Turan frowned and set her fists on her ample hips, an ornate, folded fan clasped tight in her hand. Her golden cheeks reddened, and she looked for all the world as if she had received the worse of offenses by his question.
“Hush,” she snapped in exasperation. “You are my current project, and you should be glad. You have royally screwed up everything! I practically handed the other half of your being to you, but you—you are too suspicious! You couldn’t just gracefully just accept it! Not only that, but you rejected your uxorem! When did you cease to trust your heart, Selvans? This not among the lessons I reared you with.” Her tirade died down, and the last was said so sadly that his heart ached.
“Since trusting my heart nearly destroyed me and the Eternal Forest,” he muttered. “I can’t blindly trust any female to be as she shows herself to be. Certainly not a stranger who bears my vinculum marcam that I have no memory of. And yet now I am to find out that you had a hand in all of this, and I cannot thank you for it! You set a female in my nest hoping to seduce me into mating, and you clearly succeeded. For what purpose? To amuse yourself with some challenge for me that will rouse me into action in the direction of your choosing? What do you want of me?”
Turan squinted at him in disapproval. “You do not truly believe that Diana was at fault for what happened to Arx and the Eternal Forest, do you?”
He sighed and shook his head. He had too much time to think of it lately with Cacus frustrating his efforts to find him. Although there was a great deal of evidence against her, he recalled how she had looked when he burst in. She had been tired and pale as if she were just barely hanging on. As if she couldn’t stand without being blown over by the smallest effort. She hadn’t been glutted with power, feeding on the deaths of those around her. She hadn’t tried to attack him; her strength had only come to her in a moment of self-defense. Regret rode him hard for how quickly he had attacked her.
He was glad that she was returned home safely by the one male he could trust to do it. A male who had defended her.
His mother continued to peer at him, her lips thinning into a tight line. “As I thought. As for the rest of your spewed nonsense, I have always wanted nothing less than the best for you. I had no choice but to hasten things along. The cycle is turning, and you’ve been alone too long, far longer than you should have been. I blame myself for not getting involved sooner, but I am remedying this oversight. Order is required for life to continue. You of all beings should know this and yet you are blind to it! Everything requires balance, my son. Even you. I want you to be whole.”
“And who says that this female is truly the soul that is destined to be bonded to mine. You took my freedom away from me. You meddled where it was not wanted, and now my forest rests on the edge of oblivion because of that female. I don’t have time for any ideas you may have conjured in your mind about her out of some desperate maternal hope. I will find my true uxorem when it is time and the Fates have willed it, not because you have orchestrated it,” he returned tightly.
The thin fan folded in Turan’s hand snapped on his head with such strength that it made his ears ring. His mother was not as frail and helpless as myth made her out to be. She didn’t even hesitate to strike him solidly right between his antlers as she gave him an irate scowl. “Don’t be cheeky. You know as well as I that you already have an uxorem. Just because I hurried things along, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You felt the rise of instinct, you initiated the bond. I couldn’t force anything other than set the right circumstances before you.”
He snorted in disbelief, his brow drawing down into an impatient glower. “One that I don’t recognize nor remember, and one who somehow survived Cacus’s attack.”
“You are still thinking of her in terms of what a human can survive based on her appearance. She may have entered the world