“You are such a fucking idiot, I’m ashamed to call you my cousin.”
Wow. Okay then.
I glared at him. “Oh, lovely. Just what I needed to hear right now.” I sat back and crossed my arms. “I see Lady Sarhin has been rubbing off on you.” I sneered at him, stung by his words because a tiny voice in the back of my mind agreed with him. “And not in a good way.”
He grasped my shoulder, not letting me shrug him off.
“What Zh’alek did was unforgivable. I know that. And I know it’s taken a long time to get over the hurt and the betrayal. But judging everyone else by his standards is letting him hurt you all over again, because Talis is nothing like him, and you know it.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What?” He turned me to face him. “Explain to me what you think I don’t understand?”
Anger welled up inside me, not at Dathal but at every fucking thing that I couldn’t control. Unfortunately, Dathal was the one in front of me. “I trusted Zh’alek. Ilovedhim, for fuck’s sake. And because of what he did to me, I can’t fucking trust anyone else. I can’t let myself be that vulnerable again.” I shook my head, hating the way my eyes filled with tears.
Fuck.
Dathal slipped off his stool and pulled me into a hug. It was so similar to what Talis had done that a sob tore out of me.
He let me cry on his shoulder, saying nothing, only holding me tight while I fell apart in his arms.
* * *
When my tears finally stopped,Dathal ran a hand up and down my back. “The thing that you don’t seem to understand,” he said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it before, “is that you already do trust Talis. In his wolf form and his human one. You trusted him enough to tell him about your magic when there was no guarantee how he’d react. The two of you aren’t together, and he’s not bound by blood magic to keep your secret. But you told him anyway because you know in here—” He pulled back to put a hand over my heart. “—that he would never betray your trust, no matter what.”
“But—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.” He lifted his chin, daring me to answer. “Tell me that you look at Talis and don’t know with every fibre of your being that he would protect you with his life.”
“We’re pack,” I muttered lamely.
“Chlah ferath,Axel.” Dathal scoffed. “You’re better than that.”
I closed my eyes, not wanting him to see the truth in them.
Because he was right.
On both counts.
I did trust Talis.
And I was a fucking idiot.
Talis wasn’t as loud and outgoing as some of the other shifters. He had a quiet confidence about him that had appealed to me from the start.
He made me feel safe.
He always had.
Safe enough to be myself, not the Axel I showed to everyone else apart from Dathal.
And sometimes Rys.
I’d pushed him away because of it.
“I’m scared,” I admitted, hating how defeated I sounded. How fucking vulnerable.
Dathal laughed, and whatever reaction I’d expected from him, it definitely hadn’t been that.
