Chapter : 861
Daisy rolled her eyes at that last comment, and then she shook her head at the memory before her eyes landed on me again.
“I had a feeling she wasn’t the true host,” Daisy said, letting out a breath. “After the second attempt… I kept thinking that it shouldn’t be this hard. That the magic should want to be returned to its host. Magic grows attached to the host, just as the host gets attached to magic. So, for her attempts not to work the first couple of times, it was strange to me. But then every time you were around, it would glow and seem stronger. I put all the pieces together myself. I’m surprised it took you as long.”
“Do you really want to talk like that to me right now?” I asked, raising my brows at her. “Let’s back up for a second… why would you want to break your mate bond? I thought once you were marked, you were connected as if you were true mates.”
“It’s not as strong as a true mate connection,” she admitted. “But that’s not the problem. The man I’m mated to is a complete monster.”
My mouth fell open.
“A monster?”
She let out a laugh, though it was humorless.
“Do you know what it’s like to be connected to someone who only thinks about themselves? We have a full bond, where I can feel and hear everything he feels and thinks. His thoughts are so loud that it’s hard to block them out, and his feelings are so dark that they’re all I can feel.”
Tears pooled in her dark blue eyes as she stared at me, and I was left dumbfounded. Had I been so wrong about Daisy Baldwin?
“He has this strange power or whatever where he can block my emotions so he doesn’t have to feel my ‘pointless’ feelings,” she said, shaking her head as the tears started to fall from her eyes. It was clear this man had told her that her feelings and thoughts were pointless. “He also has this rare bloodline where he can take multiple women as mates at the same time. Every time he’s intimate with another woman, it hurts like hell… but when he mates with another woman… I want to die. I sleep for days afterwards. The pain is so deep, I want to tear it out of me. I wouldn’t wish that kind of punishment on my worst enemy…”
My vision blurred, and I realized my eyes were filling with tears. My heart was broken for her, and I never thought I’d ever feel bad for Daisy Baldwin She’s been nothing but a thom in my side ever since I met her just before I worked for Gavin. She had been after Gavin for so long and had been deceitful the entire time… I had no idea if this was just another one of her games or if she was being serious.
It was frustrating not knowing.
But at this moment, as Diasy wrapped her arms around herself even tighter and let
out a sob, I realized just how broken and scared she truly was. She had been a prisoner in her own relationship… her own mating… and she didn’t see any way out of the hell he put her in.
“He uses that type of pain and then
some to get me to do what he wants,” she said, letting out a breath. “His mating with another woman means that I wronged him in some way. So, he’d mate someone else to make it right and punish me at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, there had been good moments. plenty of them to keep me from ending my life when things started to look bad. But the bad outweighed the good.”
“Daisy…” I whispered, shaking my head as a tear fell down my cheek.
She wiped at her tears almost angrily.
“And the stuff he always had me do… it was between drug trafficking, prostitution to please his business partners, and spy work… I did a lot of spying on Gavin’s territory because that was enemy lines. I was pretty enough and well-known, plus with my family connections, nobody would suspect me… I think that’s why he chose me. When he asked me to steal the Moon Gem, he told me that he would finally move me into the manor, introduce me as his mate, and marry me. I thought things could be better and I won’t have to live in fear and pain anymore… that he’ll finally love me. But I was a fool.”
“You did steal the gem, though,” I told her. “And what manor?”
She let out another breath, this one more exhausted than the last.
“I suppose you might as well know… the man who mated with me is Noah
Blackwell. Or I guess you should know him as your brother.”