And he was mated to a regular human.
Vane clenched his marked hand. He couldn't hide the truth of his physical being from the Fates. They had known what he was and they had sought to bind him to a human woman.
Why?
Life as a hybrid was hard enough. The last thing he wanted was to father children who would be even more outcast than he was.
Would they be human or Were-Hunter?
And all those arguments telling him why he couldn't mate with Bride didn't amount to anything when the human heart inside him craved the woman on the other side of that closed door.
Even now he could imagine what she must look like in there, naked. The water sliding against her pale skin as her hands slid over her body, soaping her thighs, her The wolf in him demanded he kick it down and claim her.
The man in him just wanted to hold her close and protect her.
He'd never been so torn. So confused.
So damned horny!
Vane trailed his hand over the cool silk pajamas that Bride had pulled out of one of her boxes and left on the chair beside the door. They held her unique scent of strawberry potpourri and woman. He lifted the top and inhaled the richness of her as his groin burned and strained.
It was all he could do to not go to her in the shower and take her again. But it wouldn't accomplish anything other than to terrify her.
She was human and knew nothing of his world. She knew nothing of him.
A wave of hopelessness consumed him. He didn't know how to court a human female.
Not to mention that his being mated to her didn't really affect her at all.
She could leave him and live a nice, normal life with another man. She could fall in love with anyone and bear that man's children.
Leaving her to that end would be the decent thing to do. By the very laws that governed his people, he couldn't force her to take him as her mate. His own parents were proof of that. For three weeks his father had kept his mother chained against her will. He'd brutally tried to force her into accepting a Katagari male as her mate.
No amount of violence had worked.
His Arcadian mother had refused, even after she'd learned she was pregnant.
To her, all of the Katagaria were animals who should be slaughtered without compassion. Vicious even by Katagaria standards, his father had never tried to show her any other side of himself.
Then again, his father had never had a more tender side. Markus was violent at best, lethal at worst. Vane and Fang both bore enough scars inside and out to prove that.
So the three-week window of mating opportunity had closed for his parents and left both of them frigid and sterile. Since then his parents had lived in open warfare with each other's people.
And with their own children.
"Don't look at me with that bitch's eyes, whelp. I'll rip your throat out." In fact, his father had spent the whole of Vane's life trying not to look at him. The one time Vane had met his mother, she had made her own position clear.
"My base form is human and that alone is why you and your Katagari brother are alive. I couldn't bring myself to kill you as helpless puppies even though I know I should have. But now that you're grown, I have no such compunctions. All of you are savage animals to me and if I ever see you again I will kill you as such."
Honestly, he couldn't blame her for that, given what his father had done to her. He had never expected kindness from others and so far he hadn't been disappointed. Except with the bear clan. He still didn't understand their tolerance of him and Fang. Especially Fang, who couldn't protect the bears or work for his keep.
Why would they take them in when their own wolf clan would kill them if they found them?
Vane let out a deep breath as the reality came crashing down on him. He was living under a death sentence with no pack to help protect or raise his young. No pack to shelter his mate. He couldn't expose Bride to the danger that was a daily part of his life.
No matter what the Fates decreed, he couldn't have a human mate. Bride would never accept him and his world. She didn't belong to it any more than his mother had belonged with his father.
They were different species.