Rejected 21 Times, Now He Crawls Back
Agatha Christie · Completed · 7.6k Words
Introduction
I've signed the mate bond with Kael Nightshade, Lord of the Black Panther Clan, twenty-one times.
And dissolved it twenty-one times.
Not because we didn't love each other.
But because every few months, she comes back.
Seraphine. His first love. The angel who shattered her wings saving him, leaving her mind fractured and fragile.
"Seeing the mate mark sends her into psychotic breaks," he'd say, burning the bond from my skin. "I owe her my life."
So I'd erase the mark. Burn the contract. Pretend we were never bound.
The first time, I cried and begged. He backhanded me: "Cut the bullshit. We'll rebond once she's back in the sanatorium."
The thirteenth time, I followed them to a tavern and watched him tenderly kiss the scarred stumps where her wings used to be. When I confronted them, he knocked me down and locked me in enchanted restraints for seven days straight.
Sign. Burn. Erase. An endless cycle I couldn't escape.
Until the twenty-first time.
Fire engulfed the manor. Seraphine and I were trapped in different wings. Kael could only save one of us.
"Kael!" I collapsed at the window, smoke choking my lungs. "I'm pregnant—please—"
He shifted into his panther form and bolted toward her room.
The guards dragged me out thirty minutes later. Third-degree burns across my back, lungs filled with ash, blood pooling beneath me.
No heartbeat.
Kael stood in the safe zone, holding an unscathed Seraphine in his arms. From the moment the flames erupted until they pulled me from the rubble, he never looked back.
Not once.
The twenty-first dissolution was my choice.
There won't be a twenty-second.
- Affair
- Alpha
- BXG
- Beast
- Chasing the Ex
- Cheating
- Crush
- Divorce
- Ex-wife
- Fated Mate
- Feel-Good Story
- Female Growth
- First Love
- Hidden Identity
- Human Mate
- Hypocrisy
- Infidelity
- Kickass Heroine
- Love at First Sight
- Lovesick fool
- Magic Realism
- Marriage
- Nonhuman
- Poor Girl
- Romance
- Scumbag
- Unattainable Love
- Uplifting
- Vengeance & Betrayal
- Weredragon
- Werewolf
- Witchcraft
- Woman in Jeopardy
Chapter 1
I've signed the mate bond with Kael Nightshade, Lord of the Black Panther Clan, twenty-one times.
And dissolved it twenty-one times.
Not because we didn't love each other.
But because every few months, she comes back.
Seraphine. His first love. The angel who shattered her wings saving him, leaving her mind fractured and fragile.
"Seeing the mate mark sends her into psychotic breaks," he'd say, burning the bond from my skin. "I owe her my life."
So I'd erase the mark. Burn the contract. Pretend we were never bound.
The first time, I cried and begged. He backhanded me: "Cut the bullshit. We'll rebond once she's back in the sanatorium."
The thirteenth time, I followed them to a tavern and watched him tenderly kiss the scarred stumps where her wings used to be. When I confronted them, he knocked me down and locked me in enchanted restraints for seven days straight.
Sign. Burn. Erase. An endless cycle I couldn't escape.
Until the twenty-first time.
Fire engulfed the manor. Seraphine and I were trapped in different wings. Kael could only save one of us.
"Kael!" I collapsed at the window, smoke choking my lungs. "I'm pregnant—please—"
He shifted into his panther form and bolted toward her room.
The guards dragged me out thirty minutes later. Third-degree burns across my back, lungs filled with ash, blood pooling beneath me.
No heartbeat.
Kael stood in the safe zone, holding an unscathed Seraphine in his arms. From the moment the flames erupted until they pulled me from the rubble, he never looked back.
Not once.
The twenty-first dissolution was my choice.
There won't be a twenty-second.
Nora's POV
"We're dissolving the bond."
First day out of the hospital, I slid the blood-signed dissolution contract across the table to Kael.
He was cleaning his silver blade. His hand froze. Those golden eyes snapped up.
"What?"
"Dissolve the bond. Seraphine's coming back in two days."
He stared at the blood seal on the parchment. His jaw tightened. Without a word, he grabbed the blade and sliced his palm open. Blood dripped onto the contract, dark crimson runes spreading across the surface.
Seraphine. His first love.
Seven years ago, she'd sacrificed her wings—the Golden Eagle Clan's greatest pride—to save him from captivity. The healers said her mind was fragile now. Seeing the mate mark triggered her episodes.
So every time she came back from the sanatorium, I had to disappear. Dissolve the bond. Erase the mark.
Twenty-one times now.
Kael walked to the fireplace and tossed the contract in. Flames devoured it.
A sharp pain lanced through my chest—the bond breaking, like a thread being severed inside me.
I closed my eyes and bit down hard.
"You're being surprisingly obedient today." Kael watched the contract turn to ash. "Finally learned your place."
He turned to leave, then stopped. His gaze dropped to my left wrist.
The fresh scar twisted across my skin. The wound was still seeping blood, edges red and raw.
His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. "What the hell is this?"
"The mate mark," I said. "I removed it early. For Seraphine."
His grip tightened. "Are you INSANE?! You're supposed to wait three days after dissolving the bond! This could—"
"Could what?" I met his gaze. "Hurt? Kill me?"
I pulled my wrist free. "I know the risks. Seraphine fainted when she saw the mark last time. I couldn't let that happen again."
Kael went still.
The fifteenth dissolution. Seraphine had glimpsed the mark on my wrist and collapsed on the spot. Kael had been LIVID. Said I'd done it on purpose. He'd thrown me into the fire cage—those enchanted flame-woven bars that couldn't kill you, but made every inch of skin feel like it was being stripped raw.
I stayed locked in there a day and a night. Skin blistered red, fever so high I couldn't form words.
Clan members passed by. Not one looked at me. Not one offered water.
Because they despised me. I was just human. No beast form. No power. Unworthy of being their lord's mate.
He stared at the bloody scar, then released my wrist. "Fine. Kill yourself if you want." His voice went flat. "Not my problem."
I turned to pack. Five years, and I'd moved in and out of this house twenty times. Each time thinking it was the last. Each time clinging to some pathetic hope.
Now, I just wanted to escape.
"Nora."
I looked up. Kael was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.
"Three weeks. When Seraphine goes back to the sanatorium, we'll rebond." His tone was matter-of-fact. "Where are you staying?"
"With Lyra."
"Your elf friend?" His eyes narrowed. "For how long?"
"Three weeks."
"Good." He straightened. "You better behave while you're gone. No drama. No stupid stunts."
I looked at him.
Five years ago at the Clan Festival, he'd held me on that platform and declared to everyone: "She is my mate." Back then, his eyes burned with this raw possessive intensity that made me believe I was actually wanted.
Now, all I saw was irritation.
"I won't cause any trouble," I said quietly. "You won't even know I exist."
He paused. "Good. Once Seraphine leaves, I'll make it up to you. You wanted to attend the Starlight Ball, didn't you? I'll have them prepare a gown—"
"Don't bother."
The words came out flat. Final.
His brows snapped together. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like." I met his gaze. "I don't need compensation."
"Nora." His voice dropped. "What game are you playing?"
"No game."
"Then what the HELL is this?" He pushed off the doorframe and stepped closer. "This attitude. Are you still sulking about the fire cage? Is that it?"
I stared at him.
After the miscarriage, he never once asked if I was in pain.
He just explained over and over why he HAD to choose Seraphine. As if enough justification made losing our child acceptable.
"And that baby—" His voice turned cold. "Don't think I don't know you got pregnant on purpose. Trying to trap me with a cub?" He let out a harsh laugh. "I saw through that pathetic scheme from day one."
My heart felt like it was being crushed.
"Maybe you're right," I said softly. I grabbed my suitcase and turned toward the door. "Maybe I did overestimate myself."
"Nora—"
I walked out before he could finish.
The car pulled away from Nightshade territory.
In the rearview mirror, the estate receded—black spires piercing the amber sky, stone panthers guarding the entrance, golden eyes coldly watching my departure.
I used to think that place was home.
Now I understood. It was just a gilded cage. One that had trapped me for five years.
The hollow in my chest kept growing, like someone was carving me out piece by piece.
But it didn't hurt anymore.
When you hurt long enough, you go numb.
I pulled out the communication crystal. Channeled a thread of magic into it. The crystal glowed faintly.
Three heartbeats later, it connected.
A low female voice came through.
I closed my eyes. "Mother..."
Silence.
Only the crystal's soft hum.
"It's me. I'm sorry." My eyes burned. "I want... to come home."
Last Chapters
You Might Like 😍
Bloodright
Ashveil University is not what it looks like in the photographs. The students here carry something that shifts their eyes at the edges of anger. The northwest trees hold an attention that trees should not be able to hold. And the empty chair at the council table, the one nobody sits in, the one nobody explains, has been waiting three hundred years for one specific person to arrive.
Nobody told Adaline she was that person. They classified her as Dormant. A blank space in a file. Nothing.
She is the opposite of nothing.
Beneath the campus, three ancient entities are waking up. Every house in the pack world wants to control what runs in her blood. The boy sent to assess her has stopped being able to do his job. And the woman who has been three steps ahead of everyone since before Adaline was born is not a villain. She is a warning. She is what Adaline would have become if nobody had found her.
The suppression field holding everything together is failing. The clock is running. And the only way to stop what is coming requires Adaline to give up the thing she can least afford to lose.
She already knows her answer. She decided before anyone told her the full price.
Taste of Fate: The Vampire King's Human Mate
He reached for the back of my head and pulled me up just enough to reach my neck. When his fangs slid into me, the pain was instant, electric. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My hands found his shoulders, clawing for something to hold. My legs kicked. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
He moaned against my throat as he drank, and the sound was devastating.
Letters to a Dark Prince
Thrown into Isteros Academy—a world of old money, blood money, and cruel social games—she's an outsider by birth and an afterthought by design. Her sister Solyn is the school's untouchable queen and Mara is her favorite target.
Everyone expects Atreus to treat his fiancée’s scholarship sister like everyone else does—as if she doesn’t matter.
Instead, his dorm room sits directly across from hers, close enough that she can see his light go out at night. Some nights, he climbs the old maintenance trellis just to check on her. He teaches her chess. He shows up exactly when something's gone wrong—and never once asks to be thanked for it.
"Don't fall in love with one piece," he warns her, over a board neither of them treats like a game anymore. "It punishes the person who only sees half of it."
Mara doesn't understand why the boy who's supposed to make her life harder keeps quietly making it easier—not until she realizes the anonymous stranger she's been writing to every week already has a name.
His.
He doesn't know he's writing to her, either.
By the time they find out, it's too late to stop what's already happening. Far too dangerous for anyone to find out.
In an empty studio, in the middle of a rainstorm, she asks him: 'Am I the kind of girl who kisses a boy engaged to my sister?'
He doesn't answer.
So she asks: 'What are we?’
He told her not to fall in love with one piece.
She fell anyway.
And he was never far behind.
CHASING GHOSTS
The Legacy Game
When scholarship student Chris Linds stumbles onto a mystery someone has killed to protect, she becomes the next target. The only person standing between her and death is Ashen Ford, the academy's cold, untouchable Student Council President—and heir to one of Corvain's founding families.
As anonymous invitations summon twelve students into the legendary Legacy Game, alliances fracture, secrets surface, and every challenge brings another deadly truth to light. But the greatest secret isn't who will win.
It's why one winner vanished without a trace... and why someone will do anything to make sure history repeats itself.
My Billionaire Husband's Secret
He was the CEO of the Blackwood Group — a man whose wealth and power eclipsed ninety-nine percent of the world.
He was gentle. Romantic. Attentive. I fell for him fast.
But a year into our marriage, I began to notice something — a pattern.
Lucas's sexual appetite was intense — he wanted me almost every night. Yet every single month, he arranged a solo trip to send me away. I told myself it was his way of spoiling me.
Then a message arrived from someone called Sweet An.
Do you really know your husband?
From that day on, my life filled with shadows.
I suspected my husband of having an affair.
When Lucas and I made love, something felt wrong — his body too large, too much, like something I couldn't explain.
I heard sounds during sex — animal sounds, like something feral had crawled into bed with us.
My best friend Mia said: "There are men sick enough to let dogs fuck their wives."
The family doctor, Daisy, told me: "You could never stay by Lucas's side forever. Your background doesn't make you worthy of being his wife. Do you understand?"
I went looking for whoever had been tearing my marriage apart. I fought to win my husband back.
But the deeper I searched, the larger the secret grew — something far darker hiding beneath this supposed betrayal.
Does Lucas truly love me?
And why, out of everyone in the world, did he choose to marry me?
My Husband's Secretary Wore My Dress
Those words shattered Vivian's heart.
For three years, she endured her husband's coldness and his secretary's endless provocations.
She never knew that the woman he trusted most had stolen her identity.
Or that the man she loved had secretly loved her all along.
When the truth finally came out, it was already too late.
Vivian had divorced him.
She had disappeared with his unborn child.
And she had no intention of coming back.
Five years later, the former ballerina returned as the sole heiress of a powerful family.
Standing beside her was a little girl with eyes identical to Caden Lux's.
The billionaire who once ignored her had gone mad.
He blocked her in the dressing room, knelt before her, and even accepted the possibility that another man had taken his place.
Because losing his pride was nothing.
Losing Vivian had nearly killed him.
But after everything he had done…
Could she ever forgive the man who chose another woman over his own wife?
The MC Hacker’s Stolen Princess
She did not come to find out her father had promised her to another man.
As the only daughter of Shane “Rook” Rourke, president of the Lost Coast Renegades MC, Taryn has always known club business comes first. But when Rook signs a treaty with the dangerous president of Iron Mesa, he crosses a line even she never imagined.
Safe passage through Arizona territory comes with a price.
Her.
Kellan Stroud is thirty, powerful, ruthless, and already waiting at Sturgis to meet the woman he expects to marry.
Taryn wants no part of him, no part of the agreement, and definitely no part of a future chosen for her by two men who think a signature is enough to decide where she belongs.
Then she meets Bobby Fuentes.
At twenty, Bobby is one of the youngest fully patched members of the Sons of Doom MC. He is quiet until he has something to say, dangerous when he needs to be, and smart enough to get into places no one else can. Hacking is what he does best.
Until Taryn gives him a new problem to solve.
One reckless connection at Sturgis becomes something neither of them can ignore, and when Bobby realizes exactly what Rook has promised away, walking away stops being an option.
But stealing another president’s future wife is not a misunderstanding.
It is an insult.
A betrayal.
And in the MC world, it can mean war.
Taryn refuses to be anyone’s property.
Bobby has never been good at following rules.
And Kellan Stroud does not forgive what he believes belongs to him.
The road out of Sturgis may cost them everything first.
BROKEN TRUST
Neither of them knew she was carrying his child.
Emily’s affair didn’t just end her marriage—it erased the life she thought was guaranteed. Ryan left without looking back, carrying his anger like armor and leaving Emily alone with regret she would never outrun. Three years later, fate drags them back into each other’s world, along with a little girl who has Ryan’s eyes and a truth that shatters everything he thought he knew.
Old wounds reopen, grief masquerades as rage, and love refuses to stay buried. As parenthood binds them together and the past demands accountability, Emily and Ryan must face the question neither of them is ready to answer: is broken trust the end of their story… or the beginning of a love forged through loss, forgiveness, and brutal honesty?
Faking It With My Worst Enemy On Ice
But on his birthday, everything falls apart when his girlfriend exposes Clare's most humiliating secret in front of the entire team.
Just when Clare is ready to disappear, Rhys Calloway, her worst enemy and the team's arrogant captain, pulls her into his arms and tells everyone she is his girlfriend.
She should have pushed him away, but she kissed him back instead.
Now Clare is locked into a two-month fake relationship with the most infuriating man she has ever met, trying to get over a stepbrother who never cared and survive a captain who makes her forget why she was supposed to hate him.
The problem is that Rhys kisses like he means every single second of it, and just when Clare starts to move on, Zane decides he wants her back.
One girl, two hockey players, and a heart that was never supposed to feel this much. Will she choose the stepbrother who broke her or the enemy who caught her when she fell?
Reborn and Unleashed: The Boss Lady Takes No Prisoners
Now reborn, Vivian refuses to hide her strength. She's revealing her true identity, claiming her power, and rewriting her fate. No more submission, no more misunderstandings—this time, she'll take control of her life and her love.
As regretful brothers beg for forgiveness and powerful enemies fall at her feet, Vivian has one goal: to rise without mercy and make the man she once loved fall for her all over again—on her terms.
The Family Books 1-3 (A Mafia romance)
The saint to my sinner. with her innocent eyes and devilish curves.
A Madonna that was meant to be admired but never touched.
Until someone took that innocence from her.
She left.
The darkness in my heart was finally complete.
I avenged her, I killed for her, but she never came back.
Until I saw her again. An angel dancing around a pole for money.
She didn’t know I owned that club. She didn’t know I was watching.
This time I won’t let her escape.
I will make her back into the girl I knew.
Whether she likes it or not.
2/ Judge and Jury- I can’t stop watching her.
I’m not even sure I want to.
Taylor Lawson, blonde, beautiful, and totally oblivious to how much dangers she’s in.
She’s also the one juror in my upcoming murder trial that hasn’t been bought.
The one who can put me behind bars for a very long time.
I know I should execute her.
After all that’s what I do.
I am the Judge.
I eliminate threats to The Family.
And Taylor is a threat.
But I don’t want to kill her.
Possessing her, making her love me seems like a much better plan for this particular Juror.
3/ Rags and Ritches-
