Delving, delving—
In. His blocks were down!
Thronos was recollecting some distant memory from when he was a teenager. He’d been walking with another Vrekener, one around the same age who resembled him somewhat.
Oh, yes, she’d seen that male before, had a long and storied history with him.
She swallowed, spying as Thronos’s memory played on. . . .
Anticipation burned inside him. After years of searching, he’d scented his mate the minute he and Aristo had arrived in this valley. Hastening down a winding lane, he glanced up at every window.
“I still don’t understand your eagerness to reunite with her,” Aristo said, following him. “Every limping step I took and every league flown in agony would fill me with rage. How can you forgive her?”
Because Thronos had put himself in her shoes to understand that night. “She was only a little girl. Her parents had just been decapitated, her beloved sister killed.”
“As they should have been. The parents threatened Lore secrecy with their palpable sorcery outlays, and the sister murdered our father the king!”
Aristo thinks exactly like him.
“Why do you believe your mate will forgive you?”
“If I tell her how Father truly found out about the abbey, she’ll know I was blameless.” When they passed a tavern with a large window, Thronos spied his reflection, scowling at the scars.
Aristo caught his reaction. “She’d promised to be a little beauty, hadn’t she?”
“Yes. So?” Thronos knew she would be the most comely female he’d ever seen. She had already been. He’d spent endless hours imagining what she would look like now.
“Sorceri are fickle creatures, brother. In addition to all the pain between you, it might be that she forsakes you for your looks. Have you thought of that?”
Of course. Every time he saw his reflection. “She’s my mate; we’re fated, and she felt it too.” That last day, when she’d turned to him so sweetly and sighed—
“Mayhap you merely need to copulate?”
He did. With Melanthe. Gods, how he did! But Thronos had waited this long; somehow he’d wait the two more years until she turned eighteen and could be claimed. Twenty-four more months by Vrekener law. It seemed like an eternity, especially with the way his curiosity and lusts had been building.
He wondered if any other eighteen-year-old male could possibly think about intercourse as much as he did.
“I fear you set yourself up for disappointment,” Aristo said.
“So you think I should give her up, without even trying? Just forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”
His brother hadn’t found his mate, and likely wouldn’t for decades, if not centuries. Thronos had been an anomaly to find his so young.
“Then explain it to me.”
“Melanthe is”—everything missing from my life—“my ideal female.” She wasn’t thus because she was faultless, but because he adored even her faults. He didn’t just want her; he needed her. They were each halves of a greater whole.
Why was that so difficult for others to understand? “She’s mine,” he said simply.
“We’re at war with them,” Aristo couldn’t resist pointing out.
“Then mayhap we shouldn’t be. . . .” He trailed off, homing in on her. “The building at the end of the lane,” he said over his shoulder, already hurrying forward. “There’s a dwelling above.”
Heartbeat pounding, he alighted on the windowsill. Melanthe! She was in a bed asleep. Holding his breath, he crept inside.
A sharp exhalation left him. Melanthe was a woman now.
He greedily took in every new detail. He’d known she would grow to be lovely, but she was beyond his wildest fantasies. Her lashes were thick against her pale face, her black hair a silken cloud around her head. The sheet gathered at her waist, allowing him to see the swells of her br**sts beneath her filmy nightgown.