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I don’t mean to put as much char in the words as I do, but whatever Elias hears in my voice, it makes his smile fade.

“Blair,” he says cautiously. “You kidnapped her.”

“I’m aware.”

He lets out his breath in a disbelieving huff. “That’s all you have to say? Because, as I seem to recall, you had some very choice words for me about violating a woman’s autonomy last fall, even in pursuit of a mate.”

“She’s not my mate.”

The words fall with a weight and finality that ring discordantly through me.

It’s also enough to shut Elias up. His lips press into a thin, skeptical line as he leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest.

“This isn’t like it was with Lizzy.”

At my use of her name, Elias goes absolutely still. He’s aware, as am I, that this might just be the first time I’ve spoken it aloud in more than two hundred years.

“How’s it different?”

“It just… is.” It’s a non-answer, but it’s the only one I can give.

If I’m being honest with myself, I can’t exactly remember how it was with Lizzy. The shape of it is there, of course—the immediate connection when I met her, the complete devastation when she was gone—but the finer details have been lost to time like so much else has.

“But you’re drawn to her. To Kenna,” Elias prompts gently.

Something in me bristles at the mention of her in such close proximity to Lizzy. It’s wrong, somehow, to compare them, to dredge up a ghost and hold her like some sort of standard to a living, breathing woman.

“It’s just different,” I say gruffly.

“So what made you take her?”

The million dollar question. If I knew, maybe I’d be able to deal with it and leave her alone. If I knew, maybe I’d be able to stop the persistent ache in my muscles and the fire in my blood that flares every time I get another whiff of her scent.

“Blair,” Elias prods when I don’t answer.

“Damned if I know,” I mutter. “Old age, maybe, or the fact that I don’t shift as much as I used to. Some kind of instinct gone haywire.”

Elias chuckles. “You’ve barely reached middle age. Don’t try to tell me you’re headed into your golden years.”

Dragons and krakens both have unfathomably long lifespans, though my kind live time and a half what a kraken might expect.

Fifteen hundred years. Fifteen hundredlongyears.

It almost makes me envy Elias’s short millennium.

Not that he’ll have to do his full time, not since Nora. A mating bond with a human usually halves the years we ancient creatures have left and gives the excess to the human at the other end of the bond. A steep price to be paid, certainly, but for the possibility of living out those years with the other piece of your soul by your side? The cost is nothing.

Gods, if Lizzy had lived… the two of us would indeed be nearing our golden years by now. But Lizzy and I never fully bonded. We’d been waiting until we left the ship and started our lives together to take that last step to solidify our bond.

So perhaps that’s my punishment, too—living the rest of my centuries alone with myself and my guilt.

I shake off the morbid thought.

“I’ve spoken to her,” I say, ready to put the matter to rest. “To Kenna. We’ve settled things.”

“Have you? And she’s what? Just fine with the fact that you scooped her off the street and dragged her off to the middle of nowhere and then abandoned her at our house?”

“It’s settled.” Another beat of finality, shutting the door on whatever other questions he might want to ask. Oldest friend or not, I don’t feel the need to explain myself to the kraken.