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As I pop the lock on the cell, stepping away from the bars so they don’t brush against my bare skin as Aleks shoves them and moves out of the cell, I tell him everything. From how his fight was postponed when Theo challenged Ryker to the reckless way I decided to challenge the Wicked Wolf on the spot.
He mutters something in Polish when I admit that I gave Walker the chance to abandon the district. A vamp would never understand how a shifter’s mind works, so I don’t expect him to get why losing his pack was way worse of a fate than me ripping Walker’s head clean from his shoulders.
Once I’m done, I go back to the one thing I purposely glossed over. “Oh. I almost forgot. In between the challenges, Walker did something to cause Elizabeth pain. Poor thing. She shrieked before collapsing into a ball on the platform.”
He sucks in a breath, his cheeks hollowing the point that those sharp suckers could slice through a piece of paper.
Gotcha.
I work to fight my grin. It’s probably super inappropriate, but it feels pretty good knowing I’m right. “But you knew that already. Didn’t you?”
He doesn’t answer me right away. For a second, I’m sure he’s going to lie again. Why not? He already tried once.
But he doesn’t.
“I felt it,” he confesses softly. “I felt her pain. I didn’t know what caused it, but I felt. She’s alive, but the pain… it would’ve been excruciating.”
I blink. Okay. I knew something weird was going on, but that was the last thing I expected.
For Aleks to feel Elizabeth’s pain all the way here, it’s not just some kind of empathic reaction because they’re both supes. No. That sounds an awful lot like—
“Hang on. Do you have some sort of bond with her?”
The look that flashes across his beautiful face is all the answer I need.
Whoa.
“Aleks, that’s—”
“Two hundred years ago, I fell in love with a female alpha wolf.”
Aleks’s quiet interruption stops me from issuing my congratulations. With my head already spinning at his last revelation, it takes me a second to process what he said, but when I do? My jaw drops.
I shake my head. “Wait… what? I thought I was the only one.”
Except for the Luna, of course.
“So did she. Julia.” Aleks runs his fingers through his messy curls. He doesn’t take his eyes off of me, but that’s just like him. From the moment we met, he was never afraid of what I was, and he always stared. “She hid who she was. Just like you did.”
“Where is this coming from?” I don’t understand. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s time. You see, when you drove into Muncie, your aura… I recognized it immediately. I lost her once. Before we could be bonded, I lost her. And I thought…”
Ah. Now I see. “You thought I was her.”
“I told you. She believed she was the only one just as she was the only one for me, my Julia. She was my beloved. My fated partner. And I was her mate.”
I still remember the way he said “mine” the first night I met him. Within days, he snapped off his fang, gifting it to me to wear. He told me it was for my protection, but I later learned from Ryker what it really meant: it was a sign that I belonged to Aleks.
I always thought it was strange that Aleks made it two centuries without taking a mate. Even if he hadn’t found his fated partner—his beloved—two hundred years was a long time. Supes are made to find a partner and claim them. A fated mate was a luxury, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have chosen one.
He never discussed his romantic past. Considering the baggage I carried when I arrived in Muncie, who am I to judge? I had wanted a platonic roommate. A friend. I thought that was Aleks, especially since he made it seem like friendship was all he was after the first couple of months we lived together.
Even when he told me he had feelings for me, I never really thought about why. But if what he’s telling me now is true…
“Shifters don’t live that long,” I point out. “Two hundred years ago… you have to know it wasn’t me.”
Aleks’s lips tug into a crooked smile. “That’s logic, Gem. When the heart’s involved, you forget logic. When I saw you, all I could think was that I had my second chance. You were her, returned to me.”
