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I snorted. “No. I promise you she does not. Besides, she’s a fae. You’re out of your mind.”
“So, can I?”
Rune burst out laughing. “That powerful piece of ass will kill you before you get to second base.”
“Hey, at least I’ll die happy.”
Rune laughed and shook his head. “I need a drink.”
I shook my head, still thinking about Danna and her little girl.Mylittle girl.
No, I wouldn’t think that way. She wasn’t mine. Neither of them were, and that could never change.
“I’m getting back on the floor,” I said. “You two assholes should get out there and do your jobs for a change.”
The two of them shoved at each other to get through the door first, but I ignored them. I just wasn’t in the mood.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Danna, and that pissed me off.
She’d had that effect on me years ago, and it had taken a lot of time to stop thinking about her as much—even though she still crossed my mind daily. Now, she was right back in there, and to make matters worse, it seemed like I’d left a trail in my wake I hadn’t been aware of.
Stop it, I scolded myself.It doesn’t matter.
6
WESLEY
When I’d met Danna, everything about her had drawn me to her, but the biggest factor had been the fact that she was human. Nothing could happen between us other than a one-night stand.
Why did that matter to me? Because no way in hell did I want to get involved with someone in any way other than getting off. I didn’t want to fall in love. I didn’t want to create a bond. And by all that was sacred, I didn’t want to accidentally stumble across a mate bond just because I hadn’t been careful enough about where I put my dick.
Yeah, I believed in the mate bond. A lot of people believed it was bullshit, a fantasy, a myth—I guess the human equivalent was that some people believed in soul mates.
The legend was, our species had been created to be two halves of a perfect whole. It took angel blood to create shifters, but of course the angels couldn’t just have left it there. Goody two shoes, all of them. Angels existed because the archangels, who lived in the Overworld, chose the few humans who lived exceptional lives and gave them a chance to do more good in their afterlife. Angels had come into existence, and immediately, they’d created a race of their own.
What was it with angels and trying to do something special? I would never understand that. I guess I wasn’t complaining—if angels weren’t what they were, I wouldn’t exist, but that wasn’t the point.
They couldn’t leave well enough alone, and they’d had to create another person who would be the shifter’s perfect match. The demons had gotten involved and fucked it all up, of course. There was no evil without good to rise up against it, and there was no good without evil to try to screw it all up.
The demons were pissed that the archangels had taken their recipe—turning souls who lived horrid lives into vampires with dark magic—and done something good with it, so they had to get their fingers into the pot, too.
The demons decided that if they couldn’t stop the angels from doing their thing, using their power they got from the archangels, then they’d cause shit some other way, and so they tore up all the perfectly matched pairs, letting them reproduce without each other. The result was a shifter line who loved each other and stuck together but didn’t have the same power they would have if they were fated.
Unfortunately for the demons, the angels had encoded the fated gene into the shifters, so shifters who were meant to be together ended up finding each other, at least half the time, as time had gone on and the bloodlines had been thinned by human involvement, kids running around as half-bloods, quarter-bloods, barely-any-shifter-bloods, and eventually, the legend had become a myth.
I still believed. I believed harder than anyone else… and I did everything in my power to avoid my fated mate. Humans only—that was my rule. I’d never heard about a shifter and a human being fated mates.
The guys joked about it, but that didn’t change a thing. They didn’t get it. Maybe one day, when a hot little shifter came along and claimed Zen or Rune with a fated bond, things would change, and they’d finally understand.
Then again, they weren’t opposed to a happily ever after the way I was.
I’d been abandoned as a kid. I’d grown up in the stupid foster system for just long enough to know that family was a sham. I wasn’t interested. Having a fated mate—havinganymate—meant that having kids was likely. And that just wasn’t my role in this life.
Besides, I had the curse lingering over my head, which made getting close to someone impossible.
I didn’t know what Iwasmeant to do, but I knew what Iwasn’t.
Being a father.
