Page 12 of Binding His Fated Mates

“Remember,” I said, opening the door for him. “Calm.”

“I am calm.”

“You’re grinding your teeth.”

“That’s how I express calm.”

The mess hall was already full when we stepped inside. It was a large log structure at the center of the commune and the biggest building we had. Inside, we were greeted by long wooden tables, bench seating, and a kitchen area at the back where Emma, our pack elder, presided over the stove. She had an iron grip over the meals. She didn’t even let Sarah cook, and Sarah was her granddaughter.

The smell of bacon, eggs, and coffee hit me the moment I crossed the threshold. Wolves ate a lot. Pack breakfasts, which now happened a few times a week ever since Harris had joined the pack, were always a production.

Reed and Harris, our co-alphas, were already seated at the head of the largest table. Reed had his coffee in both hands, his dark hair shower-damp and curling. Harris, brown-skinned, shaved head, broad-shouldered, and handsome, sat beside him, his eyes alert, a notepad open in front of him. Their arms were touching, and they seemed to be subtly leaning in toward each other, speaking together softly while Harris jotted down notes. Their closeness wasn’t surprising, given that they were fated mates. The pack hadn’t figured out how the co-alpha thing had happened, but to me, it was pretty obvious: the bond between them was strong enough that they could share power, as well as emotions and their nightly dreamscapes.

And they did share the power. Harris, though new to the pack, was already handling the bulk of the logistics and the tactical aspects of protecting the area. It was how his brain seemed to work best. Not surprising, given his background as a member of the LAPD. Reed, on the other hand, wrangled the rest of us. He’d gone from attempting to carry the entire pack on his back to opting for a more collaborative, democratic leadership style. It seemed to suit his temperament way better. Their situation was unprecedented, at least according to the pack’s lore. But the pack was already more functional than it had ever been under Jeremy’s leadership.

Oliver sat near the window, quiet and withdrawn as always, his dark eyes distant. With his strong features, smooth brown skin, and close-cropped black hair, he was objectively handsome, but his expression was often aloof and betrayed very little of what was actually going on inside him. He tended to blend into the background. I often wondered what he was thinking, but whatever it was, he rarely shared his thoughts with the rest of us. Though, between the brooding, his tendency to only ever speak when he had something to say, and the fact that he’d joined the pack after being bitten—something done to save his life after a skiing accident—I had a certain fellow feeling for him.

Sarah was beside Emma in the kitchen, helping to plate food. Both of them had vibrant red hair and bright blue eyes, though Emma’s exact age was a mystery, and I doubted that even Reed knew for sure how many generations she’d seen. She looked to be in her sixties, but that meant little. Wolves aged far slower than humans did.

Lacey was already standing beside Sarah and holding a half-eaten piece of toast, her blond ponytail swinging as she shook her head and laughed at something Emma had said. Whatever it was, we were too far away to hear it.

This was the pack. They were our friends. Our family, in a strange way. Some bit of tension I’d been carrying since waking up from the shared dream this morning relaxed deep within me at being around our people.

It hadn’t always been that way, though.

Two years ago, they’d been strangers to us. Hunter had adapted—he took to fighting monsters easily. It had been more of a struggle for me. But then, I wasn’t the proactive one. I was the more passive half. The one who watched and contemplated, who got lost inside his head. Anyone talking to us probably wouldn’t notice it, since Hunter and I both made an active effort to be friendly and direct with pack members whenever we could. No one would ever know that, deep down, Hunter was probably the stronger version.

Though, they all thought we were identical twins. Even Jeremy had thought that—he’d never gotten the specifics of what had happened.

Daniel was the only one who knew the truth.

He wasn’t here yet. I tried not to notice his absence, to quell the longing I felt at the thought of our warlock.

He was nearby, slowly—unwillingly—approaching the mess hall. Practically dragging his feet, in fact. Even from several cabins away, unable to see him, I somehow knew he was hesitant about facing us. I could feel it, deep in my gut. Apart from his emotions, which I tried my best not to feel, his presence was perpetually right there. It was close enough to touch, always a pull in my chest in the direction of him, a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north.

I wasn’t an idiot. And I wasn’t willing to actively lie to myself, either. It was the mate bond, exactly like what Reed and Harris shared.

Unlike Hunter, I’d stopped pretending I didn’t know what it was. That particular piece of self-deception had died after discovering, a few months after becoming a wolf, what the mate dreams were and what they meant. I’d have to do an awful lot of mental gymnastics to avoid realizing what it meant to be sharing nightly lucid dreams with Hunter and Daniel.

The warlock was destined to be with me. Or with Hunter, given that he also shared the dreams.

My twin felt the bond too, but he dealt with it differently. Where I sat in the discomfort and tried to understand it, at least on an intellectual level, Hunter built emotional walls and ran through the forest until his body gave out to avoid dealing. We were the same person’s two most extreme responses to being hurt.

Or maybe we weren’t that at all. Maybe that was way too simple.

The question of who I was—who I really was, underneath the memories of the life I’d had before, the life that had been split into two—wasn’t something I enjoyed dwelling on. Except that I thought about it far too often, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

The questions that haunted me always went back to some variation of this: had I always been inside of Hunter Lee Jameson, waiting to emerge? Or had Daniel’s spell created me from nothing? Was I a brand-new consciousness poured into an equally brand-new, magically constructed body, with a dead man’s memories playing on a loop in my head? Or was I half of the man I’d once been, now made into a full and complete person? Or was I still technically Hunter Lee Jameson? I still felt like him, but was that true? Of Hunter and me, which one of us was the right version? Was I even real at all? Was Hunter? Or were we both purely the byproduct of a spell gone awry?

I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. And I’d probably never know. It was probably option D: all of the above.

As far as I knew, my twin didn’t ask himself those questions. He felt like himself and that was enough for him.

Hunter nudged me. “Hey, come back to earth. We need to get food.”

I blinked and realized I’d been standing there, beside Hunter, zoned out like an idiot.

“Right,” I agreed. “Thanks.”