“Really?”
“Really. Petró and I were close in dominance, and I’d say with most of the Blackwater alphas, I’m on par. But Kane… It’s an ungodly amount of power. Impossible to miss.”
I thought back from the moment I met the Blackwater pack to now, and something occurred to me. “You know, I think both he and Brielle have powered up since we found the stone, and I hadn’t noticed. He was strong originally, of course. But after her curse was lifted, there was a level up. And now with the stone whole, there is a little somethingextrato both of them. I don’t have a mark, so I haven’t been affected, and I guess it’s just happened slowly enough that I missed it.”
“You’re going into early heat. I wouldn’t call you unaffected.”
“Right. I just meant I didn’t get omega sealed.” I turned over my hand, showing off my bare palm, unlike the other females in the pack.
He covered my hand with his, interlacing our fingers before lifting them so he could kiss my knuckles. “Maybe that’s because you’re destined for a different kind of mark.”
I sighed. “The guardian thing? Brute, that’s such a long shot, it’s not even worth considering.”
“I don’t think so.” When I shot him an incredulous look, he doubled down. “I really don’t.”
I hesitated, not wanting to hurt his feelings, but he’d told me before that I could and should tell him anything. “I think that’s wishful thinking. You hoping that maybe I have a different calling, something that would mean I didn’t have to lose my job to be with you.”
“Ouch,” he said it jokingly, but also a little bit not.
We rode in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
“Listen, I get how it might seem like that, given I’ve been firmly pro-bond since the beginning, and you haven’t. But my mate being a guardian wasn’t ever on my radar. Like you said, they were stories my parents told me when I was little, a mark carved into some tree bark. But you… You have something more happening.” He exhaled harshly. “And I do too.”
That stopped me mid-thought.
“Like what?” I was strangely tense as I waited for him to answer, as if he was going to tell me something awful, though that was an absurd conclusion to jump to.
“I noticed it back in Rubix’s office. You were talking about the magical signatures you could see, and I was listening to you and staring through the bars right along with you, and something shifted. I don’t know how to describe it properly, but… One minute, it was all just metal. The next, I could almostseethe enchantments. In the bars, in the collars. Glowing script just appeared between blinks. And it wasn’t English or Hungarian, but somehow I could still understand it. I’ve worked with metal my whole life, but I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
“Holy shit. Why didn’t you say anything? That’s definitely something.”
He shrugged. “It didn’t seem like the time. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t necessarily want to give the information to Rubix.”
“Fair,” I said on a slow exhale. “Okay, so, something is up with both of us, and you think we’re becoming guardians.”
“I know it sounds far-fetched, but there’s no other lore I know that fits. It’s just…” he stared off through the windshield, shaking his head.
“What? Seriously, there can’t be any more bombs to drop at this point. Let me have it.”
“We’re not marked. If we were guardians, we’d bear the marks.”
“Like the one on the tree?”
“That exact mark. It’s kind of like your mate marks, where it appears by magic. And the lore wasn’t very specific about how or when that happened, but I was under the impression that the mark would appearbeforewe’d have new abilities.”
“Oh.”
“And I don’t have anyone to ask. My parents are gone, so how am I supposed to know if this is normal?”
So he thought something might be wrong? I kept that question to myself because he was obviously frustrated. Though, I peeked sideways at his expression and saw the hurt buried there too. That sense of loss, not having your family to lean on when you needed them.
That I understand.
“You keep saying lore. Is it all just oral history? Is there anything written we could look at?”
“No, I—” He froze mid-sentence, knuckles whitening on the wheel as he sent me an excited glance. “You’re a genius, you know that?”
I laughed. “No, definitely not. More of a meathead, by all accounts.”
