Page 78 of Binding His Fated Mates

They were the Henbanes. Daniel’s family had come for him at last.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN || LEE

For a long moment, we all stared at each other and none of us moved. My mind raced—Daniel’s family had come for him. I’d lived next to all of them for most of my life, but they seemed like strangers now. Dangerous ones.

The silver-haired man was Daniel’s father, Ash Henbane. The dark-haired woman was his mother, Carmellia. The young man—three years older than Daniel—was Micah, Daniel’s brother and the eldest of the siblings. And the younger dark-haired woman was Daniel’s sister. She was just a year older than him.

“Daniel,” Ash said, standing up. His voice was cold and clipped and his gray eyes narrowed. “We’ve been waiting nearly two hours.”

Beside me, Daniel’s breath hitched.

And through the bond, I felt something happening to him that was worse than fear. It was a total collapse. As if a vital load-bearing structure inside him was folding in on itself.

“D—Dad,” Daniel managed, his voice sounding way too small. “W—What are you guys doing here?”

“What we should have done two years ago,” Daniel’s mother said, before Ash could speak. “We’ve come to bring you home.”

Her dark hair was pulled back tight enough to stretch the skin at her temples, and her eyes—sharp, assessing, the same shape and color as Daniel’s but completely devoid of his warmth—locked with his. Then they moved from Daniel to Hunter, and finally to me.

Carmellia went very still. Her gaze flicked between Hunter and me. No doubt taking in the identical faces, the identical builds, the way we were positioned on either side of her son.

“So, then,” she said softly, her upper lip curling with open disdain. “This is why you ran away from home.”

The younger man at Daniel’s desk—Micah, the older brother—leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. His expression was openly hostile. “You left the family so you could have two boyfriends?” He let out a humorless laugh. “Jeez, even for you, that’s pathetic.”

Hunter went rigid beside me. I felt his fury spike through the bond—white-hot, instantaneous—and I put my hand on his forearm. When he shot me an outraged glare, I shook my head minutely. Not now. Not yet.

“Stop it,” Rowan said coldly, glaring at her elder brother. “That’s not why we’re here.” Then she turned to Daniel with a tremulous smile. “We’ve missed you. We want you to come back.”

She, at least, seemed glad to see him.

But Micah snorted at her words. Ash raised an eyebrow, his gaze flicking to his daughter and then away again, as if she’d said something only mildly interesting, hardly worth his notice. And Carmellia’s expression tightened with fury. Her cold gaze was still on me.

Daniel, however, didn’t seem to notice the rest of the family’s reactions to his sister’s words. Because when he turned to meet Rowan’s gaze, he wilted. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, wretched. “I should’ve said something.”

“Yeah, you should have. You let us think something awful had happened to you,” Rowan said softly, her eyes searching his. “Why’d you run away, Danny?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Micah demanded, gesturing in our direction. “He left because he’s selfish and a coward. He didn’t want us to discover what he’d done.”

“No. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t run away,” Daniel whispered. But the words lacked any conviction. His shoulders sagged, as if an invisible weight were settling onto them. “I left. There’s a difference.”

“No. You disappeared in the middle of the night without a word,” Ash said. His tone didn’t change. He barely seemed interested in Daniel even long enough to get angry with him. As if the words he was speaking were just convenient stepping stones from one end of the conversation to the other. “And based on what we discovered in your room after you vanished, it seemed that you were performing forbidden spells.”

“Which you apparently performed with the intention of splitting your friend into two separate people,” Carmellia added tightly. Her gaze slid away from me to Daniel and her eyes narrowed. She, at least, seemed to care enough to get angry. “We warned you not to get close to a mundane, Daniel. And you defied us. Didn’t you?”

Our warlock’s gaze dropped to the floor. I could hear his heart hammering in his chest and the misery in his expression was total.

“Answer me,” Carmellia said dangerously.

“Yes,” Daniel whispered.

“Why would you do this?” his mother demanded. “You could’ve killed him!”

“It was an accident!” Daniel said, looking back up at her, his voice rising. There was a plaintive note in it that I hated. “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean for any of this!”

“What a surprise,” Micah scoffed, sneering at his younger brother with unmasked contempt. “Daniel Henbane messes with magic he doesn’t understand, and it backfires. Gee, who could’ve seen that coming?”

“That’s enough!” Ash snapped, glaring at his eldest son.