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Yichen froze and narrowed his eyes on her. “Why? Do you have a problem with Rei?”
She made an unhappy noise. She stomped over from the first target and grasped him by both of his shoulders. After giving him a shake, she pushed up on the tips of her toes and glared at him. “I don’t have a problem. I want to ask relationship questions. Romance stuff.”
Oh, hell no!
He was not having this conversation. It would have been easier if she did have a problem with Rei. Snagging one of her hands, he stuffed the two arrows he’d collected into it. “You keep practicing by yourself. I’m not talking about this stuff with you.”
He didn’t get more than a step in his retreat. Meimei caught his hand and dug in her heels to stop him. “No! You can’t run! You have to talk to me. Chen is useless and Moon is crazy. You’re the only other one in our clan who has found a mate. Talk to me. I don’t want to ask online people in chat forums anymore.”
Yichen squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. For most of his existence, Meimei had been everyone’s little sister. They doted on her and coddled her. She was sent to their sect because her father had arranged for her to marry disciple, Cao Zimo.
Except Jiang Chong had killed Cao before their wedding.
No offense to Cao, but Meimei had dodged the proverbial bullet with that one. Their personalities couldn’t have been more different. He doubted it would have been a happy marriage for either of them.
But after being made a vampire and settling into their sect, there’d been no mention of marriage or romance from her. Not for two thousand years.
Guess they were due since Chen had found his mate and now him.
Rei was his mate.
He’d never actually thought that sentence. He’d never allowed himself until this moment. Falling for the elf had been so slow, as Rei crawled his way into Yichen’s heart over countless years and hundreds of tender actions. Besides, he’d never thought Rei could return his feelings.
Rei was his mate.
And he was never letting that man go.
“Yichen!” Meimei whined, drawing his name out.
After giving a loud, long sigh, Yichen turned and frowned at her. “Fine. But I’m not answering any sex-related questions.”
She rolled her eyes and released his hand. “Prude.” But she smiled and handed the arrows to him before walking to one of the other targets.
He didn’t comment on her assessment. There was no way in hell he was a prude. His private time with Rei more than proved that. It was just that he didn’t want to talk about things like that with a woman he saw as his little sister.
They worked without speaking for several minutes, gathering up the arrows from the targets and taking them back to the spot where they’d been shooting.
“Okay, what do you want to know?” Yichen demanded, not allowing Meimei to leave him hanging in suspense another second longer.
“Don’t be so grumpy! This is a conversation, not an inquisition.” She huffed, and Yichen glanced up to see her staring sadly at the bow clenched in both hands. “I want to know…how you knew…”
“Knew what?”
One slim shoulder lifted a bit. “How you knew Rei was the one? How you knew you loved him and that he was your mate?”
“I…” Yichen stopped moving, his body frozen as his brain turned all its energy to figuring out the answer to that question. Was there an exact moment when he realized Rei was the one? For nearly a century, Rei had been his one positive contact. The elf had started as an annoying antagonist who at least didn’t cause him physical pain, but he changed into a fellow prisoner to a companion to the one person he could depend on.
It wasn’t until they were making their final plans to escape that he’d been struck with a near-constant feeling of suffocation and panic. It was horrible to admit, but only when he’d begun to think about them going their own ways, about never seeing Rei again, had he realized the elf was more than a companion. Rei was his sunlight in a perpetually dark world. Rei was warmth and joy, but he was also vengeance and unwavering strength.
“I asked Chen the same question when he announced he and Moon were mates,” Meimei announced, breaking into his thoughts.
“What did he say?” Yes, maybe that would help him gather his thoughts.
“He said he knew when he and Moon had sex on Moon’s front lawn, when it was littered with the corpses of vampires he’d killed to protect his mate.”
The arrow he had pinched between his fingers on the drawn string slipped and sliced through the air, heading nowhere near any of the targets. “He did not say that!”
“I swear he did! It’s exactly what he said!”
