But if not for him, Maisie would not be here.
That did not make me grateful.
It only made the rage more complicated.
I looked at her instead of the path. She was walking carefully between the rows, fingers trailing over leaves when she thought I wasn’t watching. My shirt swallowed her. My land surrounded her. Her scent drifted back to me, warm and sweet beneath the green smell of the trees.
There was only one explanation.
Mate.
The word struck with the force of a blade between the ribs.
I should have known it earlier. Maybe I had in the first moment at the spaceport, when every part of me had turned toward her before I understood why. At the first breath of her scent.
From the immediate, impossible certainty that she mattered.
The elders had spoken of this. So had the arena breeders, though they used colder words. Biological attachment. Pairinginstinct. A flaw they had tried to cut out of us because mated males were harder to control.
They had failed.
Maisie was my mate.
And I couldn’t tell her.
The urge was there. Brutal. Simple.
Mine.
It was a fact in my bones.
It was also a threat.
She had just told me about a male who had treated her like property. If I turned to her now and spoke of bonds and fate and belonging, she would not hear reverence. She would hear James. She would hear another cage closing.
I had fought too hard for my own freedom to steal hers.
Even if every instinct I possessed demanded it.
So I said nothing.
We walked between the trees, and for a while the silence was not sharp. That was new. Maisie’s shoulder brushed near my arm once. Then her hand brushed mine.
The first time might have been an accident.
The second was not.
Her fingers slid into my palm.
I stopped breathing.
She didn’t look at me. She kept walking, her face turned toward the trees, as if holding my hand was nothing. As if it did not tear something open in me.
I closed my hand around hers carefully.
She was small. Too small. Every bone felt delicate beneath my fingers, and I had to remind myself that holding was not the same as gripping.
She stayed.
