredible power. Of all the unicorns, he is the one who seals bonds between mates. It seems likely that he would also have the power to sever our bond and return my magic to me.”
It’s not a complete lie, since unicorns whose mates refuse to complete the bond must take their females there and have the bond broken. The result is that the unicorn will immediately go into the Heart rather than returning to their own well. But what is the risk of dying a few days or weeks earlier? I am willing to pay that price.
“Think about it,” I