SAGE

Once, I had wondered what it felt like to have a mate.

Not in the abstract way people talked about it—bonded, chosen, destined—but in the visceral sense. To know a mate.

To smell them and have something deep and raw inside you recognize the truth before your mind ever could. To understand the pull that made people reckless, foolish, brave.

I had felt a sliver of it once. As Maya.

That first time with Adam, years ago, in the caves, there had been something there—something tentative and fragile, like the first note of a song that never quite found its chorus.

But time had eroded it. Betrayal had ruptured...