The mate bond didn’t arrive gently. It didn’t bloom or unfold or whisper its presence the way Alice had once insisted love would. It struck.
Violent. Inevitable. Absolute.
Whatever he had shared with Alice—whatever she had convinced both of them it was—this was nothing like that. That had been constructed, carefully curated visions and chosen futures. This was instinct. Bone-deep. Ancient.
When he found her, she was crumpled on the kitchen floor of that rotting house, blood soaking into cheap linoleum. Bruised. Broken. Breathing—barely.
Something long dead inside him shifted.
Her parents were human. Fragile. Ordinary. Monsters.
Through his gift, their emotions flooded him before he even crossed the room—satisfaction, triumph, a sick pleasure at her suffering. They weren’t horrified by what they’d done. They reveled in it. He felt their pride in each bruise, their twisted justification.
His body moved before thought could form.
When awareness returned, the house was silent.
They were dead.
He stood in the wreckage of it, surrounded by cooling bodies and the copper scent of blood.
And he felt nothing.
No guilt No relief No righteousness
Just the same hollow emptiness that had followed him for decades.
The Cullens reacted exactly as he expected. Carlisle tried diplomacy. Esme tried hope. Edward tried judgment. Rosalie didn’t bother hiding her contempt. Emmett watched. Alice—
Alice saw futures without him in them.
They voted.
He didn’t argue. Arguing would have required investment. He accepted exile the way he accepted most things now—with indifference.
Because none of it mattered.
Except her.
Now he stood on Peter’s porch, the night air thick and still, his mate asleep in the backseat of the car behind him. Even unconscious, her emotions flickered faintly at the edge of his senses—pain, instability, fear that never fully quieted.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had chosen anything for himself.
The door opened.
Peter’s scent hit him first—fear, sharp and immediate, spiking before he forced it down. Old reflexes. Old conditioning.
“Major.”
The title slipped out automatically, a relic of another lifetime soaked in blood and command.
He said nothing else. Just waited.
“What… what do you need, sir?”
The deference in Peter’s voice was familiar. Structured. Simple. It required nothing of him.
“Shelter...” he said evenly. “For her.”
Peter stepped back at once. “Of course. Anything.”
But another scent curled through the house—Charlotte.
And fury.
“Absolutely not!” Her voice cut through the walls from the kitchen. “I don’t care what happened, I’m not housing that—”
“Charlotte.” Peter warned sharply.
She appeared in the doorway a second later, eyes blazing, decades of hatred burning undiminished.
“He destroyed us.” She snapped. “Destroyed everything. And now he shows up here because his precious Cullens finally saw what he really is?”
Her rage washed over him in waves—disgust, resentment, the old trauma he had carved into her existence. He felt all of it.
And it was distant. Like standing behind thick glass.
“She’s my mate.” He said quietly.
Peter’s fear spiked again at his tone—controlled, flat, final.
Charlotte let out a brittle laugh. “Your mate? What happened to your ‘wife,’ Jasper? Did Alice finally get tired of pretending you were something other than a hollow shell?”
That should have hurt.
It didn’t.
He just stood there.
“Charlotte, enough.” Peter moved subtly between them. Afraid, but resolute. “Sir… we can make arrangements.”
He nodded because it was expected. Because movement filled silence.
But the truth pressed heavier than anything else.
He had nowhere left to take her.
And she was fragile. Newly turned. Unstable. The mate bond tied her to him in a way he didn’t fully understand yet—but he knew one thing with certainty:
If she shattered, he would follow.
“Please.” He said.
The word scraped on the way out, foreign and unused.
“I don’t know what else to do.”