me shooting her a wary look. “For a long time, they were kept to themselves, and everyone was too terrified of him and then his son to ever try to help. There’s a lot of guilt among the pack over how my family was treated. We’ve been the token Asian family for a long time—”
“Until your father was killed?”
“Yes. Until I’d had enough.” I smiled at one of the servers when she dropped off a cherry cola that was already perspiring, and after I took a deep sip, I told her, “My father didn’t iron his clothes well enough one day. That was enough to trigger his rage.” Such a ridiculous way to die, but that was Kingsley Rainford. Ridiculous. On the knife’s edge. Psychotic.
Her brow puckered, but she reached over and grabbed my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I miss him,” I told her simply.
“I can imagine,” she replied, her tone soft, her eyes sad as she evidently experienced my sorrow. When she said ‘I can imagine,’ we both knew she felt it as much as I did. There was a curious freedom in that. In knowing that she felt the suffocating grief that often overwhelmed me.
Not that I wanted her to suffer, but to be understood was something any grieving child needed. No matter their age.
“My mom and he were mates. She was trying to encourage him to leave the pack, to move, but it never worked. He was too scared.”
“Why?”
“Originally, my grandparents were North Korean defectors. Their papers say they’re from the South, but they’re not. To get into the US, they took some illegal routes, and the Rainfords always held that against us. My grandparents are still alive, so losing everything would probably be the nail in the coffin.”
“You said your mother was American?”
“She was.” Eying her, I repeated, “They were mated.” I sensed she didn’t understand what that meant, because her expression didn’t change all that much. “In our world, if you’re mated to someone, bound and claimed, when one dies, the other does too.”
Her mouth turned into a perfect circle, a too-perfect circle that made me think of things I had no business thinking right now. She needed to be courted, not seduced. There was a distinct difference—even if I wished I could seduce her, because sweet Mother, she was beautiful.
A true beauty, with her dark hair that curled about her face, the bright red tints that might have been streaks a stylist put in, but weren’t. It was nature who’d blessed her with such beauty.
Her face might not sink a thousand ships to some men, but for me, it did. She was a woman to go to war over.
Thankfully, Eli had seen sense and wasn’t putting anything in the way of us getting to know one another.
I had to wonder if that was because of our conversation, his mate’s good sense, or if he’d just accepted that two mates couldn’t be kept apart.
That was something Lara didn’t understand. But she would.
She thought she could fight the attraction between us, thought she could evade it, but there was no avoiding your fate.
It was an unfair disadvantage, and while she was squirrelly enough to make me wish it wasn’t the case, because I knew she wouldn’t appreciate the lack of free will, I wasn’t about to argue with how things had worked since the first shifters had roamed the earth.
“So, let me get this straight, if Austin died, Sabina would die as well?”
I nodded. “That’s how it works. When, in the aftermath, Sabina died, Ethan and Eli would too. But don’t worry, she wouldn’t want to live without them.”
Her eyes bugged out at that, and I instinctively recognized that was the wrong thing to say.
Even though I cursed myself when she snapped her hand away from mine and leaned away from me, I muttered, “A mate bond isn’t something you can live without once you’ve had it. And as years pass and it cements itself deeper into your being, it’s not something you can exist without. Until death isn’t something to fear, but the promise of peace.”
Her gaze on her drink, she mumbled, “That’s how my mom was with my dad.”
“No, it isn’t,” I denied, the idea that she could compare the joy of the mate bond with her parents’ foul relationship was abhorrent to me.. “They’re human. There’s no comparison. She might have been obsessed with him, she might have been submissive to him, but it wasn’t a mate bond.”
“How do you know?”
“He hurt her, didn’t he?”
Her