Page 193 of Caelum

She blinked at me. “What is it?” she asked softly. “The other one, I mean.”

“I don’t think you’re even ready to hear what it is, honey?—”

“Tell me,” she urged.

I dropped the weight and shrugged. “My heart.”

For a second, her mouth opened and closed, and I knew my statement was correct. She hadn’t been ready, might not be for a while.

Being Chosen worked differently on a man than it did for the female doing the Choosing. Females held more power in our relationships, and yes, that was unfair, but it was just how it went. Maybe it was karma because the truth was, human females flocked to creatures like moths to a flame, and we usually fucked them over because we didn’t have any other choice.

There was no mate for us outside of our people, so humans were just the providers of an itch we needed to scratch. By contrast, the females of our creatures were picky but usually polyamorous when it came down to it, mostly because of the cultural norm of being shared by a Pack.

Take mine, for example. If all three of us had been Chosen by three different women, we’d all have shared them. There’d have been no boundaries. Some females even chose lovers outside of the Pack, whereas that wasn’t something a male could ever do. Not because our cocks were in Venus flytraps, but because we were hardwired that way. Sure, we could get an erection for another woman, but the desire? It wasn’t there. Our souls were in control, and they wanted Pack.

So, while I fully accepted I was in way over my head where she was concerned, and maybe not wholly in love with her but falling, I knew she wasn’t ready for a declaration of any kind from me. Not when shit was so up in the air for us.

“You freaking out?”

She blinked at me slowly. So slowly it was a robotic move, and trust me, I was in a Pack with Samuel. I knew what a robot was.

“No,” she admitted, and I could tell her answer surprised her.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I think I’m freaking out about not being freaked out.”

I couldn’t refrain from laughing about that. “Well, that’s a good step. You’ve had a shit ton of overwhelming days, Eve. I don’t want to add to the burden.”

“I didn’t think you did.” She dipped her chin and began to leaf through the book that had been leafed through a thousand times before. “Why is this special to you, Frazer?”

Didn’t she like it? Discomfort powered through me, but this was Eve. She needed to know eventually.

“When I was twelve, I was dumped in this mental health facility. My parents called it that, but it was an asylum. Before that, I’d had a charmed life, Eve. Like, that sounds as though it’s from a book, but it was true. My parents didn’t give a fuck about me, but I had one of the best nannies and a blank check on anything I wanted. Not the best childhood but not the worst.”

“Then the souls revealed themselves,” she stated softly.

“Yeah.” I blew out a breath. “Things got bad quickly. My dad’s a politician. He couldn’t be seen with a whack job kid hovering in the background, messing up his campaigns with freaky shit because he was dealing with split personalities. So, I got dumped in the asylum, and it was hell. With a capital H.

“I dealt with it, though. Handled the shit thrown my way because I had no choice, but what got me through was that book.”

She gaped at me. “Shakespeare got you through?”

I snorted at her amusement. “No. We used it as a reference code.”

“What do you mean?”

My lips curved. “I like to draw. It’s a family thing. From my mother’s side. Her dad was a famous artist.” I didn’t bother name-dropping because I doubted she’d know him. “So, we used to send each other messages within the pictures.” I shrugged. “We built up a code, and we used to talk that way.”

“That’s pretty cool,” she blurted out.

“It was a survival mechanism,” I countered. “In each image, from left to right, there’d be symbols. It would tell us which page to go to and which line and word.”

“That must have been a detailed picture,” she exclaimed.

“It was. Very detailed. More like…” I thought about it. “You know a rug? How it has a repeat pattern? Kind of like that. But that is what got me through.” Scraping a hand over my hair, I stated, “I wasn’t allowed that many visitors, but one day, Louise turns up and she’s about forty pounds lighter than before. She had raccoon eyes and she was spaced out. I didn’t think anything of it because, to be frank, my family was fucked up. The women were always dieting to be thinner for the press, and the men were always beefing up for the same reason. We always had to look perfect. If anything surprised me, it was the raccoon eyes. We usually left the house pristine, to the point of narcissism.

“She was zoned, dazed throughout the meeting, and I didn’t realize it, but it was her goodbye.”

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