The Worst Kind of Wonderful

Chapter EIGHTEEN

✖️The Worst Kind of Wonderful✖️

"Insanity is relative.

It depends on who

has who locked

in what cage."

-Ray Bradbury

Chapter Eighteen~

I couldn't stand to breathe anymore. The air of the jail, swimming with death and mold and dust particles, refused to enter my lungs. Or perhaps I refused to let it, for it tasted like the hope of words I never thought would be spoken. I couldn't afford more hope than I was already holding onto but there it was.My sister was Benjamin Hartley's mate. Suddenly my conversation with Marie from the hospital rang in my head: "why doesn't he have a mate?" I asked her when I found out how mates work and how powerful his wolf was. Her response left me full of questions I couldn't ask at the time but now made everything so clear: "he did or does I suppose. She couldn't be with him, she was too young, and when he... Killed and was locked away, we told him he couldn't be with her again. It nearly killed him." Everything was becoming uncomfortably clear.

"Is that why Lacy left the pack?" I questioned quietly, my voice hoarse.

"They took her!" He bit out in a tone that echoed with a pain I'd never known. A pain that bit straight to the bone.

"Belle, I need a minute," I explained, she nodded understandingly slipping out of the room and down into the uneven darkness of the hall.

"Do you know where Lacy is?" I cut to the chase. My fingers were in fists at my sides slicked with sweat and unease.

"Not from behind the silver bars that you and I both know are the only things that can bind me to this Hell."

"Do you have a location?" I asked, inching ever closer to the things that separated me from the only person as close to my twin as I myself had once been: the stone cold, burning silver.

"No," he sighed increasingly frustrated with me for reasons I couldn't grasp. "But if I was out, if I had that strength of my wolf I could find her. It's a mate thing, you can't understand."

I do understand. I do! I wanted to shout but the words wouldn't leave my thoughts, sticking to my tongue like glue. "Maybe I wouldn't," I muttered instead. "You could help me understand. You can just know where Lacy is? Feel her like an internal GPS?" I wondered, if this was true, why I hadn't felt the same with Xander. I could sense him when he was near but never get a read when he wasn't.

"As the bond grows stronger, like in the legends that I'm surprised you even believe, your ability to know what your other half is thinking and feeling and seeing and smelling and where they've been and where they are now becomes stronger." There were questions that I knew I couldn't ask. The personal kind of questions that no one should know, save for him and Lacy, but still they clouded my mind like a toxic unrelenting fog.

"And how does the bond develop?" I dared to ask.

"We never completed the bond if that's what you're asking but we're marked and we spent enough time around each other for it to grow." That's what Xander and I needed: time to grow our bond, even beyond the mate logistics we needed to work out. We had to know each other emotionally and mentally on a level normal couples knew each other on. The control freak in me couldn't deal with a life that wasn't my choice at least in part and it couldn't feel like my choice until I knew him.

~*~

Annabelle and I left shortly after but my mind never really left the cell. Was it really possible for my sister to be found? Was Benjamin my only hope of learning more about soul mates and my sister's disappearance?