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“I haven’t thought about it. Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” I answered as we walked hand in hand toward our doom.
TWENTY-ONE
DOMINIC
Time slipped away like grains of sand through an hourglass. We’d never have enough, but I didn’t know it would be this hard as the days and months fell away.
The quickening arrived, and I should have been thinking about the possibility of my pack tearing me to shreds when I told them my chosen mate was a daywalker and a male. Instead, I lay awake hour after hour, thinking about what Vin had said. I felt the lack of sleep now the day was upon us. Or maybe the gravity of what I was about to do and all the pieces coming together to tie me to Vin for the rest of my life weighed on me.
He couldn’t possibly understand the gravity of what he wanted. Of what it meant for the future. The years after I was gone. I shook my head, trying to push it from my brain. None of it mattered until after tonight.
“Are you so worried, Dominic?”
“I’m not worried,” I replied, looking up from where I sat on the porch stairs, waiting for the sun to set.
Waiting for my brothers if they, in fact, would show.
Waiting for my second.
Waiting for my fate.
“You sure seem like there is something on your mind, my love.”
I let his words sink into my chest, savoring them like they were the last. “I can’t believe you want me to mark you.”
He laughed and looked to the heavens. “You can’t have been thinking about this for days.”
“I have been.”
“I thought you were worrying about your mortality.”
“Hardly. I’ve told you since we met I wouldn’t live until thirty.”
He snarled but didn’t argue. I had to love him hard for the time we had left and not waste a second of it.
“You’re upset about marking me?” The crease in his brow told me this pained him.
Rarely did he show hurt.
“No.” I held out a hand for him, but he turned his back on me. “Vinkettin.”
“Yes, Dominic.”
“Don’t ‘yes Dominic’ me.” I pushed to my feet and coming up behind him to hug him to me. “I’m not worried about it for the reasons you think.”
“Explain it to me then. Tell me why?” He remained stiff. More like stone than a living being. I’d seen it in him when I used to watch him with his playthings, but never with me.
I hated it.
“How easily you think I reject you when I’m putting my life on the line for you tonight,” I said against his ear.
“And yet you won’t give me the mark your people will recognize?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t.” I’d just put off talking it through. “It’s not just my people. The mark is unmistakable and permanent,” I said, closing my eyes because I was sure he didn’t know the gravity of what he wanted.
He turned on me but not to accept the embrace. He tossed my arms off him, baring his teeth. “And? Do you think I’m not here with you as fully as you are with me? You think my commitment is any less, that I don’t deserve a mark you’d give one of your kind?”
