Page 100 of Fated In Blood

“You can go straight to hell.My king.” I dropped him back onto the floor and stumbled back a step until my back hit the wall, my shadows sinking back under my skin. “She’s not my fucking mate. Even fate couldn’t be that fucking cruel.”

But I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think around the word hovering front and center in my mind.

Mate.

Like a fucking, undeniable truth, that word settled deep into me.No. No. NO.

Riordan straightened his coat. “I see what’s right in front of me. Unlike you. Now. Are we going to go get her, or are we going to stand around and argue?”

Riordan had to be wrong. Mates were rare and precious, something gifted once a generation to a chosen few.You knew the truth from the beginning. You want to pretend you didn’t, but you knew what she was that very first instant when your eyes locked and that split second became an eternity.

Everything inside me reeled, exactly how the world had spun after we’d been together for the first time, but now, there was no sense of rightness, no sense of possibility.

Now there was only the fear I was too late.

Fear turned to resolve, fury to focus. I would not fail her. Not this time.

“She’s right there.” I squinted toward the cloud-flecked sky. “Five miles, due south.”

“We can’t just rush in there.” Rohr was uncharacteristically somber as he studied me. “If they’re holding her on hallowed ground, then whoever has her knows she’s been turned. This could be Tyrell’s trap, although why he’d lure us all the way down here…”

“It’s her own goddamned family.”

I knew without a shred of doubt who had her. Who’dhurther. Who had always hurt her, ever since she was a child. Hurt her enough she’d spent her life running.

Because it was the same sick bastard who’d hurt me.

Silas.

Shadows exploded out of me, slithering over the stained carpet like spilled ink, shaking the thin walls of the cheap hotel before I spooled them back. Nothing made sense…except for this terrible ache in my heart at the idea of her suffering. I couldn’t comprehend how Evangeline could possibly be my mate, but I no longer hated her for being a Silverwood.

I was just…done hating her.

A sense of peace swept over me, like a weight had been lifted, and fuck Riordan and his theory, but I swore that place beneath my heart grew a little bit warmer.

41

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Ten minutes later I crouched in the shadows of the trees, white-hot fury spreading through me like caustic poison.

They had Evangeline staked out in an open field, dried blood crusting her shackled wrists, an open gash on her forehead, and a black eye blooming beneath her tangled hair.

She’d either fought like a demon or they’d beaten her, and my anger coalesced down into a dark, pulsing seed of hate. I was going to paint this entire fucking compound with their blood.

I ground my teeth together. “We have to get her free.”

“That will take time,” Rohr’s sharp eyes scanned the field again. “They’ve used iron to chain her and those rods are driven four feet into the ground. We can’t break the shackles without hurting her more than she already is. You go charging in and neither of you will survive.”

Solid advice, but I didn’t care.

There also were a dozen snipers in the tree line, equipped with long-range rifles and silver bullets, likely filled with a cocktail of chemicals to eat us from the inside out in case they missed the headshot. We were a quarter mile away, but I sensedanother twenty pairs of eyes watching, waiting for us to take the bait.

“There’s someone—something--else here.” Riordan sounded worried. “But I can’t get a read on what I’m sensing. They aren’t human, that’s for sure.”

“I feel them, too.” I blew out a shaky breath. The presence moved quickly, staying well outside the perimeter. Possibly unrelated, but…I didn’t believe in coincidences.

Her family did this.If Silas was capable of such depravity against his own child…how much pain had Evie endured before her mother had gone on the run? Another wave of shame hit me, that place beneath my heart twisting like I’d been flayed wide open.

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