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“What can I do to show you that?”

There was a twinkle in his eyes, and that was when I noticed they were welling with tears. What I had said upset him? That was not at all what I expected to happen. Maximus didn’t seem like the type to be overwhelmed with emotions enough to cry. He might have been a good king like his father, but I didn’t think he felt anything other than anger and disappointment.

How could he show me what being a good mate was supposed to look like? He was the only mate I’d ever had, and the experience was great—until it wasn’t. My mother was gone, and after she died, I never saw a good relationship from my father either.

Still, there were things I knew I wanted to see from him—the same things I had hoped for when we were first mated. But did he even know what he had done wrong enough to fix it?

“What do you think you need to do?” I asked him.

If he didn’t know what went wrong, then this wasn’t going to go well.

“Are you asking me if I know how to be a good mate?” He looked at me with confusion, and I just wanted to slap him.

“Yes.”

“Wow,” he said as he moved over to a chair in the corner and sat down. I could see his knuckles turning white as he gripped the arms of the chair, and I waited for him to explode again. “I guessI have more work to do than I thought. When we were mates, I was good to you.”

“You were until you noticed I wasn’t getting better.”

He growled, but I couldn’t tell if it was anger at me or himself. “I thought it would be a simple fix with your lycan by bonding us. If being bonded helped a male become stronger, it made sense to me that it would make you stronger, too.”

“Then you got mad when it didn’t work.”

His jaw clenched, and he bowed his head for a moment before looking back up at me. “Yes. I got mad when I couldn’t figure out how to make you better. I didn’t want to look weak to our kingdom. No one ever questioned my father, but I could see them questioning me.”

“Because you had a mate who wasn’t able to connect with her lycan the way she should?”

Maximus narrowed his eyes on me. “It’s different for me. As a king, I need to show my people they are in good hands. I let that dictate far too much, and I lost the love of my life because of it.”

Well, I didn’t expect that. A tear rolled down my cheek at his admission.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not. I fucked up, Ky. I didn’t mean for my ego to get the better of me. I thought it would make me look too weak to have you as a mate when your lycan wasn’t fully connected. Even if you weren’t my mate, I would have done the same things whenI first met you. There has always been something about you. How resilient you are, how beautiful… Everything about you is perfection.” He paused and leaned his head back to take a deep breath. “Even now, I can feel your lycan at the surface. That wasn’t something I felt before. When I came back here, it wasn’t because of your lycan finally connecting to you. It was because I fucking missed you.”

My pup wiggled in my arms and stopped nursing. I looked down to see his mouth slightly open, his eyes still closed. I focused on him as I tried to stop the tears from coming. Maximus had never said anything like that to me before. Part of me wondered if he had heard about my lycan along with the pup and that’s why he was here. Wait, did he know about me being pregnant?

“Only because you missed me?” I whispered.

He scoffed. “Yes. I didn’t know anything about what you’ve gone through before I came here. I received information about you still getting sick, but it was only after I learned your location that I finally came. I’ve been looking for you since you left.”

The wood of the chair groaned, and I looked to see him gripping it so tightly it was about to snap.

“I can’t stand sitting here and seeing you upset. Can I please hold you?”

I shook my head. “No. That’ll be too much, too fast. No.”

“It’s killing me to see you hurting right now.”

“Too bad.”

“I meant what I said. The only thing that brought me here was realizing my mistake and needing you in my life. If I need to show you that I can be a good mate for you to come back to me, then that’s what I will do. I promise you won’t regret it.” He stood up and gripped the bar at the bottom of the bed. I could tell he needed to be closer to me to calm himself, but I needed to make sure he didn’t touch me. “You two are the most important people in my life. Fuck the rest of the world.”

“Those are just words to me now.”

“I know. It won’t stop me from trying to prove to you that I mean them, though.” He sighed. “I’d burn the world down for you, Kylie. Him, too. Nothing and no one means more to me.”

“Then show it.”