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“Mmhm.” She focused on my hair for a bit. “He and I are the talk of the town; fated mates who choose not to embrace our connection. If you haven’t heard the gossip about us yet, you will soon.”
My eyebrows shot upward. “You don’t want to be fated?”
“Not according to the gossipers.”
My eyes narrowed at her in the mirror. “I’m askingyou.”
She sighed. “It’s complicated.”
I waited.
The only sound for a moment was that of her scissors snipping bits of my hair, but then she finally spoke again. “Jesh has a poor opinion of fated pairings. He doesn’t want children, either, and I’m sure you know that mated pairs are the only ones who can produce them. There’s no birth control that can prevent pregnancy in a mated pair, either, so it’s not as if we could be one thing but not the other.”
Shit.
I hadn’t known that, actually.
That meant Namir’s parents had been fated… and mine had been too. I knew mine had been lost during childbirth—fated mates lived and died as one. But I regretted never having the chance to meet them. I’d daydreamed about them as a child, imagining a life where I would get to play in the forests I could only attempt to imagine, loved by people I could only wish I’d known.
And they had been a mated pair…
Stars, I hoped they’d loved each other fiercely while they had the chance.
That knowledge brought a level of uncertainty to the possibility of having sex with Namir, though. If there was no way to prevent pregnancy, I might be getting myself into a hell of a lot more than a good time if we went all the way.
“And what about you?” I asked Lavee.
She gave me a small smile. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’ll spend my immortal life alone. Jesh is happy to be my friend, but…” she trailed off, shrugging a bit.
“But you don’t want to be just friends.”
“Unfortunately not. So, I try to spend plenty of time out and away from the castle, in hopes that by some miracle, I’ll find a man who’s interested in a serious relationship with someone he’s not fated to.”
“Wow, Lav. That’s terrible. If it makes you feel any better, I spent the first twenty-one years of my life being tortured.”
We both stared at each other in the mirror for a long moment, before we burst out laughing.
“Aren’t we just a sad pair of fuckers,” she said with a grin, wiping at the corners of her eyes with the side of her hands.
“Mmhm. Don’t tell Namir about that last bit—he’s not going to find out until I feel like I can trust him.”
“You don’t think you can trust him yet?” Her words were curious.
I shrugged. “I do, mostly. But like you said, he has a lot more secrets than he’s admitted to any of us. I’m not going to spill my soul to him before I’ve seen at least some of his.”
Lavee nodded, and resumed trimming my hair. “I always wondered what his fated mate would be like. I imagined her much more… smiley. I’m glad she’s not.”
“Strangely enough, I think I am too,” I admitted.
The topic changed to hair products, and she checked what I had in my shower before tossing it in the trash bin and promising to retrieve some better hair shit for me from her room before I washed up. The conversation didn’t grow serious again, but I enjoyed it. And by the time she left me to wash my newly-trimmed hair, I felt like I might’ve made my first real friend outside of the prison I’d spent so much of my life in.
Not counting Namir, of course; things between him and I were too complex to define yet.
Chapter19
I foundNamir waiting on the couches downstairs, chatting with a fae woman I didn’t recognize when I finally went out to find him. My monster gathered in my abdomen immediately, but I forced myself to notice how much space there was between Namir and the beautiful woman—and how practiced the smile on his face was.
He wasn’t happy to be talking to her. Not really. He wanted people to believe he was, but that had to be just part of his kingly mask.
