Fated Truth (The True Witch Saga)

by Gwartney, Tasha

  “Even if I kill someone?” He chuckled like he was joking, but I think maybe he isn’t.

  “I’ll bring the shovel.” I smiled, threw myself into him and hugged him to me tightly.

  “Okay okay,” he said, shoving me off. “Get out before you see more than I want you too,” he laughed.

  “So you will come with us?”

  “You aren’t getting rid of me that easily.”

  I turned and left him to get dressed feeling lighter than I had all morning. I found Jaxx in the kitchen finishing his call. “Did you get everything worked out?” I asked him as I walked into his arms.

  He kissed me on the forehead. “Yes, I’m going to rent a secluded cabin from a member of my clan.”

  I pulled back and looked into his eyes. They are troubled. “What’s wrong? And when do I get to meet your clan? You’ve met my family. Well, what I call my family.”

  “That’s the problem. They want to meet you. Badly. They are anxious.”

  “That’s a problem why?” I tried to pull back. Is he ashamed of me?

  “I know what you are thinking, and it isn’t that. They are a ruthless, but honorable clan. They will test you when they meet you. And you are not ready. I need more time to train you.”

  “Then I guess it is a good thing I want to get the fuck out of here for bit.”

  “Yes, my love. It is.” He pulled me tighter against him.

  He still looked troubled. I tried not to worry about it. I was strong, stronger than most Trues, according to Seb. Gavin came down the stairs with his duffle over his shoulder ready to hit the road.

  “Are we all riding together or can I take my bike?” Gavin asked Jaxx.

  “I wish I could take my bike.” I grumbled.

  “Your bike will be ready in about a week, pretty eyes. And I figured we could all take the Lexus. Safety in numbers.”

  Gavin caught my look. He glanced at Jaxx and noticed that he was worried about something as well.

  “Well get your ass packed so I can go to my uncle’s and get the shit I need.” I slapped Jaxx on his ass on his way out of the room.

  “What has him up in arms?” Gavin asked me.

  “He said he was wigging because his clan wants to meet me. That they are ruthless and will want to test me or some shit. Maybe they want to make sure I’m good enough for him.”

  “You are too good for anyone, Ella.”

  “Awww! I knew you were sweet.” I snuggled into his side.

  “Shut it. Don’t tell anyone.”

  I laughed. Jaxx was back down quickly carrying a duffle with him. “Road trip!” I shouted and laughed, pumping my arm in the air.

  “Dork!” Gavin poked me in the side making me jump.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dropping the Bomb

  We stopped at my uncle’s house for me to pack a bag before we hit the road. Jaxx had been silent since we left his house. My teasing him with sexy panties while I was packing didn’t even get a rise out of him.

  “Jaxx, seriously, I’m tired of the damn silent treatment. Either spit out whatever is bothering you or turn around and take us all home.”

  He huffed a breath and turned toward me as he drove. “There’s nothing wrong, Ella. You are imagining things.”

  “Oh fuck! You did not just go there!” Gavin said from the backseat chuckling.

  “I have tried to coax it out of you by being sweet. Now I’m fixing to pull a bitch.”

  Jaxx slammed on his breaks and swerved the Lexus to the side of the road jamming it into park. I was holding onto the dashboard for dear life. Shaking and breathing hard.

  “What the fuck, dude? Her best friend was almost killed in a car accident last night! And you pull that shit?” Gavin shouted from the backseat.

  Jaxx jumped out of the car and started to stomp down the side of the road heading nowhere. I looked back at Gavin and shook my head. I didn’t know what was up his ass, but I was fixing to find out. “Stay, I’ll go,” I said as I slammed my door and ran to catch up with Jaxx. “Are you going to tell me what I did wrong now? Or are you going to sulk for the rest of the trip?” I inquired when I finally caught up with him. He kept walking so I grabbed his arm and swung him around toward me. “Jaxx!”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. Okay? It’s me! I didn’t tell you something about my clan, about me and I’m afraid that I might lose you when you find out!”

  “What could be so bad that you thought I could walk away from you over it?”

  “I don’t want to tell you. Please, Ella, just let it go. Please don’t make me get into this on the side of a fucking road.”

  I was getting pissed now. You don’t drop a bomb like that, allude that he knew or did something that could end us, or could make me put an end to us then just walk on like nothing happened. Like nothing had been said. “Fuck, no! You tell me right now or I make my own way back home with my brother and he can train my ass alone. I don’t need this shit. I have had enough stress the last few days to last me a lifetime.” I argued. Hmmm this is what fighting with a boyfriend is like.

  “I lied to you okay? Is that what you want to hear? I lied about you being my first! About that being our first time. It wasn’t mine,” he said, his voice filled with anguish.

  I stood there, completely still. Mute. I didn’t know what to say to that. I mean with someone his age you would have thought that he’d had lovers before, many of them, but to lie about it? The fact that he’d lied about it was what hurt the most. Why lie at all? I wouldn’t have held it against him. I was new to the True Witch race. I didn’t know all the rules. The rule that said you were celibate until you met your destined. He didn’t have to completely crush me by dropping that bomb on me. “Who is she? Or was she? Are you still in contact with her?” I asked after a moment.

  “SEE!” He shouted the word at me.” This is why I didn’t want to talk about it. The questions! Fuck this!”

  “No,” I said in a dead voice. I could barely see his face in the moonlight, but I could see how twisted it was. Whatever else he was keeping from me was even worse than being with some random girl once to scratch an itch.

  “Tell me,” I demanded, but I didn’t scream at him. I didn’t shout. I just kept my voice in monotone.

  Jaxx dropped to sit in the grass that lined the Interstate. He dropped his elbows to his knees and his head to his hands. “Her name is Valkyrie,” he said softly. “She is a prominent member of my clan. We’ve known each other since we were barely able to walk and we were always together growing up,” Jaxx said and then paused.

  “Don’t stop there, finish it,” I said, feeling my heart twist in my chest.

  He nodded. “Everything started innocently enough, a brush of a hand, a peck on the cheek. I always knew she wanted more from me, but I never gave her any signs that I was receptive, I swear,” Jaxx said, looking in my eyes and then he looked away as he continued. “Then I got drunk one night, about a hundred years ago. I was depressed that I hadn’t found my destined yet. I was deep in my cups and she seduced me. I woke up the next morning in a strange bed with her naked, and draped across me. I told her that it would never happen again. I meant it. I knew that once I found you that you would walk among the people of my clan. I didn’t want you to feel like you came second to me in any way or form,” he pleaded with me to understand.

  I held up my hand and stopped him there. There was something that I had to know. I could tell how important it was, now that you were supposed to save yourself for your destined. He had explained that very well. “How many times? I asked. I felt like my throat was closing up.

  “Just the once and I don’t even remember it,” he whispered barely loud enough for me to hear.

  “You lied to me! WHY? You could have told me the truth. I would have understood. I was raised by Norms. Most people my age have had multiple partners. You didn’t have to pretend that it was your first time,” I shouted even louder. I laughed suddenly remembering his answer to my question, when
I’d asked him how he had become so good at what he did in the sack. “Research you said, you practiced on her! And you are still in contact with her. You look so ashamed. So why are you still talking to her?” I was too blind by shock and hurt to understand what he was saying to me. “When was the last time you fucked her?”

  He looked up at me with tears in his eyes. “Just that once!” he roared at me. “But once was enough to ruin me, to ruin what we have,” he sighed, blowing out a long breath.

  I slumped forward and started to retch. Nothing came up since I had eaten very little lately. “In our-” I stopped. “I mean your bed? Did she have you in your bed? Did she take you where you took me? Your destined for the first time?”

  “NO!” he exploded, jumping to his feet, trying to touch me.

  I pulled away as if his touch would burn me.

  “I would never do that! I never took her in our bed! That is sacred!”

  “And staying celibate isn’t? Lying to me isn’t?” I stopped mid rant. He had been in a funk since he got off the phone with someone about the cabin we were traveling too. “Who owns the cabin that you are taking us to?” His face twisted and I knew my answer. “Is that where you would meet? To do your research?” I snarled at him. “Yeah. Your silence says enough.” I was not crying now. I felt too frozen inside. Like someone had taken a dull spoon and gutted me, hollowed out.

  “I don’t talk to her. I don’t even think about her,” he pleaded with me. “I haven’t seen her in more than a century. Her father owns the cabin. It has nothing to do with her,” he implored me to understand.

  “You were going to take me and my brother to a place where we could run into someone that you broke one of the biggest taboos of our race with?” I roared at him. Jaxx wasn’t the man I thought he was. He was a liar. Everything about us had been a lie, a callous lie. “Does Seb know? Did he keep this from me?”

  Jaxx just shook his head in the negative. He stood still as stone, searching my face for something. Whatever he saw there, he didn’t like. He looked like he’d found the answer that finally broke him. He turned his back to me, found a shaft of moonlight and dissolved into mists, leaving me alone on the side of the highway. I wondered where we could have possibly gone so very fucking wrong.

  When he disappeared from view I lost it, slumping to the dirt, I broke. Shattered. Nothing was holding me together now. I had nothing left. I was empty, a husk that a weak breeze could blow away. All I could think about was why? Why did he lie? I would have understood, just as I told him. I would have found a way to work around this. He left me, I thought. After dropping this shit on my lap. He just left. My head fell to my knees and I started wrenching at my hair, pulling it out by the roots as I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs.

  Gavin had stayed in the car letting Jaxx and I have some semblance of privacy while he dropped his shit in my lap. He had stayed put until Jaxx had left me there. Now he was pulling me into his arms and lifting me to his chest. He carried my limp sobbing form to the Lexus and put me in the passenger seat. He buckled my belt then ran around to the driver’s seat and started the car. He pulled a U turn and headed back the way we came from. “Listen to me, Ella. People make mistakes. He must have thought that you couldn’t forgive this.”

  “Doesn’t he know me at all, Gavin? I could forgive him almost anything. This shit happened before us. He didn’t even know me. Or even that I existed yet.”

  Gavin continued to talk as he sped down the barren highway. “The bonds of the destined are unbreakable. You can hurt them. Stretch them taught, but they can’t be broken, but he has grown up in a True witch’s world. What he has done isn’t done. You have to understand that. It is the most taboo thing that you can do. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I do know what it is like to be tempted. She was a means to an end for him. That’s all.”

  “I understand that, but he left. He just left me there. Why would he leave if it wasn’t over?”

  “That is what you are not understanding, you can’t be away from one another. Even though you went through the mating rights and consummated. Loudly I might add. He can’t stay away or you and he will weaken. You will eventually die if you are not together.”

  “There is so much that I don’t understand about this world, Gavin. So much that I need to be taught. That I need to learn.”

  “I know, Ella. You will. You have me for that. You will have me always. Forever.”

  “He told me forever also,” I sobbed, finally letting the hurt out.

  “You have to forgive him for misleading you. For thinking that you couldn’t get past what he stupidly did. He is a male. No matter the species. We make mistakes and think that we can’t come back from them. When all we have to do is trust in those who love us. They will always see us through. That’s what he needs to realize about you. Give him a day tops. He will find you,” Gavin insisted. “You know she meant nothing to him. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you see him when he comes?”

  “Dunno,” I mumbled into the window I had my head jammed against.

  “You will have to eventually. I have never seen a destined pair with such a strong bond. He was scared, Ella. Forgive him his weakness.”

  “I already have. I just didn’t think he would ever leave.”

  We sped through the dark night in silence. Gavin held my hand squeezing it every once in a while, as if to give me comfort. To let me know that I would never be alone again, Jaxx or no Jaxx.

  “Where are we going?” I asked after we drove for a while.

  “We are going to get my bike. Stowe our shit and get the fuck outta dodge before any more trouble finds you. You have had enough. You need to time to rest and rebuild yourself.”

  “Yes,” I whispered in the positive to his plan. “But where are we heading after we get to your bike?”

  “I own a hunting lodge that no one knows about. It’s around a couple of hundred miles from here. It’s my home away from our father’s clan. No one knows about it, no one but you now.”

  I nodded my head. All I wanted to do was sleep, to forget this night.

  “Sleep if you want, Ella. I won’t tell Seb if you drool on his seats,” he chuckled and tried to get a reaction out of me.

  I didn’t respond, but I appreciated the effort. I loved him for it, but I want to keep the numb feeling that had once again taken over. I didn’t want to feel yet. I didn’t know what I was going to do when Jaxx did come to find me. I knew that I had already forgiven him for fucking someone else before he was with me. There was really nothing to forgive on that. The archaic beliefs of our people weren’t mine. What I was going to have trouble forgiving him for was leaving. Not staying and trying to fix this shit.

  I eventually started to drift. I glanced over at Gavin thumping his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove, barreled down the road was more like it. I felt darkness taking me. I wanted it. I craved the oblivion it offered, the emptiness where the hurt didn’t wait to wrap itself around me, to strangle the remaining life out of me. My last thought was that he’d left. He left me. He said forever. He lied.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Void

  It had been four days. Four days since Gavin and I had arrived at his home. Four days of not moving and growing ever weaker. Four days since he left me. Four days without his smile, his touch, his embrace, his forever. I knew I was dying, but I couldn’t seem to care. Gavin was growing continuously worried. I just couldn’t seem to find it in me to reassure him, not when I couldn’t even reassure myself that I wanted to go on.

  Gavin’s home was beautiful. All redwood and exposed beams. The room he gave me was gorgeous. It was decorated in different shades of blue ranging from the lightest blue of the sky to the darkest blue of midnight.

  I knew I was depressed. I was supposed to be using this time to train, but I couldn’t even move from the bed anymore. Gavin said it was because I was too young for my body and soul to deal with that much tortur
e. That was exactly what it was. Physically I was disappearing into myself. My spirit was sucked dry the minute he disappeared into the moonlight. The moment he walked away from me like I was trash. He was done. And now so am I. Literally.

  Gavin had been raging. So much anger and despair and I didn’t know how to help him. My heart, what was left of it, was being twisted dry. To see someone you love in so much pain. I guess I knew what he was feeling. I couldn’t watch him fade.

  He made a call to my father’s clan that morning, asking for help. To say that they were astonished to find out that Gavin had a twin was an understatement. They would be arriving tomorrow, but even I know that it will be too late by then. I will have moved on.

  Gavin even tried reaching out to Seb, but he was off the grid. Much like Jaxx, just thinking his name made me shudder. I lived in a constant void of pain. I begged Gavin repeatedly to end me, but he wouldn’t . I knew that he wouldn’t when I asked, but it was at a moment when the pain became too much. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take anymore now, but i held out for him, hoping he would come back to me, so that I might get a chance to say goodbye. To tell him that he left me for the wrong reasons. He had no reason to leave. My love was eternal.

  “You have to fight, Ella. You can’t let yourself wither away like this,” Gavin begged. “Even like this, when you are withered and weak, you are still beautiful. Twisted Beautiful.”

  Gavin was speaking to me again. He did it quite often, but I couldn’t answer him, even when he raged at me. I was locked deep inside a void, a void so dark that even the smallest hint of the light left inside me had been snuffed out like a weak candle.

  My room has so many holes in the walls. Gavin’s rages were getting worse. He prayed by my bedside most nights, days, mornings, and minutes. He was hoping and begging for something that would never happen.

  Destined Mates were not supposed to be separated. He knew this. He knew this. He had left me to die. I realized that now, but I still loved him more than my own life. I forgave him for everything.