“Bullshit.”
His expression hardens slightly. “It was not.”
“It absolutely was if I was the reason it started,” I shoot back.
“You are not the cause,” he says. “You are the trigger.”
A humourless laugh punches out of me. “Not helping.”
Silence stretches between us. I drag a hand over my face, trying to get a grip on the sudden mess of thoughts in my head.
Ten years.
Ten years of that.
Ofthis.
“And just now?” I ask, quieter. “That wasn’t… the normal cycle, was it?”
“No.”
“Then what was it?”
He hesitates before landing the truth bomb: “You.”
I huff a breath. “Right. Of course it was.” It seems I was brought here just to make this Nyxerian’s life miserable. I know enough about fated mates from being in this world for ten years to not bullshit myself. I’m the worst kind of mate.
The tension between us spikes again, but now there’s something heavier under it. Not just heat or want but understanding.
And guilt. So much fucking guilt.
I hate that part.
Because my brain immediately does the thing it always does—goes back, digs up old versions of me, asks questions I can’t answer without hating the outcome.
If I’d known, if he’d told me, would I have done anything differently?
I want to say yes. I want to be the kind of person who would have. But ten years ago, I was barely holding myself together. I was angry and broken and so lost while trying to survive in a world that had ripped everything out from under me.
Would I have chosen him?
Or would I have run harder?
The answer sits somewhere I don’t want to look too closely at.
“Fuck,” I mutter, more to myself than him.
Varek shifts slightly, like he’s about to ease away fully this time. To put space between us again. To lock everything down the way he clearly has been for years.
“I will not allow it to affect you again,” he says, controlled once more. “That was an error.”
Something in me snaps at that. “Don’t.”
He stills. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that thing where you shove it all back down and pretend it doesn’t exist,” I say, holding his gaze. “You can’t lie to me, remember? So don’t start acting like that didn’t just happen.”
A flicker—brief, almost imperceptible—moves through his expression. “I am not pretending,” he says.
