to one female forever through an unbreakable bond just because some biological connection had pushed her onto him. He didn’t want a mate. He wanted love.
Odd for an assassin in his position of power, with his bloody and ruthless history, to want that, he knew, but want it he did. Maybe it was a hang-up from Iolanthe leaving him on the day of their ceremony, when she should have become his. He had loved her, and she had left him, and those feelings had persisted. He was sure of it. When he had seen her again in Underworld that first time after centuries apart, he had felt that same spark, that same need bloom inside him. He had been mistaken. His feelings for Iolanthe hadn’t gone anywhere.
The thought that they had was just another deception courtesy of his instincts. Those instincts had attempted to remove a hurdle between him and claiming his mate, had made him believe what he felt for Iolanthe had died all those centuries ago.
But what he felt for Mackenzie was more potent than his feelings for Iolanthe had ever been. It was intoxicating and controlling. Intense and consuming. It drove him wild.
He pivoted to pace back along the length of his bedroom and worried his lower lip with his thumb, toying with a cut in it.
So his feelings for Mackenzie couldn’t be real.
They were too powerful to be love.
It was just a biological, programmed response to his fated one. He was sure of that. It wasn’t real love.
He stilled as he sensed Fuery moving past his door, as he felt his friend enter his own room and sensed the one who waited for him there. Shaia.
Hartt stared at the black wall. Could he be wrong about his feelings for Mackenzie being a lie? Caught up in a desperate need to deny them in case they were a fabrication caused by the fact she was his ki’ara all in the hope of sparing himself the pain of realising the love he had thought was blooming inside him wasn’t real?
Shaia and Fuery were proof that it was possible to have real love with a fated mate. Prince Vail and Rosalind were too. Both of those couples loved each other deeply, had shown feelings for each other that Hartt couldn’t deny were real.
Fuery and Shaia in particular.
They had spent centuries believing each other dead and yet they had remained faithful to each other. Their love had endured.
Gods. He dragged a hand down his face and turned on his heel to pace away from his door. Maybe that was his problem. He had witnessed how Fuery’s love for Shaia, and her love for Fuery, had refused to die, had remained as strong as it had been before they had believed each other dead, and it had coloured his expectations. He wanted that sort of love for himself. Not the sort produced by a possible bond or the sort of love that soon died.
Or ended up broken.
What if he could have that kind of love with Mackenzie and he convinced himself to believe it was a lie created by the possible bond and let it go? What if she was his one shot at a forever kind of love?
The sort of love he wanted for himself, craved like a madman and would do anything to have.
He wasn’t sure he would be able to carry on living in this world knowing he had turned his back on that kind of love, hadn’t even tried to see if what he felt for Mackenzie was real and had just let her slip through his fingers. He didn’t want to be swayed by the bond by going to see her, but he couldn’t just give up on them either.
He would regret it if he did.
It would be his greatest mistake.
He needed to see her.
Hartt strode across his room, stripping off his top as he went, tossing it onto the floor. He stopped at his dresser, scooped water from the large bowl on it and washed his face and neck, clearing the blood away. He ran his hands through his hair, dampening and tousling the blue-black strands, and straightened.
His gaze dropped to the twin black and silver metal bands around his wrist, armour he was liable to need when Mackenzie saw him. She had told him she never wanted to see him again. The sensible course of action would be giving her more than just a scant few hours before he showed up on her doorstep,