Page 52 of Bad Girl
I was about to expand on that but he cut straight across it.
“Simple? How hard is it?” He kept his voice just below shouting level, which in Cuán’s register still filled a room.“Cuán, I’ve found my mate. That’s it. That’s the whole sentence.”
He turned away and stared out of the window.
The city spread out below us—Canary Wharf at night, lit and indifferent, the Thames catching the light in long broken lines. From up here it looked ordered. Manageable. Nothing like it actually was.
“I’d have been happy for you,” he said quietly.
I knew that. That was the part that sat badly.
“She isn’t—normal,” I said.“The bond might not take. I’ve been trying to find out more before I said anything. About her. About rejected bonds.”
The silence that followed was brief and total.
He swivelled around. Jaw dropped. Eyes wide in a way I almost never saw on him—Cuán, who had an opinion about everything and delivered it without hesitation, standing in my living room looking genuinely struck.
“Yeah,” I said.“That was probably my reaction too.”
“That’s not possible.” He shook his head, a hand going through his hair.“Our mates are fated. It’s absolute. Mum and Dad—”
“Are exceptionally fortunate,” I said, cutting him off.“And not every bond is theirs.”
He stared at me for a long moment.
Then something went out of him—not the hurt, not the worry, but the argument. He crossed the room and dropped onto my couch with the full committed weight of a man who had just been handed news he needed to sit down for.
“I need a brandy,” he said.“For the shock.”
I rolled my eyes. But I moved to pour him one.
Against my better judgment, I told him.
“She’s coming to dinner tomorrow,” I said casually.
His jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes. He took the brandy from me, looked at it briefly, and downed it in one go—making every Irish ancestor we’d ever had collectively proud—then extended the empty glass back toward me without a word.
I refilled it.
“What’s on the menu?” He pointed at me with the glass before drinking again, slower this time.“Don’t fuck this up, Conrí. One of us has to reproduce. The pack needs heirs and I am not currently in a position to provide them.”
He closed his eyes. His brows drew together with the gravity of a man contemplating something genuinely tragic.
“I may never find my mate,” he lamented.
“Cuán—” I began only to be cut off.
“Thirty-six years, Conrí.”
“You’re the same age as me.”
He opened one eye.“Eighteen minutes younger. It’s different.”
I looked at him for a moment—sprawled across my couch, second brandy in hand, mourning his unmated status at volume while I was the one with a potential broken bond and a mate who had poisoned an entire office floor and bitten her ex-boyfriend’s testicle off.
I turned away with the empty glass.
Whiskey. This conversation required whiskey for both of us.
