Gerald's POV
Should I have felt pity for her or take everything between us as fated? That was a hard question for me to answer. I knew she was the right person, but was not certain if it made sense to call it fate.
She had asked me to tell her about myself, and that had given me the hint that the rumors about me were already getting to her, and that she was starting to get scared.
No, she wasn't. She could still speak freely with me.
"Leah…" I called when she barged through the door to meet up with Cristine.
But what exactly did she want me to tell her?
I gave her room to ask questions, but at the same time, stylishly gave hints that most things she had done weren't hidden from me. She had found it hard to ask questions as fear and guilt almost stopped her reasoning.
To end the session we were having, I let her off by trying to make her feel I was the most stupid person she had seen who could never think deeply. But she was smart enough to feel uneasy with the way I was acting.
"She should do whatever she wants." I muttered to myself.
I locked the room door so no one could access without a knock. I laid flat on the bed, my eyes closed, and after a minute, my body floated upwards to stay above the bed in mid air.
That was one of the strange things about me that no one had to know.
In another two minutes or more, I crept out of my actual body to appear in a different place. In that way my body could be in the room as a man swimming in the air, and I was active somewhere else.
"Gerald…" Sago caught sight of me.
The place was dark, and it would have been hard for me to see if he wasn't holding a burning torch.
"How far is it? When do you think all these can be over?"
The curse… I had to do away with it, and time was already going against me. If I delayed, it was going to get to its next stage, how was I going to cope with that?
"You have made progress by having found her as your mate," he said, walking me to a different room. "But you have to make sure she doesn't get a reason to leave you."
And then he stopped outside the door, prying his eyes on me. "Fear and guilt shouldn't push her away… I'm sure you understand…"
I nodded. That was something I knew, and then it occurred to me that I hadn't thought of the possibility of her leaving me. What if she did? What if she discovered something that could raise concern?
The day of the marking ceremony… I had noticed Roshan's questions to her, I had noticed him asking her over and over again if she was certain of being with me as though the mate bond wasn't valid.
"It's better you don't let her know her faults," Sago said. "Let her leave freely. Her having an affair with Amon should not affect you. Don't get too attached to her."
"I understand…"
"Take her to your pack as soon as possible."
In this other room, there was a bed on it, and he made me lie on it after taking off my shirts. There was a can of oil beside the bed, he poured it on my face, allowing it to flow down to my long hair.
"This will help you for a while." His fingers dug into my hair as though combing it. "It will keep you balanced for a while, just for a while so you don't flair up."
After an hour of me lying on the bed, my eyes faced a screen, watching the past events of my life unfold to me all over again.
"It helps to clear your head, and get used to what has happened… You shouldn't feel moved by it, it shouldn't cause a burst of emotion in you…"
But I couldn't stand an extra second looking at myself going through pain, and I turned my head away from the screen. I didn't realize tears were already rolling down my jaws.
"Gerald…" He placed his hand on my back. "You have to watch it over and over so you are able to kill the painful feeling it brings to you… You have to let it absorb into your mind…"
"But this curse… Isn't there another way to go over it?" My hands were starting to shake.
He shook his head. "The only way is through the girl you have marked as your mate, Leah… The mate bite had formed the connection between you two… You don't want everything to go down the drain, and that's why you need to kill every emotion."
I had to force myself, going over the pain as though they were repeating themselves on me. I felt a sharp pain on my skin, I groaned, my face contorting, and veins popping out.
"Good." He clapped once. "We should move on to the next process."
A meter away from where I was, there was a pool, but instead of water to be inside, a constant supply of steam had filled it up, giving it a cloudy view, like the clouds from the sky had come down to form a pool.
"We have to do it every time we get," he said. "It's to conserve your energy."
I got inside it, and the steam wrapped me like an envelope to a letter, going all around my body in such a way that I could feel it pressed tightly against my skin due to the high amount of it.
It felt like a massage.
"I would have asked you to transform into your wolf form, but you can't do it here… Do it when you return to your actual body."
I breathed out hot air from my nostrils as though the steam had become part of me. "I have to leave… Someone is knocking at the door of the room."
"Be careful… Hardly show emotions…"
Just then, I faded before his eyes, regaining myself in the room. I fell on the bed, and a heavy knock on the door was the first thing I heard.
I wiped the sweat off my face, and got to the door. "Andrea?"