Little Mate

Dzhan “Tell me about Roxanne,” doctor Ambrose asks with her soft mellow voice, making me shiver all over. My eyes narrow at her and it is a struggle to stay calm, to stop my palms from curling into fists in anger. Somehow, my expression remains neutral, or at least I think it does and I try to focus on something, anything, else than the way she said my mate’s name. Casual, like it means nothing. It means the world. I take in the doctor’s petite fragile frame, feeling somewhat content in the realisation that if I wanted to I could crush her beneath my feet. She’s old and small, and dry like a prune that’s been left out in the sun for far too long. It wouldn’t be difficult to break her neck if she disrespects my mate’s name again. The woman looks clueless though, with sunlit warmth in her pale eyes, some familiarity in the way wrinkles frame her mouth, something about it making her seem comfortable in her skin as she always does, which makes me relax a little a moment later. I wonder what that is, what a person who’s got their s’hit together feels when there’s nothing to obsess about all the time. I suppose it’s fun. Boring. A little smirk lands on my lips as I force them to move, to spit the words out, because I have to give her the answer she expects from me. I need to be cooperative if I want to get out of here as soon as possible. “The first time I saw her was when I was seven,” I start slowly, bitterly. Despite my best effort every word is like a knife on my tongue, splitting my flesh in half, making me choke and I know I will choke until I somehow manage to grit it all out. I’ve always been like this. Ever since I was a little kid I didn’t like talking that much. Even now, at twenty-one, I still struggle with my words most of the time, it’s just that I’ve gotten better at hiding how much I hate talking, wasting breaths and time into meaningless conversations. I only do it willingly for people who deserve it, like my parents or my cousin Ariana, and only because it makes them sad when I stay silent for far too long. I don’t care about the doctor though, so I just let the quiet settle between us until she starts fidgeting a little in her seat, her hand shooting to her necklace until she realises what she’s doing so she moves it away, covering the awkward with a cough. “How did you feel seeing her?” She asks after a moment, looking everywhere but me as if sensing how delicate this topic is. A glimpse of fear flashes through her sunlit eyes and my grin goes predatory as I try like hell to hide my annoyance. Y feelings for my mate are private. I’ve hidden them from the entire world for far too long and sharing them with other people, other than Roxanne, who’s lost to me, forbidden and elusive, feels like a violation. Still, I maintain eye contact with the doctor and brace myself to tell her more than I’ve told anyone before, this is the only way out of here for me and I can’t blame anyone but my own stupidity for letting it slip the first time I accidentally mentioned Roxanne. As our staring contest continues, the doctor shifts in her seat, changing the weight of her body from one side to the other. The afternoon sun beams behind her, framing her grey hair in a halo of gold and orange, beckoning my stare on the line just above her head where light and shadows collide. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I finally force the words out with a frustrated sigh. “Elevated. Like I finally found my missing piece and could be whole for the first time in my life. Possessive. Even then I knew she was mine and no one had the right to her but me.” Even now, as a grown man, just thinking about my mate, about those piercing eyes of hers, I can’t stop the warmth from spreading through my body. A deep longing settles at the pit of my stomach and I can barely move, or breathe for that matter. Even the next part of my story doesn’t take the feeling away. It just only amplifies it, making the possessiveness, the need to own and protect, to f*uck and kill, stronger, all consuming. “She was bruised and broken,” I continue, trying to detach my present self from the past, from the pain and the rage sweeping away any common sense as the memory takes hold on me. “She was bleeding out on the floor of that warehouse, you know the one where they held me when I was kidnapped? She begged them to let me go, but no one listened. The bastards hurt her even more for speaking up for me.” Doctor Ambrose swallows loudly at that and moves her eyes away from me. I’ve never told her that much before. I don’t think she even expected to hear those exact words coming from my mouth. She knows I was kidnapped when I was a kid and that my family found me and saved me, fighting off the men who did it. She doesn’t know why or how it all unfolded, or the way it’s affecting me even now, all those years later, turning everything about it into an obsession I don’t want to fight. “Do you want to tell me how they hurt her?” Ambrose asks carefully, setting her pen next to the notebook and leaning against the backseat of her chair, giving me all her undivided attention. My heart skips a beat. I did expect this part of her interrogation, yet, I don’t want to talk about it. A new wave of rage fills my lungs, making my cheeks heat and my breathing speed up. I don’t want to remember my Roxanne being hurt and me small and powerless to stop it. No, I want to dig each and every one of the men who hurt her out of their graves and do horrible things to them just for the sake of it, but I know that even then my need for revenge won’t be satisfied. I’ve dreamt of torture and pain for far too long and it’s part of my personality now, but that’s not something the good doctor would understand. Actually, she’d never understand even a third of what really happened that day. She’d lock me up for good and throw away the key, so I won’t be a threat to society anymore, and I can’t have that. I need my freedom to chase after the woman I’ve been craving my entire life. Still, I need to say something, anything, so Ambrose would finally sign away on my documents and clear me out of the mess I got myself into. “Whatever they did, they paid for it. It doesn’t matter now,” I finally reply, my voice coming out strained and choked, the voice of a person who’s not over it, which is dangerous, very dangerous. I need to trick her into believing I am over it even when I will never be. My pulse is still too quick for my own good, and the fight to control my breathing so she doesn’t notice, takes the best of me. Finally, my fingers start to play with the little thread on my sleeve that’s been driving me crazy ever since I noticed it almost an hour ago. The doctor narrows her eyes at me in concern and accusation and I wonder if she knows, if she’s read through my bullshit and ready to fight me for the truth. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly as she reaches up and takes her glasses off. We remain silent for a little while, the only sound in the room the one of the big clock on the wall, ticking away the seconds until the end of today’s session. It’s our last actually and this is the only reason I say so much. I should’t even be here, I think sadly. In this clinic, with these people asking questions about my life that are none of their business. The only reason I am here on my merry little four-week forced hospitalisation is because the paramedics who came at the scene of my car accident, and the cops too, all stupid humans of course, thought I was trying to hurt myself when I drove my car into that damn wall. I wasn’t. Not in the way they thought I was, and with me being who I am, there’s no way to give these people a logical explanation to what I was really doing that day. Or why. So, I had to stay and even my uncle, the town’s mayor, couldn’t take me out of this one. Not to mention how my parents think it’s actually a good idea that I am here, how the my believe I do need fixing in a way. “You are still thinking about it…” The doctor prompts me, her somehow clear voice bringing me back to the present, so I shift my focus back to her instead channelling it all to my past. “It burdens you.” “Yeah, it does,” I sigh, trying to dismiss it all, to distract myself with empty words, even when it doesn’t work like that for me. “Those men, they paid for what they did to her, but I couldn’t help her, and now I get to live with that guilt for the rest of my life. I am the reason she got hurt in the first place, so, yeah. It burdens me.” “You were just a child, Dzhan. There’s not much you could do given the circumstances.” That’s not true. Such reasoning is for the humans. I am not one. For a long time I didn’t know what I was, but I know now. I am a wolf shifter. The alpha blood of my ancestors runs in my veins, making me stronger than most. Even as a kid I was stronger, better. Even as messed up in the head as I was, deep down I could guess the true potential of my power, I was just a coward who didn’t know how to use it, who let the other big bad wolves to scare him away and touch what belonged to him. “Have you talked to her after that day?” The doctor’s voice brings me back to reality once again and I cough a little to force the unpleasant, self-centred hate go to the back of my mind. Another unhappy smile stretches my lips and I pull more of the thread from my sleeve, twisting it mindlessly around the tip of my finger until it turns painfully white. I am aware I am avoiding her eyes and that I shouldn’t do that, but I just can’t help it. Playing with that thread seems more important right now. “No, she disappeared,” I reply after a moment and in that one sentence is hidden the entire bane of my existence. It’s not just that I couldn’t protect the woman destined to be my mate, but I haven’t been able to find her ever since. She just vanished into thin air and no one’s heard of her for years. No one knows where she is or what happened to her after that day. “What would you tell her if you saw her now?” “That I am sorry,” I shrug, the words leaving my mouth on autopilot. “That I wish it never happened. I hope she’s found a way to be happy.” Lies, lies, lies, the voice in my head screams. I don’t want her to be happy. Not without me. Does it make me a bad person? I don’t care, I’ve never claimed to be good. I know I am her happiness, just like she’s mine, and no way in hell am I letting someone else steal that away from me. That’s why I need to get the f*uck out of here and— find her. Make her realise that there’s no life without me, no healing, no hope. Another wave of lava-like anger rushes over me and I grunt in frustration, feeling all kinds of hot and restless. Just before I am about to spit those words out, all of them, I stop myself, remembering where I am and what I am doing here. I’ve been locked up in a cage for an entire month because stupid humans think I am suici*dal, when I am anything but. Now I need to play by their rules if I want to be free to pursue what I’ve been after my entire life, ever since I was old enough to make my own decisions and recognise things for what they were. Things like the fact that Roxanne Saint Claire is my fated mate and I will never have peace until I find her and make her admit she belongs to me, proudly wearing my mark on her neck for the entire world to see. The doctor fidgets in her seat, her eyes going down to her papers as she runs through them slowly, methodically. The thread is tightening around my finger, the little pain keeping me in the present, and for a long time I just sit in my place, counting the seconds, waiting for my final verdict. “I will clear you for leave,” the doctor says after a while, once she’s gone through her notes for a hundredth time. Her words make my heart jump with excitement in my chest, but I don’t let it show on my face. She can’t know I only said those things so she’d let me go. “But,” she lifts a finger at me, her voice going stern, “I want you to come visit me every week for the next six months. You miss a check in and you are back inside those walls. We have a lot of work to do here, Dzhan. A lot to unpack. You can only heal if you start facing your demons and finally work through them. These last few session have been an improvement and I won’t let our progress go to waste. Do you understand what I am telling you?” Yeah, I do. My win comes with a price this time. I am not even surprised. I force myself to patiently wait for her to dismiss me. And when she does, when I get up to walk out of her office, there’s this big, absent smile on my face. “We have a deal, doctor,” I finally reply, letting go of the thread the moment her eyes land on it. “And no driving for this time, that’s non negotiable.” I let out a little grunt at that, just for theatrics. Fine by me. I don’t care about driving. I don’t need to drive to get to places anyway. “Done. Now, can I go back home?” It’s early the next morning when I am dismissed, my mom coming to take me with her big new car. There’s a big warm smile on her lips which freaks me out because it’s filled with so much guilt it makes me want to scream. She knows I won’t harm myself on purpose, but the doubt that I might have and it’s somehow her fault eats her away. That’s the same reason dad barely showed up to see me while I was in here. “Demir really wanted to be here…” mom starts seeing my questioning look when I find her alone “If he wanted to, he would,” I shrug as I jump into the car, already regretting I didn’t call my cousin Ariana to come and pick me up. I love my mom, I love her more than anything in the world, but I don’t know how to make her realise it’s not her fault. That nothing about my accident is the way they painted it out to be. I can’t tell her though, not without telling her what I was actually trying to achieve. “Get in the car, smartass,” mom says with a roll of her eyes and I do, because you don’t just ignore Geneva Aslan’s commands. “Here’s your phone. Ariana’s been blowing it since last night for some reason.” “You kept my phone battery alive and the power on?” I shoot her a stern look. “Gee, Geneva, talk about privacy.” Another roll of her eyes as she starts the engine, and here she is, my mom again. Confident, no-bullshit attitude and so much warmth hidden beneath a layer of ice. I hate to admit it, but I did miss her in the time we were separated. I mean, I’ve been away for college for a few years now, but it’s not the same. “Gee, call me by my name again and I will kick your a*ss,” she bites back now, but there is a huge grin on her lips. “I don’t care if you are six foot five, boy, just try me.” “Yes, m’am,” I fake salute with a giggle, and we drive off. As we do, I check my messages, which I know no one at home actually read, no matter what. Texts from other students at collage, missed calls from whoever, Ariana, my cousin and best friend in the entire world, sending me stupid memes all the time and calling me an asshole for leaving her alone at her first year in college. And then, when I get to the last message, my heart almost stops. Ariana: Don’t you think she looks like the girl from your sketches? Bellow her text there is a link to a news article about the new professors joining our college with a blurry group picture of the entire staff. A woman’s face is circled, probably by Ariana, in red, but I don’t need the pointer. I don’t because even through that grainy picture, I recognise her. There’s no way I’d miss the face I’ve been dreaming about ever since I was seven. Raven black hair, pinned back this time, olive skin and pale green eyes, so pale, so green, magical. Impossible. I finally found her. My mate’s come to me. My Roxanne tells me with that picture that she is finally ready to be found.