I shift my gaze to the floor, unsure how to navigate this conversation.
Tension radiates off of Anders. “Is Emily aware?”
“No. I haven’t spoken with her yet. But Troy assures me he will take care of her, and I will still be a part of her life to make sure of it. Troy is more afraid of me than he is of our own father.”
“Troy isn’t a natural Alpha,” he insists.
Neither was I before the accident. “He’s the second-born. It is rightfully his responsibility.”
Anders sighs and massages his forehead. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
“Did my father call you to change my mind?”
“No, nothing like that. He called to update me on the decision you both made. I think he mostly called to inquire about a little friend you’ve been spending quite a bit of time with recently,” he sneers.
I bite the inside of my lip to stop myself from grinning. Now I understand why I am here. In speaking with my mother, I let it slip that I was spending time with a new friend, a special female friend. Of course, my parents were nosy and interrogated Anders. Shit.
“She’s my daughter, Shadow!”
“I know. I tried to stay away. I can’t fight the pull, not anymore. She’s my true mate.”
His eyes narrow to slits.
I beseech him again, “She’s my true mate, Anders. She makes me feel alive, feel normal.”
“No. This ends now. Do you hear me?! This ends now!”
“I’m not you. I can’t just walk away and pretend that she doesn’t exist to me.”
“You think I did that on purpose!” he roars. “Everything I did, every choice I made, was to protect her. You think it was easy for me to fight the bond, to fight my instincts to stay with her? It wasn’t, but I had to. To. Protect. Her! I made so many fucking mistakes because I wasn’t strong enough. I refuse to sit back and watch our blood curse destroy you both!”
“I don’t believe in curses!” I spit back. “Curses are made-up bullshit to control their victims! They instill fear to prevent an individual from living their lives to their fullest potential. Have you ever once sat down and thought about what your life could have been if you hadn’t let that bullshit curse influence the decisions you made?”
Anders closes his eyes. Frost billows out from between his lips on his breath as he tries to regain control of his temper.
For generations, Anders’s family members experienced a tragic death of their true mate, and sometimes, it included the death of the family member themselves. Alpha Agnus lost her true mate to death after being ambushed by an unknown gang. Both of his parents and his sister were murdered during a home invasion by the Resistance. It’s why he swore that he would never become mated to another for fear that this family curse would take away the one person he loved the most. But the Moon Goddess still matched him with a fated mate. Even though he tried, he could never truly fight the bond that tied them together.
After I told Anders what I had learned from Sodie about his mate, instead of taking some accountability for his decisions, he swore it was the curse working against him. And now it’s pretty evident that he believes this curse will affect his daughter as well.
But I don’t believe in all of that.
“If you ask me, from an outsider’s perspective, you're miserable because of the choices you made out of fear, over something that doesn’t really exist.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he grits between clenched teeth.
“From what I do know, every decision you made—the ones regarding you and your mate—boiled down to incidents that had nothing to do with your bond. The Resistance and the White Hunt existed before you were even born. They had nothing to do with you or the fact that you found your true mate. Everything that occurred, you believed it related to the curse. That’s why curses carry so much power—they infect into your brain until you start weaving isolated incidences into some supernatural bullshit, affecting every aspect of your life.”
His hands clench into fists on his desk. The temperature drops to near freezing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeats in a low, threatening tone.
“You know I’m right. Every decision you made was of your own doing and had nothing to do with a supposed curse. I’m not going to let what-ifs and some hovering, bogus curse rule my life.”
“I’m warning you, Shadow. End this. Don’t let it progress beyond friendship.”
It’s too late. I’m already in deep. I’m not going to let him know that. I respect what he thinks he’s doing for her, but I won’t stop living my life. “Curses don’t exist. I will prove to you that this one doesn’t.”
We glare at each other in silence. After a few moments, I stand from my seat. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Anders snaps.
“Is there anything else to discuss?” Frankly, I’m done with this conversation. He won’t listen, not today anyway.
