SAGE
Once, I had wondered what it felt like to have a mate.
Not in the abstract way people talked about it—bonded, chosen, destined—but in the visceral sense. To know a mate.
To smell them and have something deep and raw inside you recognize the truth before your mind ever could. To understand the pull that made people reckless, foolish, brave.
I had felt a sliver of it once. As Maya.
That first time with Adam, years ago, in the caves, there had been something there—something tentative and fragile, like the first note of a song that never quite found its chorus.
But time had eroded it. Betrayal had ruptured it. Distance had finished the work. Eventually, even the longing had died.
Or so I had thought.
Now—
I shut my eyes as his voice carried through the door, threading its way into the room as though walls were merely a suggestion.
"Sage?"
The sound of it made something inside me twist.
Lifemates.
