Page 27 of Out of the Darkness

Madelyn just sighed and shook her head. He sounded so sure of this, of them. Meanwhile, she had never been sure of anything. Her life was a rollercoaster that she was still trying to navigate. She didn’t know how she was supposed to do this.

“Look, I get it,” he began, brushing her hair out of her face. “You aren’t a shifter, so you don’t feel the bond the same way I do. You probably feel some attraction and the desire to be around me, but nothing much stronger than that. For me? It’s entirely different. It’s… it’s an obsession, an addiction. My wolf is devoted to you and you alone. There will never be anyone else for me. Nor do I want anyone else.”

That was probably the most she had ever heard him say all at once, and it was a lot to take in and unpack. She pressed her lips together and looked up at him. “One of these days, you are going to have to tell me more about this whole shifter thing.”

“What do you wanna know?” he asked, the corner of his lips tilting up slightly.

Madelyn leaned against the wall and folded her arms across her chest before letting out a breath. She had so many questions that she didn’t even know where to begin. She knew Melanie and the others were waiting for her to return, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to finally get some answers. All of this had been driving her crazy for weeks.

Deciding that her friends could wait a little while longer, she figured she’d start with an easy question. “Were you born a shifter?”

With a nod, he settled against the wall next to her before he stuck his hands into his pockets and propped his foot up on the wall behind him. “Yes.”

“How many of you are there?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted with a shrug of his shoulders.

“But there are others; it’s not just you, right?”

“Right. Rogue shifters are lone wolves though, meaning we don’t run with packs or with any other shifter. I became a rogue after I killed my father, but I had been born into a pack. There were sixty-five of us in that pack, though there are dozens more all over the world.”

Madelyn nodded, taking in that information. That was a lot of shifters, and the fact that no one knew they even existed was mind-boggling. “How have you guys remained hidden for so long?”

“Easy,” he said. “We learn to control our wolves at a very early age. We stick to small towns that are surrounded by woods so that, when we do let our wolves out, it’s not so conspicuous, and it’s easier to hide. We stay away from cities where it’s harder for us to let our wolves out, and if someone did stumble across one of us, while we were in the middle of shifting or something, we’d just take care of them.”

“Meaning you killed them,” she clarified.

He nodded again. “They’d be considered a threat, so yeah. We killed them. We’d make it fast though so they didn’t suffer, and then we’d either make it look like an accident or make the body disappear entirely. Packs never killed lightly though. They’d try talking to the person first, explaining the situation, and assessing the risks.”

“Do, uh, do I need to be worried?” she asked hesitantly, not sure she wanted to know the answer. By all accounts, she would be considered a threat now since she knew about the existence of shifters.

Thankfully, Xavier shook his head and she was able to relax a bit. “No, little dove. You do not need to be worried. You are my mate. You were going to find out eventually. Many shifters take human mates. They just have to make sure that their mate is in a position to accept them and their secret before they tell them.”

“But you didn’t do that with me,” she muttered. “You didn’t wait.”

“I tried, but I wasn’t given a choice, no,” he explained. “Colby threatened you. And then that junkie tried to kill you. Your safety is my number one priority because, if anything happens to you, I die. That’s how strong the bond is for me. So, I took the risk, even knowing there was a possibility that you could expose the existence of my kind.”

When she found out what he was, she had been angry that he had kept it from her, especially since they had slept together. But after taking the time to really think about it, she realized it made sense. It was a big secret, one that couldn’t be trusted to just anyone.

So, her being angry with him for not trusting her had been completely unwarranted because he had trusted her. He had shown his true self to her before he knew if she was ready to hear it, which made her feel like a jerk for ignoring him for the last two days.

“Tell me more about the fated mate thing,” she said after a while.

If he was getting annoyed with her questions, he didn’t let on. “To be honest, I thought it was a myth. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard of a shifter finding their fated mate, but since I don’t really associate with any others of my kind, it makes sense that I hadn’t heard anything. When a shifter sees his fated mate for the first time, he knows it immediately. It’s this strong, undeniable pull that leads you to this person, and a bond forms between you and them, one that’s said to strengthen over time. It’s like a flashing neon sign that screams that this is the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with. The one person who’s your absolute perfect fit.”

“Soulmates,” she whispered.

Xavier looked at her and nodded. “Yes. And that person? Our soulmate? They become everything to us. They become our life, our will to live, and we would do anything and everything to protect them. They are all that matter in the world. And because shifters are mainly social creatures, we can’t be away from them for too long, or we start to lose our minds. We go feral and have to be put down, or we become a menace. And if they reject us? It’s an instant death sentence.”

“Which is why you started stalking me,” she sighed, thumping her head back against the wall. The more she learned, the more everything seemed to fall into place. The more it all made sense.

Xavier wasn’t trying to be creepy or weird. He just couldn’t stay away from her without losing his marbles. Granted, he could have approached her like a normal person and struck up a conversation, but considering the way he was brought up, he probably didn’t have much by way of social skills.

Looking over at him, Madelyn gently took Xavier’s hand in hers. “Thank you for being honest with me. I appreciate it.”

“I’ve never lied to you, little dove,” he stated, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “I may have kept things from you, but that was only because I needed to be sure. Now that you know the truth, I won’t keep things from you anymore.”

“Good, because I’m going to have more questions for you.”

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