"You're a rule follower, aren't you? And how bad is that girl's luck?"

"Rules bring order to chaos and turn animals into gentlemen. Structure helps one know how to act or respond in any given situation and makes things simple. And to answer your second question, I secretly believe that Bethy may have been cursed or something. I have never seen someone so afflicted with not only bad luck, but also bad coordination and balance. It is like watching a drunk stagger around a ballroom, barely missing tables stacked high with champagne glasses only to get to the doorway and trip, break their arm, and then have a bowling ball land on them out of nowhere."

"You're not serious."

"Very. There was a reason why Tarak and Kuruk rotated shifts guarding Bethy. One would need to practically go on a bender to recover from watching her. Not that they ever did, but if there were ever two men on this earth that deserved to, it was them."

"She's pregnant, you know; I could smell that when I met her."

"Which is why both Kuruk and Tarak passed out at the news. I do not know which aspect of her pregnancy scared them most: protecting her while she is carrying or once she has delivered, having two special ones to watch over with the same bad luck."

"Poor things."

"What about you? Do you have family?"

"No."

"Just no? You managed to drag my entire sordid tale from me, can you not trust me with your story too?"

When he leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck, she felt the walls around her heart begin to crack. "I was barely an adult, still a cub really. I remember asking my Papa if I was old enough to visit the human towns. He would laugh and ruffle my hair and tell me I could go when I was older. I think I was about two hundred at the time. We had a happy life living in the forests of what is now eastern Russia. Nature provided us with everything we needed, so we stayed in tiger form most of the time. One day, I was coming home from a hunt and had a bad feeling. When I arrived at our den, there were pools of blood. Both of my parents had been skinned and their bodies left behind like trash. I got so angry that I blacked out. When I woke up, I was lying in the middle of a human home. I had killed the men that had my parent's hides drying in the back." Eva felt the old nausea rise as it did every time she remembered what she had done. Her mate rubbed soft circles on her back. He didn't say anything, allowing her to choose to continue or not.

"I shifted back to human and walked to the back. I wasn't used to human hands, so my fingers were having troubles with the knots. That's when I heard the sound of a hammer being drawn. I turned and a small boy, no more than five or six, was pointing a gun at me. I just stood there. I knew no matter what had happened to my parents, I could never harm a child. So I waited. He looked at my parent's hides behind me and then at me. He asked if I was the one that killed his father. I told him yes. He asked if I was a tiger and I told him I was. That's when it dawned on him what was hanging behind me. He asked me if they were my friends. I told him that they had been my mother and father. He looked so shocked, so confused. He put the gun down and ran back into the house. I didn't know what to do.

"He came back out carrying a knife; he walked past me and tried to cut the ropes that had drawn my parent's hides taut. I asked him why he was helping. He turned, and I saw he was crying. He said his father had killed my mother and father, but I had only killed his father. He told me even in my snarling rage, I had spared him, his mother, and his two baby sisters. I took the knife and cut down my parents' skins. He asked me how he could tell a regular tiger from a human tiger so he wouldn't kill someone's mother or father by mistake. I told him not to kill anything he didn't have to. If he killed a tiger that was attacking him, he was within his right to kill it in return, but killing just to kill was wrong.

"I took my parents home, wrapped their skinned bodies in the hides, and buried them both by the river they loved. After that, I couldn't stand living in the forest alone, so I made my way to the human's city. I stole some clothes from a clothesline and a purse off a man who was trying to rape a woman. I slowly learned how to be human, saved my money, and headed west. I didn't stop until I reached Texas."

Eva didn't even realize she had started crying until Adriel turned her to face him, and he began to kiss her tears away. It was the first time she had ever told anyone what had happened to her parents, and she was glad that the first person she told was her mate.

"Gods, my love, I wish I had been there with you. It hurts my heart knowing you were out there alone, dealing with such grief at a young age when I existed in this world. I would give anything to take this pain from you."

She sniffled as a smile began to form in her heart. She looked up and, for the first time in centuries, she truly didn't feel alone. "I know of a way you can make me feel better."

"Maybe that is not such a good idea; you have relived a trauma. It would be wrong of me to press advantage while you are in a delicate state."

Eva saw the sincerity in his eyes and realized that at that exact moment, she had fallen head over heels in love with him. She rose to her knees then straddled him. "You are my mate, and your mate needs you very much. Will you deny her?"

Already, his body was responding. At the junction of her thighs, he was starting to harden, and his eyes had shifted to a ruby red. "I could deny you nothing in this life. If you asked for my still beating heart, I would rip it happily from my chest. Anything in life you desire, I will give to you, for I will never be able to repay the gift of you."