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He growled back. “I’m serious.”
“Tell me.” I wouldn’t take no for an answer, not when a memory I hadn’t lived unlocked.
He pulled over with enough force to send me slamming into the door.
“Dominic,” I said through my teeth.
He turned toward me with a snarl. “Do we need to fight about every single thing? Can we not get through the rest of this drive without more?”
“Not when you’re quite obviously keeping things from me.”
He flexed his fingers, balling his hands into fists. “I don’t want this to be a thing.”
“It already is,” I said, managing to sound way calmer than I felt. “I can feel it’s bad, Dominic.”
“It is.” It was written all over his face, too.
“What did you do?”
“I was looking for you.”
“What?”
“I haven’t been completely honest with you. That day you spotted me in the forest. I knew you were there. Or I knew something was. I wanted to understand what the pull in my chest was. She told me you would be, but she told me not to go. She told me I should never seek you out. That it would bring me ruin. I’d regret it.” Moisture pooled in the corners of his eyes. “I went anyway, knowing it could bring disaster. I was tired of feeling the empty place in my soul.”
I sat in silence and listened in disbelief. I’d been searching for him for so long. I thought I’d been the one to find him at that first meeting. I’d thoughtI’dfinally found him, but he’d come to me.
“She told me if I didn’t seek you out that day, you’d move on. You’d move and look elsewhere. That we wouldn’t have many opportunities to find each other in this life. She told me I should let you go, find you in the next. This one, we weren’t ready for each other. Our lives were too tangled in other fates. I didn’t want a next, so I couldn’t let you go. I couldn’t let go of the constant pull in my chest. She wouldn’t tell me what or who you were. She said I had to see for myself, and I convinced myself if we were fated, it couldn’t be that bad.” He closed his eyes, a single tear running down his cheek.
“You’ve known that long you didn’t want another life but you let me believe there was another chance?”
“If felt less cruel.”
“Why did you go to the forest that day?” he asked somberly.
“I couldn’t stay home. I tried to make myself, but I missed you even without knowing you. I ran through all the things I expected to keep us apart and knew I could overcome them. I expected you to be a wolf. Wolves are only fated with other wolves. I knew this. I expected so many things. For you to be from a different pack. Or an alpha. Or even some feral, uncivilized, barely human wolf. I thought of a million reasons why we hadn’t found each other. All the reasons it would be difficult or near impossible, and I was prepared to fight through all of them. I never expected you to be a daywalker.”
He met my eyes, leaving me speechless for maybe the first time in my life.
“After she told you to let me go?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And then you spent years running away from me?” I swallowed back the waves of emotion threatening to crash down upon me.
“I believed her to be right for a long time. I believed we would ruin each other, but I couldn’t stay away, not after seeing you. The empty spot turned into a goddamn cavern. But I was wrong. I set myself up to fail by denying the universe’s will.”
I put a hand over my mouth, not sure what to think about all of it.
“So when I told you none of that is relevant to this, I meant it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I don’t want some old woman’s words to define what we are or what we will be. I told you we can’t deny the universe, and this is right. I was too stupid to see it then, and maybe she knew I’d go anyway and her telling me not to would drive me towards my fate. But either way, willed or not, if this is all we have, I want it. I want to be selfish as fuck. I want to take all I can fucking get. We get to decide, and if it kills us, it kills us. At least we’ll have had it for a little while.”
I met his eyes and believed him. For the first time, I really believed he wanted this, and he thought he was doing the right thing.
THIRTY-ONE
