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If she could move as quietly as she had when she’d run away and come back, I could believe that. She was a lot more dangerous than anyone realized because of her size. Everyone thought bunnies were cute and cuddly and not dangerous at all. Clearly, that wasn’t true, not for a rabbit shifter.
I ached to know more. I needed to know what her magic could do, what I was dealing with, but I didn’t think she knew, either. That gave me an edge—I would find out about the same time she did. I hoped.
She was shutting down on me, so I changed the topic.
“You didn’t run away.”
She frowned at me before she lined up the small pieces of twig she’d broken off on her knee.
“When you shifted. You could have run.”
“You know where I live,” she pointed out. “You’re the alpha, and you have everyone in your pocket. You would have found me.”
She had a point. My heart sank. I’d hoped she’d come back for a different reason, but I was just fooling myself. I’d bought her, she wasn’t here forme. How could she be?
“Do you live in the giant cabin alone?” she asked.
I shook my head. “There are always people around. Staff. Dagger. Uma. Cal.”
“Cal?” she asked.
I bristled. “My foster brother. He’s a dick. He hasn’t been around since I b—” I swallowed. “Since we were at the auction. I don’t actually know where he is right now, but yeah, he lives here, too.”
“But no women,” she said. “Besides Uma, I mean.”
Was she trying to find out if I was single?
“Uma and I aren’t involved,” I said.
She nodded slowly. “I was just wondering, since… you know. The thing in the room.”
Ah. She wanted to know what kind of man I was, if I would take what I wanted no matter who was in my life and what they would do to me.
I walked to her and sat next to her on the rock so that we both faced the water.
“It’s not like that with shifters,” I said. “When we take a mate, it’s for life, and it’s serious. Fated is even more so.”
“What does that mean?” she asked. “Fated?”
“It’s when two souls are made for each other, two halves of a perfect whole. In the old days, fated mates always ended up together.”
“Not anymore?”
I pulled up one shoulder. “The modern world means there’s too much going on, too many people to meet. It’s made the world so big and so small at the same time. Shifters find love before they find their fated mate, and it’s more of a myth now.”
“Do you believe in it?”
“I do,” I said honestly. “I also think it can be screwed up really fast.” I tasted the bitterness of resentment at the back of my throat.
My parents had been fated, but my dad had fucked it up anyway, and now they were both dead. If they were lucky, my mom was somewhere blissful, where she could find peace. My dad… I didn’t give a shit where he’d ended up. He’d only wanted power, making deals with demons so that he could grow stronger. I didn’t know why. Maybe he’d wanted to overthrow the alpha or something—I’d been too young at the time. All I knew was that for that power, he’d been willing to sacrifice his family, and that kind of selfishness was unforgivable. He could be drifting in the Underworld forever for what he’d done, but I didn’t know how death worked, and I didn’t want to think about it too much.
Thinking about death felt like I was giving into the idea that I would end up there before my time, too.
“It’s sweet,” Kinley said, interrupting my dark thoughts.
“What is?”
“The idea of being one half of a perfect whole and knowing there’s someone else out there that fits you perfectly.”
