Page 4 of Broken Fate
“But, Mom—”
“You and Clive are going to make such a good pair,” she continued, adding the eggs to bacon, tiny fried potato bites, and two pieces of freshly baked bread already on the plates.
“I don’twantto be mated to Clive,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s my best friend. A loser nerd like me.”
“Which is why you two will be perfect,” she tittered with enough excitement for the both of us.
“I don’t want a mate,” I said strongly enough to gain my father’s attention.
“You will,” he said. “That’s how it works. The Fate Stone knows you best. It will pair you up and show you things you couldn’t see. If it puts you and Clint together, then you’ll find out you weren’t looking at him right all along. That’s how it is for everyone.”
“I don’t want to be like everyone,” I said, fully aware of how petulant I sounded. To avoid the looks I knew I would get, I put my head down and focused on my food.
It wasn’t like I could tell them the truth. That Clive was the only person in my life besides them, and I didn’t want to lose him as a friend.
Or that I was fairly certain that I would end up killing him, too. Just like Lanna. It would be easier if I didn’t have a mate. It was why I didn’t have any friends. Keeping them at bay was easier than being hurt again. Only Clive had stuck around, forcing his way past my bullshit. But even he didn’t know how I truly felt.
Avoiding friendships was a lot easier than avoiding tonight, though. I still hadn’t figured out a way. Could I fake being sick and get out of it that way? It seemed unlikely, and even if it did, it would only delay the inevitable. What I really needed was a way to stop it from happening entirely …
“Don’t take too long,” my father said as he cleaned his plate. “We have to get going. You know what they say.”
I finished the saying with a sigh. “Arcadia waits for no one.”
It had been a long time since I’d been to the city. I avoided it like the plague. But today, I had no choice. Every shifter who had turned twenty-one since the last Fate Night would be there to touch the stone and become bonded. Every one of them was excited, I was sure.
Everyone but me.
Chapter Three
“Jada! Jada, hey!”
“Hey, Clive,” I said, as my best friend—my only friend, if I were honest—came jogging up.
Behind him stood his parents, and I smiled and lifted my hand in greeting before they slipped into the back of the line several hundred yards behind my family.
“Been waiting long?” Clive asked, his eyes darting up to the massive walls that towered over the outskirts of Arcadia proper.
I shook my head as he slowed his jog. His deep brown eyes were full of easy happiness. That was Clive in a nutshell. Easygoing and always happy about nearly everything. It was one reason he’d wormed his way past my defenses. He never got upset when I tried to push him away, even when I had made fun of the really bad bowl cut his mom had given him a few months after we met.
Now, he stood tall and proud, hair the color of his eyes grown long and tied behind his back as was the current fashion for Arcadian men. His jaw was slimmer but well-defined, a holdover of his late growth spurt, but it suited his more triangular face quite well, which the girls at school had started to discuss in our final year. Clive never seemed to notice.
“We’ve moved about sixty feet in the past hour,” I said. “Not sure what’s with the snail’s pace. Must have been some commotion.”
“Maybe, yeah,” Clive said, standing on his tiptoes, resting one hand on my shoulder to balance as he tried to peer over everyone for a better look. “I hope they get moving soon. I want to get inside!”
I kept my mouth shut. It didn’t matter. Clive knew me better than that.
“Really?” he said, sounding a little dejected. “You’re still on the road of hate for tonight?”
“Nothate,” I said, slouching. “It’s not that I don’t want a mate, Clive. I’m just not ready for one. I don’t want ityet.”
That was a twist to the truth. The idea of being that close to someone else was terrifying. What if I lost them? I might never be ready for a mate.
“Oh, come on, everyone goes through with it. They come out fine,” he said, nudging my side.
“It’s not fair,” I said, my emotions boiling over. “I don’t want that life, Clive.”
The line shuffled forward two paces. I followed suit, kicking at the hard-packed dirt. The tiny cloud of dust I stirred up was caught up by the wind and dispersed across the plains. The prevailing winds came in off of Lake Arcadia to the north and west, gathering the dust and sending it out into the vast flatlands that stretched behind me and the Macrean Desert in the far east.
