Grey's Tribute

His Soul Crumbles

His mind is a disturbing chaos. It roars with a force of a hurricane attaching to my neurons, binding him to me.

As his essence seeps into my subconscious together with his thoughts, his feeling, his compulsions, I feel everything like they were my own. His heart's a wild percussion of beats, and mine starts to sync with his.

He's a contradiction. For all his fierceness, his savageness, he's a tragedy filled with sorrow.

I turn my eyes on him, with pity.

"Don't look at me like that!" His hand's still clamped over his mark, the mark I gave him, the mark I forced on him....unintentionally.

"Stop looking at me!" His voice sounds ashamed.

I can't pull my gaze from him. I'm frozen, unable to move, as his soul entangles with mine. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. I think I even let a gasp of breath out as the Moon's shattered pieces want us to mend. They want to become whole again.

"Why?"

He's still confused, unsure of what just happened. One moment we're fighting, and he's trying to stop me from damaging him, the next, I have my teeth sunk deep into his neck. It's never the female to initiate the mark, always the male to grab her, to dominate her, to claim what's his. It's an expectation. His expectation.

Only when the female feels comfortable with her male, usually while mating, does she mark him as hers. The male is rarely taken by force; it just doesn't happen. It's seen as a weakness, as feminine. Not what males are born to do. It's ingrained in their basic DNA to take what belongs to them.

It's a perversion, a weakness in the eyes of males everywhere, that you let your female dominate you, initiate the mating. It just doesn't happen... ever. I've made him look weak for all to see, even though it was unintentional. No one but us will see that. Everyone else will see this as a failure on his part to take what is his.

There will be no confrontation to his face, but the whispers will trail behind his back wherever he goes. He'll be laughed at, ridiculed. This will be with him for the rest of his reign, hung over his head in shame, an Alpha, a king who couldn't mark his mate first.

"I missed." It's a truthful statement coming from my mouth. "I was going for your throat; it was an accident."

A look of absolute horror and disbelief filters across his face. "You were going for my throat, Meela, and you missed? Then what? Your teeth slipped, and you marked me?"

I nod my head. Why lie.

"You hate me so much that you would see me dead, but instead you shame me in front of my pack? You made me a mockery."

Again I nod my head. I feel his emotions crawl up my spine slowly, anchoring in with a painful heaviness around my heart. It constricts my breathing, tightening my chest, hurting my soul. His pain becomes my pain, his darkness becomes my night. I feel him through me, in me, around me. His soul has merged with mine in an unconditional way.

It's unwanted!

The layers of him peel back, exposing the rawness, the nakedness of who he is. The tables have turned. I have the advantage. I have one upped the Northerner. I forced it on him, exposing him to me, binding him to me, sealing his half to me... completely.

His hand raises and I wince away from him, just as a beaten dog would cower away from its master's heavy hand. I cower away, shrink back from an expected retaliation.

"I'm not going to hit you." His voice is soft.

It's not normal for him, so I back away.

"How could you do this to me?" He's still slightly in denial that this happened. He's going to suffer such shame; this gossip will spread just as wild fire spreads through a dry forest. Every pack will find out and have a good chuckle at his expense.