“No, you would be destined to mate with Jaxon—until you touched and refused him.” She smiles now. “But you didn’t refuse the bond, did you?”

Her words swim in my head, looking for the nearest shore. “Does that mean Jaxon wouldn’t mate with anyone else, either, until we met?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Well, of course, dear. How else could I insure you at least had a chance to become my Jaxon’s mate if he was already mated before you met?”

Oh my God. I feel sick. If I was right and the guy Flint had been talking about, the one he’d been in love with his whole life, was Jaxon… That means, all this time, Flint’s heart was breaking, thinking Jaxon wouldn’t choose him—when all this time, he couldn’t. Because of me.

I wrap my arms around my waist, the walls of the room closing in as I take a shallow breath. “So it was all fake? Nothing I felt for Jaxon was real?”

“Did it feel fake?” she asks and leans over to pat my hand.

I think of his eyes, of his smile. Of the way he touched me. And some of the pressure building in my chest starts to ease. “No. No, it didn’t feel fake at all.”

“Because it wasn’t fake,” she tells me with a shrug. “You know the mating bond rules—”

“You broke all the rules!”

“No.” She holds up an emphatic finger. “I bent a few rules, but I didn’t break any. I created a mating bond for you, but if you weren’t open to it—if Jaxon wasn’t open to it—you two never would have mated and would have been free to find your true mates. It’s as simple as that.”

It doesn’t feel simple. None of this feels simple. Even before a new and horrible thought pierces the whirling kaleidoscope of my thoughts.

“What if we’d never met? Would Jaxon—would he have spent the rest of his immortal life alone?”

“That would never have happened. I used an ancient magic that calls like to like. It was inexorably drawing you to Katmere, to Jaxon, from the day you were born.” Something close to kindness enters her green eyes.

I drop my head into my hands and fight the tears burning against the backs of my eyes. But I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to cry, not here and definitely not now. I won’t give her that satisfaction.

“Grace.” Her hand hovers over my arm like she wants to touch me again, and her eyes are softer than I’ve ever seen them.

Neither makes me feel better.

I push out of the chair and walk toward Hudson with some vague idea of convincing her to unfreeze him now that she seems to have mellowed out a little bit. But before I can, the one question I’ve had from the start—the one question that’s been burning inside me from the moment she admitted she manufactured the bond—bursts out of me.

“I just don’t understand why you did it. Not to me, because I get that. I was just a commodity to them, a bargaining chip to you. But what about Jaxon? You raised him. You trained him. He loves you. So why would you do something like this, something that had the potential to hurt him this much?”

“Do you remember what Jaxon was like when you met him?” the Bloodletter asks.

An image of his frozen black eyes flashes through my mind. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“He’d closed himself off a long time before you were born. Maybe I was too harsh in raising him or maybe it was just the product of having those two people as biological parents. I don’t know. I thought giving him a mate might undo some of that, or at least make up for it.

“And it wasn’t just for him, you know. You were supposed to be the last gargoyle in existence, that poor creature in the cave notwithstanding—” She stops for a second to clear her throat and to finish off her drink. “I knew that you would need his protection. That you would need Katmere and everything that Finn and he could give you.”

Her eyes are steady on mine when she adds, “I did it for both of you, Grace. Because you needed each other.”

There’s a part of me that hears the truth in her words. That flashes back to that first day at Katmere, when I was so lost and hurting. When I realized Jaxon was the same.

She said I needed the protection of Katmere—does that mean that the Bloodletter told Lia about me, knowing that she would kill my parents, and I would end up at Katmere?

It’s a terrible suspicion, one that makes my blood boil and my skin crawl, but then I realize she would have no need to do this. If the magic of our bond truly would have eventually drawn us together.

I turn away and see Hudson, his perfect face frozen in time. And wonder, just for a moment, if we were supposed to be mates all along. If, in a different world where millennia-old vampires didn’t do whatever they wanted, would we have been meant for each other after all?

I rub my chest as I swear I can feel a new crack slicing through my already bruised and abused heart.

I reach for Hudson, wanting the comfort—the solace—that comes from the feel of his skin against mine, even if it’s just for a second. But the moment my fingers brush his, something miraculous happens.

His fingers grab on to mine and squeeze, even as he blinks away whatever spell has been holding him frozen and immobile for the last fifteen minutes.

30

Who Needs Plausible

as Long as You’ve

Got Deniability?

I gape at Hudson for a second—totally shocked that he’s somehow come out of whatever trance the Bloodletter put him in. I glance behind me to see if she decided to let him go, but she looks as surprised as I am.

She covers it quickly, and that’s when I start moving, putting myself between Hudson and her. I expect him to come out of whatever this was gunning for her, and the only chance I have of stopping him is putting myself directly in his path. Because I don’t know much about anything, but I do know that Hudson will never, ever risk hurting me. Which means maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a chance to save this mess before it goes completely off the rails.

Except Hudson isn’t anywhere near as livid as I expect him to be. He’s annoyed, sure, but he was annoyed right before she froze him, and I figured the whole forced-statue thing would ratchet that up about two hundred notches. Instead, he’s just looking at us like he’s expecting an answer to a question.

I look back at the Bloodletter again, and this time she gives me her most grandmotherly smile. “He can’t remember, dear.”

“Remember what?” Hudson asks as he looks back and forth between us.

I should tell him—he’s got a right to know what just went on—but if I do, all hell will break loose. So I’m definitely operating on a don’t-need-to-know basis.

“Nothing,” I say.

I’ll tell him what happened later, when we’re safely away from this cave. He’ll be mad at me, but he’ll get over it. And I’ll be relieved he didn’t piss her off so much that she decided to use him as her own personal chew toy.

It’s a win-win-nobody-dies situation.

And yes, I’m more than aware that my standards for win-win situations have deteriorated significantly since I got to Katmere Academy, but now isn’t exactly the time to address that.

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Hudson tells the Bloodletter, “but you need to break Grace’s and my mating bond.”

She looks at him questioningly. “I thought you were just chastising me for playing God.”

“And you were telling me that power demands to be abused,” he shoots back. “So go ahead. Abuse it one more time and get us all out of this bloody damn clusterfuck.”

For a minute, I think the Bloodletter is going to explode over being ordered around, which really, really makes me want to drag Hudson into the corner and insist that he stop pushing her. I mean, I know he wasn’t privy to the conversation she and I just had, but still. He acts like he’s wanting her to come after him.

Or like he really, really wants to destroy our mating bond.

That thought cascades through me like a boulder. I knew before we came here that Hudson didn’t want to be mated to me, thought it was all a cosmic joke. But now that I know he was likely always meant to be my true mate, well, it feels like an even bigger kick to the gut.

“You need to learn a little respect,” she tells him with a glare.

“Give me something to respect and I’ll be happy to,” he shoots back with a glare of his own.

Not going to lie, I almost ducked at that one. Because I’m still not convinced smiting isn’t a thing.

But instead of ripping him limb from limb with her millennia-old power, the Bloodletter picks up her goblet and all but glides to the small bar made entirely of ice on the other side of the room. Once there, she very slowly, very carefully pours herself another cup of blood and takes a long sip.

When she turns around, the flames in her eyes are banked, though her mouth is still tight and her shoulders very, very stiff. “So,” she murmurs, and now she’s back to watching us like a dangerous cat with a very small mouse.

Which doesn’t make me nervous at all.

“You really want to break your mating bond?”