Chapter 9

-Juniper's POV-

The sound of her broken voice as she apologised to me caused tears to well in my eyes. I didn't have a right to be this sad, but at the same time, I felt like I had every right to be devastated. I just found out that I had a soulmate, I was in an extremely rare situation, which I would've never imagined myself to be in.

I had dreamt about falling in love with Canta before, I had thought that she would bewitch me to be like everyone else. I had fantasised about her thinking that she put a spell on me, we would date for a while, and then I would tell her that I had never been under her spell. But that felt like a lifetime ago now. We were in a similar situation now, but this was different.

I knew nothing about soulmates, other than what I had read about. I had read volume upon volume about star-crossed lovers, ending up in trouble because they had feelings for each other. Yet, they would always end up together. That's how literature was. There would always be something which caused a happy ending.

But that's not how real life works.

My soulmate just told me that she had a fiancé which she had never met.

I should be on cloud nine, learning that the person I've had a crush on for years was my soulmate. But then something just had to ruin it.

"What are you sorry for?" I asked quietly. I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from her. I didn't want her to feel sorry for something which was far out of her control.

"I just threw this all on you. Why aren't you furious? Aren't people like you meant to be, I don't know, furious when others mess with them? My grandmother bonded us together, and I don't know how to reverse it. I can't give you the future which my grandmother wanted us to be in. And that will tear you apart, it means that you wouldn't stand a chance being in a happy relationship."

I laughed slightly, feeling like I wasn't in control of my body as each of her words hit me like a bullet. "Canta, I don't care about whether or not I could be in a happy relationship in the future," I began to say. That was a very small lie. I was an independent person, and I was sure that I could handle life without a romantic partner. But it would've been nice to have a companion through life. I hadn't experienced romantic feelings for anyone else. "I just want you to be happy."

Canta turned her back to me with a bitter laugh. "Exactly, that's just the bond talking. You shouldn't care about my happiness above anything else. You should care about the fact that you wouldn't be happy without me. I'm just a simple person, and I've taken away your free will to love me yourself."

My hands clenched and unclenched as I tried to keep my breathing steady, we were making a small scene. "Canta, this kind of thing doesn't bother me because who knows what would've happened? I might not have had the chance to get to know you if we didn't have the bond. We might not have even talked if it didn't exist. There's no point in thinking about what could've been."

More tears escaped her eyes. "But Juniper, what could've been, would have been beautiful. You would've been able to have a partner and a family and be happy. There's no chance of that now."

I took one step forward and cupped her cheeks, forcing her to look at me. "Canta, it doesn't matter if it works or not. But I am going to fight for you. I am going to fight for the vision which your grandmother had. I will fight for your happiness, our happiness. We will figure something out."

I decided that reality could sod off. I was going to turn this into the perfect romance novel, one with a happy ending. It didn't matter if we needed a sequel or a series, we would get around to it, eventually.

Canta pulled me in for a hug, her arms tightly wrapped around my back and her head rested in my shoulder. I trapped her arms to her sides and rested my head on top of hers. I wasn't sure how long we stayed there for, but it was beginning to get a bit chilly.

"Do you want to come in and see if she stole our chips?" I asked. I pulled away a bit and tried to look at her face.

She laughed weakly, moving out of my arms and grabbing my hand. "We can get new chips, an extra bowl if we want it."

I gave a small grin, and we entered the alley again. For the rest of the afternoon, we would forget that the previous hour didn't happen. We would pretend like Canta doesn't have a fiancé and that we weren't soulmates. We would have our first date.

"You have a soulmate?" Kavi asked me that night as we lay in my bedroom. I should've asked Canta permission before I spouted all of this to my closest friend, but I knew that he wouldn't spread the word, especially since it was a supernatural matter.

"Yep," I replied. I ran to the library as soon as Kavi and I met each other at the bottom of the street, collecting about a dozen books on witchcraft and love. Those were the books I was reading now; I had gotten through one, which turned out to be useless because it was about charming people, but it was interesting.

"And what are you going to do about it?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. "Surely, you're going to do something about it, right?"

I shook my head. "What do you think I'm doing here, Kavi?" I pointed to the book I held in my hand before turning more of my attention to the same sentence which I had read five times. "I need to learn about soulmate bonds before I could have a soulmate. I need to know what's going to happen to us when she gets married and moves away."

He shifted, causing the bed to dip. "What if it's one of those soulmate bonds where you get any injury she does? What if she dies and you die too? You could be doing your food shopping and you could suddenly have a broken spine or something."

I cringed at the thought. "Let's hope not." I turned the page in my book.

"What are you going to do about the fiancé issue?" he asked, interrupting my reading again.

"I haven't thought about that yet. We don't really know who he is. Our best bet would be to convince her parents to call it off, or to convince him otherwise. Put him off, you know?"

"You could always kill him," he said off-handedly. "Then she certainly wouldn't be able to marry him."

"They do that in some cultures," I told him distractedly. "And you've been spending too much time with Fisher."

"I have not been spending too much time with Loche," he argued. "But I did forget about ghost marriages. Those kind of spook me."

I slapped him without tearing my eyes away from my book.

"What was that for?" he whined, rubbing the back of his head.

"Not being helpful." That wasn't really why I had hit him. I didn't feel like he was taking it seriously enough, but I also didn't appreciate his comment about other cultures.

"Fair enough," he said and grabbed one of the books from the pile in front of us.

"That's literally the only one I've read," I commented. He then huffed and grabbed another, one with an appalling pink cover, which seemed no more than a romantic's drabbles from the blurb and front page, but I had picked it up anyway.

"Why are we looking through these again?"

I groaned and hid my face in the book, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath to calm me down before I exploded at him. If only wolves were able to turn the page, then I would be able to read in my wolf form and ignore all of his comments, because surely, he was joking?

I yawned and rolled over, falling off my bed. I groaned and opened my eyes, only to be greeted by darkness. I lifted myself up and checked my phone, and the numbers 5;55 stared back at me. My eyes stung a little as I scrambled to get up. I looked around my room mindlessly for a good thirty seconds before deciding that there was no point in trying to go back to sleep.

I took a step forward, but tripped over something I hadn't seen. I bent down and picked up the book which I had tripped over, placing it on the bed. Kavi and I had fallen asleep reading yesterday. We didn't often have the opportunity for a sleepover, but apparently my parents didn't want to wake us up when they saw we were studying. They mustn't have looked too close though, as the books definitely did not resemble schoolbooks. It just meant that we had to wake up at 6am, so that Kavi could go home and get changed.

I didn't get a lot of work done in the five minutes before my alarm, but I managed to claim the bathroom before anyone else. Whilst Kavi was in there, I managed to get my uniform on, and I had made myself a solitary piece of toast which I could have whilst walking to his house.

"Are you going to tell her that you've been reading all night?" Kavi asked as we walked down the street. "I'd hate to think you wouldn't at least get brownie points for it."

I shrugged. "Probably, she said that she would be working out how to break the bond. But I don't want it broken." My stubbornness expressing itself as boldly as ever.

"Don't you think it would be for the best?" Kavi asked again. "Then you could have a normal relationship?"

I glared at him. "You're forgetting my own nature, Kavi." I sighed. Wolves were meant to only have one partner throughout their life, it was very rare for werewolves to have several partners, but that also meant that we were extremely particular with who we choose, "If I have fate on my side, then I wouldn't make a bad decision."

Kavi was silent for a moment, just nodding to himself. "You really want this?" he asked in a very small voice.

I nodded, biting my lip. I had plenty of time to think about it over the past few years. I wasn't sure if my attraction to her was because of the bond, or if it was her natural beauty which everyone else gushed over, but that didn't matter. I could trust my emotions to tell me what I really wanted, that's the only thing which I could trust. Love witches are naturally stunning and enticing, but this was more than Canta's magic. We were supposedly meant to be, and the wolf inside of me longed for that.

"Then okay, you should wait to see how she's feeling today though, just in case."

I hummed in agreement; I had no doubt that the conversation which she had with her parents last night would've been a tough one.