Page 49 of Fate of the Sun King

He hesitates, and I widen my eyes as if to say Are you done now?

He nods and then turns on his heel, leaving the room. When he’s gone, I let out the breath trapped in my chest. I look back at Rhiannon, who stares at the doorway where he just left with a half smile on her face before turning to me again.

“Where were we?” I ask. “Tell me more about my grandfather. What was he like?”

“Hmm,” Rhiannon says. “I got to know him only for a short time during the summit, but he was both ferocious and exceedingly kind. He loved your grandmother fiercely.”

I like the sound of that. Rhiannon’s stories about my grandmother aren’t exactly bad, but they don’t always paint her in the most positive light. While I’m sure she wasn’t evil, there’s a definite theme of selfishness underpinning most of her actions. Maybe they were just young and foolish in the way of adolescents. They had the freedom to be children in ways I never did.

“You look a lot like him too,” Rhiannon says. “Not your coloring—that’s all Serce—but in your features, I see Wolf.”

I like the sound of that too.

“Do you think he tried to stop her?” I ask.

“I’m not sure, but I never got that sense,” Rhiannon says. “He would have done anything for her from the moment they met.”

I consider that, wondering about how they fell in love so quickly.

“They certainly gave up a lot for one another,” I say.

“Well, of course. They were mates,” Rhiannon says as if that’s perfectly clear.

“‘Mates,’” I repeat. “I’ve heard the term referenced once or twice before, but what does it actually mean?”

“Well, it’s very rare,” Rhiannon says, shifting in her seat, a sparkle dancing in her eyes. “In the thousands of years since the Beginning of Days, there have been only maybe a hundred true mate pairs to ever exist.”

“Wow. What were the odds of finding each other, then?”

“Almost nothing,” Rhiannon says. “She told me she knew the moment she met him. That there was this shift in the air around her, and she knew something had changed. Her magic started to respond to him, too.”

My scalp prickles with heat, an alarm howling in the back of my head.

“What? How do you mean… respond?” I practically choke on the words as they wedge in my throat.

“She said it was like it was fighting to get out, sure it was fighting to get to him. If they were ever apart for too long, the feeling would get stronger, and once they’d both realized who they were to each other, it finally calmed down, like two opposing halves fitting together.”

She knits her fingers together and smiles with a wistful look in her eyes.

My chest turns heavy, the air in my lungs moving like sludge as my magic tugs inside me, reminding me it’s there. As if I could ever forget.

“Could that magical tug be a signal of anything else?” My voice has gone unnaturally high, and Rhiannon draws her eyebrows together, oblivious to my climbing panic.

“I’m not really sure. I’ve never heard of it happening otherwise. I’ve had plenty of time on my hands,” she says with a dry smile. “I’ve done a lot of research on mate bonds purely out of curiosity. Sometimes I think it was their love that burned down the world, which in a way is almost romantic, I think?”

I give her a weak smile as thoughts roll through my head, pinging against the inside of my scalp like razored arrows. When Gabriel had said Nadir’s name that night at the Sun Queen Ball, I’d felt a shift too. An unmistakable bend in the course of my destiny.

Mates. Mates. Mates.

“Fuck,” I whisper as it all calcifies into focus.

Nadir is my mate.

That’s the only explanation for any of this.

For the way he’s twisted me into knots from the moment I first saw him.

Does Nadir know about this?