Chapter 150

If Viola still loved that scum, it would be incredibly hard for him to get her to see him as a mate in order to awaken her wolf, and all of his efforts would amount to nothing but a waste of time. And if she didn’t still love him, he would like to know why she had stopped him, when she could have simply pretended she hadn’t seen anything at all and let him deal with Evan for her.

Sebastian was aware that he was supposed to act as though he didn’t care about her in public so that no one would realize she was his mate, but at this point, it didn’t matter, he had more than enough excuses to fall back on.

Every member of the Silver Pack knew how he ruled and how he never tolerated outsiders laying hands on his members, and no one would question him for killing Evan or beating him into a plump. They all knew he despised the Moonwillow Pack more than he despised anything else in this world, and they would simply assume he had used Evan beating the future Luna as the excuse to do it.

No one would ever connect it to Viola personally, which was exactly why he had been so willing to strangle the man to his death, until she stopped him.

At his question, Viola, who had been fully intent on not looking at him until he would leave her alone to lick her wounds and grieve the loss of a friendship she had been growing so deeply accustomed to, slowly turned to look at him.

His expression was as blank as a plain sheet of paper and his eyes were cold, just as cold as they had been the very first time she had met him, and the sight of it sent a shiver crawling down her spine.

Did she still love Evan, he had asked? Viola almost laughed at those words. Love was far from what she felt, and it had nothing to do with it, what she felt towards Evan had nothing to do with her past affection, but with something far deeper and far more complicated than that.

“I thought you already had your answer, and that is why you are giving me the cold shoulder,” Viola stated indifferently, not wanting to let her emotions bleed through her voice or her words. She stared at him blankly from behind the cracked glass frames of her broken glasses.

“Would I be asking you if I already knew why the hell you stopped me from beating that piece of shit into the wall?” Sebastian gritted out, dragging furious fingers through his hair and glaring down at her darkly, for he hated that she was lying there looking up at him with that indifferent expression when his own emotions and mate jealousy were eating him alive. Did she honestly think he would be asking her if he already had any idea of what was going on with her?!

Viola felt her heart thud. So he didn’t even know why she had stopped him from beating Evan, and yet he was already this furious and cold towards her?

What would his reaction be if he actually knew the truth? She thought, biting the inside of her cheek and weighing whether she should tell him or not. But then wasn’t it better to just let him know the truth now and let him accept it sooner rather than later, even if it might break the relationship they were carefully building together? It was far better for it to crack at this stage than to carry on until it reached a point where it could no longer withstand the weight of it.

With the way he hated Evan and Moonwillow, he might not like what she would tell him, but Viola knew she had to let him know now.

With that thought settled, Viola said, “All right, I will not only tell you, but I will show you.”

Sebastian watched her push herself into a sitting position on the bed, wincing slightly, and he fought the urge to step forward and help her sit up gently. He watched her sit up at the edge of the bed, wondering what she intended to show him, as she reached out and began to unbutton her pajama shirt.

His brows knitted together as he watched her undo the buttons, and then she pulled her hair forward and away from her back before she lowered the shirt to reveal her fair upper back to him. Sebastian arched a brow as she turned her head sideways to look at him and said,

“Look at the back of my neck.” As Viola said those words, she forced herself to think of Evan, so that Sebastian could see for himself what had caused her to stop him from inflicting further damage on Evan beyond any reasonable explanation.

The moment the thought of Evan entered her mind, something glowed at the back of her neck, and it instantly caught Sebastian’s eyes and held them there. A dark mark appeared in the shape of a chain, and he felt something violent turn over inside him. He blinked to make certain he was seeing clearly, but the mark didn’t disappear, it only glowed more intensely.

Sebastian’s heart turned over in his chest, his skin prickling with a surge of anger he hadn’t thought it possible to feel any more of. For every werewolf who had gone through proper education and studied every kind of mark that existed, knew exactly what was on the back of her neck.

The heart binding mark.

There were different kinds of markings when it came to the act of marking. There was the soul binding mark, the most sacred and significant of all, which mates or werewolves who wished to spend the rest of their lives together gave to one another. A mark that connected them at the deepest level, one that could only be broken through mutual rejection. Then there was the mate marking. And then there was this one, the heart binding mark.

Unlike the soul binding mark which was given to form a soul bond, and unlike the mate marking, the heart binding mark was something entirely different. It was given when a person intended to love someone for the rest of their life, when they willingly allowed that person to mark them in a way that would bind their heart to theirs, completely and sometimes irrevocably.

“I let him give me this mark when I turned sixteen because I thought he was the one I would end up with. I couldn’t give him the mark in return because I hadn’t awakened my wolf yet at the time, and he had only just awakened his as he had just turned nineteen. He swore to me that once I awakened mine, I could give him the mark in return, so that even if we turned out not to be each other’s fated mates, we could never truly turn away from each other, because we would both carry the heart binding marks…”