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“How do you not know?”
“I’m on suppressants, Cillian. I’ve been on them since I was sixteen. My heats are three days long and I schedule them around my trial calendar. I know my cycle. I don’t know what this is!”
He blows out a breath. He’s gripping the steering wheel real tight.
“It’s a recognition,” he says finally. “You know that, right?”
I know what recognition is. Everybody knows what it is. It’s the thing in the movies. The shit your grandmother swears happened to her cousin. Fated mates. One in a million. I thought it was a nice story wolves tell their kids.
“That’s not real.”
“It’s rare, but it’s very real. And it can speed up a cycle.”
My stomach flips. “By how much?”
“It varies.”
“That’s lawyer for I know, but I don’t want to tell you.”
“No, that’s lawyer for it varies.”
I’ve already got my phone out. My hands are shaking so bad it takes me three tries to type fated mate recognition omega heat. I get medical journals, wolf forums, and a government pamphlet with a cartoon on it. I read the first one. Then another one. My stomach gets tighter with every paragraph.
“Zahra. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to do anything. Nobody’s going to make you decide anything today. You hear me?”
The prison’s gone. I can’t see it anymore. My chest squeezes so hard I can barely breathe.
“What if they gave him too much?” It comes out real small. “What if his heart…”
“Hey.” His voice goes gentle. Cillian’s voice never goes gentle. “Declan Greene’s very, very hard to kill. A lot of people have tried.”
I let out an ugly, wet laugh. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Yes.”
It kind of does. I wipe my face again, and this time, the tears actually slow down.
“Tell me about him.”
“No.”
“Cillian!”
“You’ve read the file.”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it. How long have you known him?”
He’s quiet for a second. “Fifteen years.”
“So you’re friends.”
“We’re not friends. We’ve got a long-standing professional relationship.”
“What’s he like?”
“You saw what he’s like.”
“No. I saw a man meet his mate and lose his mind.”
