Page 74 of Omega Hunted

“But?”

His eyes closed. “My wolf doesn’t believe me.”

The silence between us seemed to stretch and when he opened his eyes again, amber had swallowed almost all the brown.

“He thinks there’s something here.” Cassian looked almost angry at the words, but underneath that was something far more unsettling. Fear. “Something that shouldn’t be possible. Something I spent three years believing couldn’t happen to me again.”

My mouth had gone dry. “A bond?”

“I don’t know.” His answer came immediately. “And I won’t call it that when I don’t understand it. I won’t do that to Raff, and I won’t do it to you.”

I stared at him. “Then what do we do?”

His thumb moved over my knuckles again.

“I find out what’s happening.” His gaze dropped to our joined hands. “Because if this is real, I need to understand what it means. And if it isn’t…” He stopped.

“If it isn’t?”

His fingers tightened around mine.

“I need to understand why the thought of you leaving feels so fucking wrong.”

The honesty frightened me. Outside, the storm continued to bury the mountain beneath another layer of snow, but inside the kitchen, with my fingers threaded through his and his heartbeat steady beneath my hand, I felt an overwhelming sense that something had shifted between us.

I didn’t understand what it was.

I wasn’t sure Cassian did either.

He was staring past me, but I had the strange feeling he was seeing something beyond both of us, trying to fit a lifetime of certainty around a truth that refused to stay hidden. Whatever was happening, neither of us had the words for it yet.

Neither of us let go.

Chapter Twenty-Two

CASSIAN

As soon as Soren fell asleep in my arms, the warmth between us was too strong for me to ignore; I carried him to his nest and tucked him in with the sweater I’d been wearing in his hands, and I headed straight for my office. Ignoring everything else in the room, the photos of people who needed to pay for Raff’s death, the lists of names and addresses, the testimonies of omegas I’d tracked down, I switched on my laptop and typed fated second bond after losing bonded mate into the search bar.

Hundreds of results appeared. Most were folklore sites, spiritual nonsense, anonymous forums full of people insisting they’d recognized their mate’s scent across crowded rooms or dreamed of wolves they’d never met. I ignored those and searched again, narrowing it to veterinary journals, shifter anthropology papers, old university archives, anything that cited actual research instead of stories passed around campfires.

Bonded mates. Secondary bonds. Multiple fated mates. Mate bonds after death.

There wasn’t much.

Every paper agreed on one thing: a true mating bond was exceptionally rare and impossible to manufacture. Most shifters lived entire lives without finding theirs.

Like I’d found Raff.

After that, certainty disappeared from the research.

One paper, almost sixty years old, suggested that a handful of historical records described individuals who had formed a second true bond after the death of a mate. The author dismissed most of the accounts as unreliable because they relied on oral histories instead of medical observation. Another researcher argued the opposite—that shifter society had romanticized the idea of one perfect mate so completely that it had ignored any evidence to the contrary.

Neither could prove anything.

There were references to wolves who had chosen new partners after losing their mates, but every source carefully distinguished between choosing someone to love and actually experiencing another true bond. Those weren’t the same thing.

I rubbed a hand across my face and kept reading.