low, one where he ached as he never had before, felt as if he might die if he didn’t see her again.
It struck him that he had been a fool to let her go.
He should have seized hold of her and held her close instead, should have done whatever it took to make her believe that he didn’t view her as a weak female.
And that she was wrong about his heart.
Because as he stood aching from a fight and hurting in his soul, he realised something else.
He didn’t love Iolanthe.
He had only been convincing himself that he did.
When she had left him centuries ago, he had been hurt, and he had been angry, but those two feelings had been mere shadows of the hurt and anger he felt right now. He had gotten over the pain of Iolanthe leaving him, had moved on and had pursued other females, and had lived his life without feeling a need to find her.
He wasn’t sure he could do that where Mackenzie was concerned.
He wasn’t sure he would ever get over her leaving him.
He was sure of something though.
He couldn’t function without her, was going out of his mind with worry about her already, was crazy with a need to see her again and make things right between them.
Because he couldn’t lose her.
Fuery released him and Hartt just stood there, mind racing and running through a million thoughts about Mackenzie, about how things had been left between them, and how he could possibly make her believe that she was wrong about him.
Harbin huffed as he stepped towards him and Fuery. “You want to talk about this witch now?”
“No,” Hartt snapped, the leash on his temper close to breaking as the shifter interrupted his thoughts of Mackenzie and he lost his train of thought, had to go back to the argument they’d had in that alley and replay it again to seek an answer to the question that burned brightest inside him.
Did she have feelings for him too?
“Man, what has you acting like a male who can’t find his mate?”
Hartt slowly turned his head towards Harbin. “What did you just say?”
Harbin rolled his thickly hewn shoulders beneath his torn black T-shirt. “I said, you’re acting like a male who can’t find his mate. Frantic. Angry. Scared… and desperate. Lashing out at everyone. Well, everyone except Fuery, apparently. Fine, lashing out at just me.”
Hartt wasn’t sure what to say. He just stared at the shifter as his entire world seemed to rearrange itself before his eyes, as everything he had been thinking about Mackenzie suddenly felt like a lie, a hollow fabrication.
The product of a possible bond and his instincts as a male to claim her as his mate.
He looked at Fuery, needing to hear him say that the shifter was wrong.
“Harbin has a point.” Fuery offered an apologetic look when Hartt glared at him. “You are acting like an elf who has lost sight of his ki’ara.”
Hartt couldn’t believe it, even when all the markers were there—the need to be near her, the urge to protect her, the hunger to decapitate any male who so much as looked at her, the desperate desire to please her.
Mackenzie was his fated mate.
Chapter 19
Hartt wanted answers and the only way he was going to get them was by tracking Mackenzie down and talking to her. The thought that his growing feelings for her might be the product of her being his fated female and not real weighed him down and had him pacing his bedroom.
Seeking answers he knew wouldn’t come.
Because the answer he wanted was one the universe didn’t want to give him.
For a moment, a brief and close to wonderful one, he had thought his feelings for Mackenzie had been real, but the more he analysed every moment that had happened since he had met her, the more he feared he had been blind to the truth.
Mackenzie was his ki’ara.
That was the only reason he felt something for her. That was the only reason he felt compelled to go to her right now and see her again. It wasn’t love. It was mate lust. It was an instinct, not an emotion he felt.
What if this instinct was blinding him to other things? What if his initial thought about his feelings for Iolanthe had been wrong, twisted and deformed into a lie whispered by his instincts because they wanted him to choose Mackenzie over her?
He would never choose his ki’ara over true love.
He wasn’t interested in tying himself