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It was silver — no, it wasn’t silver, but it looked like silver — and seemed to hold the light, making it glow with an unearthly intensity. At its center was an ugly lump of metal that hadn’t been fashioned or shaped.
“In my culture, we have a ceremony,” Ohara said. “It’s a test of adulthood where we are thrust into the wilderness and forced to survive. We hunt and kill and survive off the land. It never ends, not until we discover our Soul Stone.”
“That’s what this is?” I said, holding the crude lump in my hand. “Your Soul Stone?”
He nodded and ran his fingers through my hair. “When we find our fated mate, we give it to them. They wear it forever and never take it off. So long as you have this, you have my heart, my soul.”
I gripped it tight and it fit perfectly in my palm. “But I don’t want your Soul Stone. I want you.”
Another flood of tears threatened to overtake me.
“So long as you have my Soul Stone, you do have me,” he said. “I know this is not what you want — what either of us wants — but it is how it must be. I must keep you safe and this is the only way I know how.”
“By leaving me?”
He looked at me with a broken expression. “For now, yes.”
I fell forward and he caught me in his arms, clutching me tightly to his chest.
“Everything is going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
He escorted me to his door and was about to step into the hallway with me when I stopped him.
“No,” I said. “I want to say goodbye here. Not outside the Prize Pool. I don’t want that to be our final moment together. With me going back to be a Prize.”
He ran his fingers through my hair again. Oh, how I was going to miss his soft touch.
“You will never be a Prize ever again,” he said. “This, I swear to you.”
It seemed an odd thing to say but I ignored it. There was no way he could know that, no way he could prevent another inmate from Claiming me.
Still, I took some comfort in his words. They were nice to hear, even if they weren’t true.
I embraced him again, for the last time, and kissed him on the cheek.
I whispered in his ear, “I will always love you, my fated mate.”
He hugged me so hard, I thought he would crush all the air out of me. He pressed his lips to mine, again for the last time, and didn’t seem to want to let go.
Finally, he reached for the door, looked away, his eyes shut, and let my hand slip from his as I stepped outside and returned to the Prize Pool the same way I had arrived there.
Alone.
PART IV
28
OHARA
THE DAY OF THE RIOT
Freedom was not what I thought it would be.
It’d been almost five years to the day since I had been set free from Ikmal prison, and yet I might as well have still been there for all I’d been up to.
I worked around the clock — not only for Thillak but doing research on Ikmal prison and how to bust someone out of there.
There was a reason it was considered the most secure prison in the galaxy. Ikmal had been selected specifically due to its turbulent surface where volcanoes and earthquakes erupted constantly.
