Page 117 of Twisted Ties

“I think they were human.”

“Andrew Playford’s?” I ask Azlan.

“Andrew’s!” she says, alarmed.

“His body has been found,” Azlan says softly.

“Oh.” Her gaze falls to the floor.

“He deserved to die,” I say through gritted teeth. “He betrayed you. Handed you over to be …”

“No one deserves to die,” she says. Then shakes her head. “You think Barone killed him. Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” Azlan says. “The authorities seem to think Andrew had gotten himself tangled up in gang business.”

“Oh,” she repeats, picking her shoes up from the floor.

I see her to the door and when it closes behind her, I rest my forehead against the pane of wood and attempt to catch my breath.

“It was always going to happen,” Azlan says. “You could only fight it for so long.”

And how can I argue with him? He’s been through this too. Faced the same temptations. And even my friend, a man I’ve seen deny himself all manner of pleasures and indulgences, who shunned his family’s wealth and luxury for a much harder life, stumbled when it came to this girl.

“If she wasn’t so …”

“Yeah, if she wasn’t.”

“If I claim her, if I seal the fated bond–”

“We’ll find a way to make it work.”

“You think we can? That we can live that way?”

“Yes,” he says simply.

If the fated-mate bond is rare, the fated-mate bond between one core and many is even rarer. But there have always been cases. Throughout history, throughout time. How I ended twisted up in one is beyond belief to me. Even if, like Azlan, I always knew we’d share the same fated mate if fate ever gave one to us.

She thinks she’s unworthy. A nobody. A nothing. She has no idea.

But they’ve been known to work.

“There was a memory in her head …” I say, turning slowly to face my friend.

“Yes?” His face is flooded with curiosity. He watched his mate writhe on the floor when I unlocked those memories. He must be dying to know what lay inside.

“Of crimson magic.”

“What are you saying, Phoenix?”

“History,” I say simply.

37

Rhi

My body doesn’t wantme to leave that cabin. The strange sensation in my core, the one I now know to be my bond, doesn’t want me to leave either. Both were more than content, cocooned between those two men and it is like ripping off my own skin to leave them. It’s that intense, and the fated-mate bond isn’t even sealed with Stone yet.

Do I want it to be sealed? My body and the bond both scream yes. But my heart. And my mind. They’re less sure.