Page 7 of Binding His Fated Mates

On the opposite side of the room, Lee’s breathing changed. He was awake, too.

We didn’t say anything for a while. That was the worst part about the mate dreams—the silence afterward. We both knew. We’d both been there. And neither of us wanted to be the first one to acknowledge it.

I cracked first.

“Same dream?” I asked the ceiling.

“Yes.”

He sounded calm. But Lee was almost always measured, because he processed things at a pace that would make a glacier look impulsive. Where I ran hot—quick to anger, quick to laugh, quick to do something stupid—Lee ran deep. When no one else but me was around, at least.

It was one of the strangest things about being split from the same person. We’d started in the same place, but two years of being separate people had turned us into near opposites. Or maybe he’d always been the careful and analytical half of the person we once were and I… well, I was the part that really wasn’t.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of my bed. The cabin was spacious, by the standard of the commune—it was able to fit two beds, a full kitchen and bathroom, a dumpy couch facing the television we’d scrounged from a thrift store in Ellensburg—the nearest actual city to the commune—on our first excursion down the mountain, and a square wooden kitchen table with mismatched chairs. Morning light filtered through the hideous red and blue tartan curtains that had been there when we moved in. From outside, I could hear birdsong and the distant sound of someone—Lacey, probably—chopping wood.

“You told me not to be a dick to him,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “There’s no point in being cruel. He can’t undo the past. And he didn’t choose to be in our dreams.”

“You don’t know that,” I shot back. “He’s a warlock. He might be casting spells to—”

“C’mon, Hunter. You know he’s not doing anything like that. You know exactly what this means.”

I scrubbed my hands over my face. The dream was already getting hazy around the edges, the way they always did once I was fully awake, but the core of it—Daniel’s face, the longing in his dark eyes, the careful distance he’d kept from us—that part stayed way too vivid.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“You brought it up.”

“Yeah, well, that was a mistake.”

Lee was quiet for a moment. Then he sat up too, his movements unhurried. He looked at me from across the cabin. His green eyes, identical to mine—because everything about us was identical, right down to the freckle on our left wrists—were steady and patient.

“What did you whisper to him?” I asked. “At the initiation.”

That had been three days ago, but I hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask him until just now. Whatever it was had caused Daniel’s whole expression to crumple like an empty beer can.

Lee frowned. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because whatever you said, it’s been eating him alive. I can feel it.”

And I could. It was a low thrum of guilt, longing, and desperate hope—maddening. I didn’t usually admit things like that to Lee, because it came too close to admitting why I might be feeling the warlock’s emotions, even from a half-dozen cabins over.

In fact, ever since waking up as a wolf, I’d been able to sense Daniel’s emotions at the edges of my awareness. It had gotten even stronger since his initiation into the pack. Hell, I could probably close my eyes, spin around, and point in the direction of him at any given moment. His presence was taking up that much rent-free space in my mind.

Lee didn’t speak for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

Then he said, “I told him I want to forgive him, but I’m not sure it’ll change anything.”

I sat with that, dumbfounded.

For several long moments, I had no idea what I actually felt. It was so at odds with what I wanted. Because I wanted to be angry with him. I craved the familiar heat of fury, the righteous certainty that Daniel had destroyed our lives and didn’t deserve our forgiveness, that any suggestion to the contrary was a betrayal.

But my anger wouldn’t come, even if I might’ve wanted it to. Instead, what settled into me was a heavy sadness, the kind that presses down into the soul and strips away every single defense against it.

“Did you mean it?” I asked when I trusted myself to speak normally again. “The forgiveness part?”

“I meant all of it.” Lee’s eyebrows shot up and he tilted his head to the side, holding my gaze from across the room. “I want to forgive him. Don’t you?”