“You’re used to people hating you,” I realized aloud.
“I am.”
I pressed my palm to his cheek and drew my thumb across his lower lip. “I see you, Shade.”
“Do you?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I leaned in to kiss him softly, craving his touch with an abandon I couldn’t ignore. “I feel you, too.”
He palmed the back of my neck and allowed me to slowly explore his mouth with my tongue. It was a lazy embrace filled with unspoken words.
The bond had opened a connection to him unlike any I’d ever felt, yet something about it was familiar, too. I suspected it had to do with the roots we’d already established inside each other with his initial two bites. Now that he’d finished our mating, our link had blossomed into a world of color and sensation.
His pain became mine.
His fears, too.
Yet I didn’t fully understand them or why they existed. I just knew it had something to do with whatever he’d seen.
“You have Fortune Fae in you,” I realized suddenly, pulling back.
“Yes,” he admitted softly, sliding his hand down from my neck to rest against my hip. “On my mother’s side.”
My lips parted. “That makes you an…?” I couldn’t finish, surprise rendering me speechless.
“An abomination,” he whispered. “Of a sort, anyway. Fortune Fae Alphas are former Midnight Fae who refused to drink blood, making us all related at our origin. Yet we’re not allowed to crossbreed, why?”
“Because it makes powerful kin,” I breathed.
He nodded. “Yes. And those who are in power right now don’t appreciate the challenge cross-species pose. But a thousand years ago, that wasn’t an issue. My grandmother mated my grandfathers without much prejudice. One was a Fortune Fae Alpha, the other a Death Blood—the former king before the Nacht family took over.”
I frowned. “Wait, but you said your mother’s side had Fortune Fae?”
Another nod, his expression grim. “My father married into the familial line of power, then claimed it as his own because females are not allowed to lead.”
“An archaic law,” I muttered.
“Actually, no, it’s not. The Nacht family—Kols’s grandfather, specifically—enacted it. My mother would have been on the Council had it not been for his chauvinistic actions. He used my grandmother as an example of why women shouldn’t lead.”
“How?” I wondered out loud, captivated by his history. This was the most Shade had ever revealed about himself, and I felt through the bond how much this all meant to him. And instinct told me it all tied into our fate as well.
“She went into hiding shortly after the call for Quandary Bloods to be eradicated.” A shadow touched his features, one that darkened his ice-blue irises to a dark gemstone similar to sapphires. “Constantine Nacht stated that my grandmother’s emotional state forced her to choose family over duty. He said all women were born with that loyalty flaw and therefore were not fit to lead. Thus, my father was marked as the Death Blood incumbent over my mother.”
“He didn’t object?” I asked, shocked.
“No. Actually, he fully supported it.” Shade’s jaw ticked, showing how he felt about that. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“But what happened to your grandmother and her mates?”
He studied me for a long moment. “They suffered a similar fate to the Quandary Bloods.”
“They died?”
“Not exactly,” he replied cryptically. “What happened with the rock, Aflora?”
His abrupt change in subject took me aback, some sort of wall going up between us. He didn’t want me to know about his grandparents, which meant he was hiding something.
As much as I wanted to press him, I sensed the importance of letting it go.