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But this… I was afraid. For the first time, I didn’t want Arran to touch me. It felt wrong. I felt wrong. Everything was wrong.

“Then I will just feel… other.” I forced out the excuse.

Arran hadn’t moved. Not a twitch of his arm or hand. Totally still, now. Waiting for me. “Maybe. But you are also my mate. It has been seven thousand years since there was a mated pair in Annwyn, Parys said. We don’t know what we will be able to feel. Our souls are connected, Veyka. It could mean we feel everything.”

I flinched back. Out of my circle of tamped down grass. Away from Arran.

He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t come after me. He waited until I was several paces away, clutching my cloak around me, before he spoke.

“You don’t trust me.”

My composure crumbled. I pressed my palms hard against my eyelids, digging my fingers into the roots of my hair. “Of course I trust you…” It was true. That wasn’t the reason I wanted him far away from my magic. “Even if I don’t trust myself.”

I spun away.

Looked at the scrubby forest. Then turned to the ledge, considered throwing myself over just to escape this conversation and the discomfort in my chest. But when I turned back, Arran was still there.

He was still there.

And it all spilled out of me. The worry and fear and the words.

“I’ve barely begun to figure out who I am,whatI am…” I gestured wildly, trying and failing to capture the enormity of it. But my eyes pulled back to Arran. Always back to Arran. I beat at my chest, at the bond that lived there now, whether I wanted it or not. “I don’t even know who I am, and then suddenly I’m someone’s mate. Your mate. I belong to you.”

I bit hard on my lip to keep from crying. My eyes were full of tears—tears of grief that I hadn’t let myself cry, because they were for me and it seemed ridiculous.

But I knew I was not the only one who was hurting.

The agony in Arran’s eyes, in his heart… I could feel it.

It was there in the set of his eyes, the way the fire that burned—that black ring of fire, desire, always burning for me, even in the most fraught moments—now it was nothing more than a ring of black sparkles, just a tiny sliver around his irises. It was beautiful. And haunted. Hurt, by the way I’d flinched, the words I’d said.

I regretted them, even though they were true.

But it wasn’t just what I saw in his eyes, or the slight hunch of his shoulders. His heart was twisting, dealing with the blow I’d dealt, contorting to find some sort of comfortable position within his chest and failing.

And I couldfeelit.

Like it was my own heart. Maybe it was.

I felt something else, too.

It nearly knocked me over, right off that cliff.

Love.

Not my own—Arran’s.

Arran loved me.

He hadn’t said it. Not those three words.

But it was right there in his heart, the heart that I felt beating and twisting. The heart that was a part of me now, because of the mating bond.

Not just because of the mating bond.

Because he loved me.

Oh, Ancestors. Why… fuck, but it hurt.