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I finished with, “And we can talk about anything you want, okay? I’m serious.”

“You’re like a walking, talking green flag,” Quinn said, raising his gaze to me and grinning. He nudged his shoulder into mine playfully. “Does it ever get exhausting being so perfect?”

“You tell me.”

Sadie was clearly still listening because she rolled her eyes heavily. Sarah, who was human and didn’t possess Sadie’s preternatural hearing, stopped midsentence and lost her smile. I couldn’t hear what she said to Sadie, but I did see Sadie’s eyes widen as she shook her head and put both hands up, clearly about to start backpedaling wildly.

I smirked at them.

“You know, I’m kind of jealous I can’t hear those two.”

Quinn followed my gaze, then shot me a mischievous look. “What do you think they’re saying?”

“Well, it looks like Sarah is informing Sadie as to the error of her ways. And if I had to hazard a guess, Sadie is in the process of blaming me entirely.”

My mate looked impressed. “Pretty close, actually.”

“I read people pretty well,” I told him. “I always have. Ever since I was a kid. My dad used to—”

I broke off, realizing I was about to tell Quinn all about my childhood. Something that was a distinctly bad idea, because it would lead to my adulthood and a whole pack of things I wasn’t quite ready to talk about yet.

“Your dad used to?” Quinn prompted, a bemused smile on his lips.

Without thinking, I said, “Uh. He was good at reading people, too.”

Quinn lost his smile, so he clearly heard the extremely lame lie I’d just told him. Or maybe he’d heard the falsehood in my heartbeat—vampires were better than a lie detector test because they could see and hear the biological tells when someone wasn’t being honest.

It was messed up, wasn’t it? Because lying felt like such a default now that it was way too easy to slip right back into it, even when I didn’t actually mean to.

But I should never feel like I needed to lie to him, should I?

Wasn’t that what it meant, to be fated to be together? That you could be completely honest at all times? Or, if that wasn’t what it meant, shouldn’t it be?

And I’d clearly just hurt his feelings.

Dammit, Derek. Nice going.

“Sorry,” I said, grimacing. “Look, that wasn’t what I was going to say. I don’t know why I said that. It’s—it’s just that my past is kind of a third rail for me.”

Quinn searched my eyes with his, chewing on his lower lip. After a long moment, he nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’ve figured that much out already.”

“I’ll tell you eventually. I promise. It’s just—a lot.”

“A lot” was doing a ton of heavy lifting right there, especially considering that my past involved watching my ex-boyfriend’s brother murder someone in cold blood, fleeing to the literal other side of the country after learning that I’d been shacking up with a mob boss’s son, changing my name and inventing a whole new backstory that was basically like lying to everyone I knew all the time, and never contacting anyone I used to know to tell them I was okay or even still alive, because if I did, I might be putting them—or myself—in terrible danger. And, of course, knowing full well that getting close to anyone here was a bad idea because eventually my ex-boyfriend’s mafia family were going to track me down and finish the job. Tying up loose ends and all that.

My past was that particular type of “a lot.”

It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

That’s a big part of the reason I’d been so relieved when I wandered into Bailey’s—a random hole-in-the-wall bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that I found mostly by accident—and discovered that most of the regulars were vampires.

They’d been surprised about my unbothered reaction, but if they’d known the truth about me, they wouldn’t have been. At least I wouldn’t be putting them in very much danger. After all, they could survive a mafia hit. And if one of them decided to break the rules by snacking on me and went way too far, it would probably be a much easier death than getting gunned down in a dark alley or something. Vampires were the safest bet—the only folks I could maintain somewhat ethical friendships with.

“You know I’d understand, right?” Quinn said, still holding my gaze. “I wouldn’t judge you, whatever it is. You already know everything I’ve done.”

He was referencing his role in what happened to Rookwood, the town he’d grown up in on the Oregon border. A sadistic monster of a vampire by the name of Magnus had turned Quinn into a vampire against his will and then forced him to help the evil fucker create an army of vampires. Apart from the fact that Magnus was roughly a billion years old and crazy powerful at mind control—Quinn definitely hadn’t stood a chance—when a newborn kills in the first few months after they become a vampire, they lose any semblance of the humanity they’d once had. Quinn had become the kind of creature that had hunted his friends and neighbors without even a shred of hesitation. He had only regained his humanity after meeting his fated mate—me.

He hadn’t chosen any part of it—it had been done to him—but he still had to live with the memories. If I could have taken them away from him, if I could have somehow healed the pain he felt, I would have, in a heartbeat. No matter what it cost me.