“No. I’m fine right here. Tell me everything. What do you know and when did you learn whatever it is?”
I can’t stop myself from wincing under her glare. This isn’t my submissive or my therapist. It’s not the vibrant female I’ve spent the past week with, watching her come more and more into herself. The Maya standing before me is a stranger. She’s harsh and cold. And it’s my fault.
“I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure.”
“Just tell me,” she demands.
My wolf pushes forward, trying to get out. He doesn’t care about any of this. All he cares about is keeping her safe and putting his mark on my mate's neck. But that’s never going to happen if I can’t get her human side to understand I was trying to protect her.
“Caleb Cooper, the alpha of the Iron Fang pack, called me the night I brought you to Lunar Eclipse when you were with Sofia and Emily.”
“The pack where Jackson’s sister and the other omegas are?”
“Yeah, that one. I had called him when I first suspected you were some kind of cat shifter to ask if he knew anything about otherspecies. He and his brothers traveled a lot searching for their sister after she was taken, and he has more experience outside of wolf packs than I do. He didn’t have anything to share with me at the time, but he has been working with Katie to trawl through the records from the Keepers.”
Maya’s heart rate ratchets up, and I can’t hold myself back from wrapping my arms around her. She doesn’t allow me to comfort her, though, pushing me away as soon as I make contact. My wolf snarls and claws at me, desperate to be the one to make it better for her and not realizing that pressing her right now will make everything worse.
“Don’t,” she says, holding up a hand before doing that breathing thing again. “Don’t pull that fated bond bullshit on me. Don’t mess with my head. Just tell me the fucking truth for once.”
My wolf whimpers at the insinuation I’m using the bond against her. As if I’m not trying to use it to help her.
“They found records of cat shifters who escaped from years ago. One was a tiger; she was pregnant when she got out, and when they found her again months later… she wasn’t pregnant, but there was no cub.”
Maya walks to the couch and sinks into it, staring into space. “You said you didn’t want to say anything until you were sure? Are you sure now?”
I sit beside her, angling my body to face her even if she won’t look at me.
“It seemed like too much of a coincidence for it not to be true. Tiger shifters are rare, and the dates line up with how old you are,but shifters don’t abandon their young, so it makes sense that your mother would have only done so if she had no other choice. After looking at all the reports Caleb sent over, I’m sure this is where you came from.”
“I don’t understand,” Maya whispers, her voice cracking before she clears her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to. I just hadn’t yet.”
Maya nods, but she still won’t look at me. My hands shake with the effort of holding my wolf back. I don’t trust him right now. We’re all too emotional. Too prone to making bad decisions in the heat of the moment.
“How were they recaptured?”
“The Keepers had a way of faking the mate bond to make it possible to ensure pregnancy, and I guess it also helped them with tracking the females down. It’s pretty easy to find your mate through a completed mate bond if they aren’t too far away. It’s harder when it’s incomplete, so it took a lot longer.”
“I don’t understand what half of this means,” Maya says with a sigh, shaking her head before continuing. “Why wouldn’t she have run far enough away that they couldn’t have found her? Emily told me the mate bond can’t be traced if there’s a large enough distance. That’s why she ran from Aidan before the bond was in place.”
Maya stares into space as she talks, trying to process things that no one should have to. She wasn’t around when we rescued the omegas. She didn’t see what we did. Everything she has heard is secondhand; she couldn’t possibly understand how bad things were for them.
“I’m not sure,” I tell her honestly, rubbing the back of my neck. “Emily had a head start by leaving before she turned twenty-one; these shifters didn’t have that. They had to keep running, knowing the organization would be coming for them.”
“And babies would have slowed them down?” she asks, tears rimming her eyes that have me desperate to make it better.
I should have told her more about the Keepers and what they did sooner. I should have fed her this information slowly instead of overloading her with everything all at once. My wolf whimpers and scratches to be let out, to comfort her and take away her pain.
“I don’t think that was it. I had Caleb scan and email the documents related to the shifters who escaped, but it’s not clear. If she had rejected the mate bond before the escape, she probably would have been able to stay gone, but…” I trail off, not wanting to say it out loud. This final part of the puzzle I’ve been putting together.
“But what?” Maya asks, staring at me intensely.
I swallow roughly while my wolf snarls at me, trying to stop me from telling her things we both know will hurt her. “But severing a mate bond is a traumatic experience for the body. It can kill. If she had rejected the bond while pregnant, it would most likely have killed the cub. She had a choice to make, and she chose you.”
Maya flinches as if my words are a harsh slap across her face. She has wanted to know about her origins her entire life, and now that she’s learning the truth, I can’t imagine how painful this is for her.
“And my biological father, he wasn’t her fated mate?”
