Page 18 of Promise & Artem

“I haven’t, but I’ll only let you make me breakfast if you let me help.”

She smiled. “You got it.”

She took him into the cabin and to the kitchenette. “Your sister and Charlotte took me to town yesterday for groceries. Ally and Richard said I could eat with the employees whenever I wanted, but I didn’t want to always have to go on a walk to have something to eat.”

She opened the fridge and pulled out a small carton of eggs and a jug of orange juice. “There’s bread in the cabinet,” she said.

He made toast and filled glasses while she fried up some eggs and plated them with the toast. She didn’t have jelly but she had picked up butter.

While they worked, she told him about her dream. “So do you know why I dreamed about some kind of fighting arena?”

There wasn’t a kitchen table, so they took their plates, silverware, and glasses to the little living area and the comfortable couch and wooden coffee table.

“I do, actually,” he said.

When he didn’t keep talking, she prompted him, “Is it bad? You can tell me anything, we’re mates.”

Her wolf loved to hear that word.Mate.

The corner of his mouth crinkled in a grimace. “It’s not great.” He paused again, staring at his plate, then looked at her. “I don’t want you to be sorry that we’re mates.”

“I won’t.”

He stared at her for a quiet moment, then said, “Do you know anything about minotaur shifters?”

“No. I didn’t even know your people were real.”

“I don’t think there are a lot of us, actually. So it’s just me and my dad. But what makes our people unique is that we’re cursed.”

“Cursed like a fairy tale?”

He chuckled mirthlessly. “Kind of. The males of our kind are cursed to grow progressively more aggressive the closer they get to age twenty-five. It gets more and more difficult to return to human form when we shift, and sometimes the shift comes along suddenly and can’t be controlled. I’ve done things in my shift that I’m not proud of.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“So you’re having trouble coming out of your shift?”

“Not anymore,” he said. He rubbed the space over his heart. “I can feel in my heart that finding you has fixed all that was broken with my beast. I won’t be totally free of the curse until we’re mated fully, but already the aggression isn’t biting at my neck like it was before we met.”

“What happens if you don’t find your mate by twenty-five?”

“We shift and can never shift back. That’s the curse: to be a monster forever.”

“Geez, that’s awful.” She’d heard of curses before. The mountain lion pride that her friend Lyric was part of now had been cursed by a goddess ages ago, and until the curse hadbeen broken, the males and females didn’t mate with each other because the females were cursed to never know love.

She put her fork down and reached for his hand. Her wolf let out a happy sigh at the contact. “I’m sorry you were dealing with the aggression of your beast. I feel like whatever you did under the curse of that aggression isn’t your fault.”

He looked like he didn’t believe her.

Inhaling sharply, he said, “I think the arena in your dream was related to my fighting.”

“What kind of fighting?”

“Underground shifter fighting…for money.” He explained that even though his dad had gone down a similar road as a young, unmated male, he’d cautioned Artem not to follow in his footsteps. “I didn’t listen of course,” he said with a wry laugh. “I knew my aggression was getting out of control once I turned twenty-four, but I thought I could handle it. I just killed a male I was fighting. I wasn’t totally sure I had until I woke up after getting choked out by some of the other fighters who were trying to keep me from killing the people watching the fights.”

She gave his hand a squeeze. “I’m so sorry you went through that. Do your parents know you fight?”

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