“You know what.”
“I don’t. Tell me.”
“He’s going to fucking kill us if you don’t stop teasing us,” Vaughn says.
“It’s a good thing you are immortal then, huh?” I say with a wink as Soren walks in carrying a plate for him and me.
“What are we talking about?” Soren asks as he hands me a plate of waffles with bacon on the side.
“Nothing,” Vaughn says quickly.
Soren sits on the couch next to me, and I promptly steal a piece of bacon from his plate. Vaughn is relieved for all of three seconds before Soren talks. “You know,” he says, and I laugh.
“Talia,” Vaughn says again.
“Yes, Vaughn?” I ask.
“Stop encouraging him.”
“What am I encouraging?” I ask. “I’m just laughing at my mate. Isn’t he so silly?”
“Fuck my life,” Vaughn says with a heavy sigh as I take a bite of my waffle. I grin at him, and he just shakes his head, trying to hide his smile.
“I could think of other things to fuck than your life, Vaughn,” I say between bites, and he looks like he is about to go play in traffic.
A long stretch of silence fills the room, but we are all comfortable in it. Eventually, Dad is the one to speak first.
“So,” Dad says. “You met your mother?”
“She hates me,” I say with a frown.
“No.”
“Then what?”
“She wants to be you,” he says gently. “She always wants what she can’t have.”
“Was this always her plan?” I ask. “To wear my skin like Kill Bill?”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “What happened?”
“Well… I bullshitted my way into making them think they ruined the bond between me and Soren,” I say. “Oh… Micah marked me.”
“He did what?” Vaughn snaps.
“But that’s not how that works,” Laurent objects.
“It is when he fed his blood to her,” Dad says. “When she was nearly dead, and you all fed your blood to her, that created a bond.”
Vaughn, Diego, Caine, and Laurent all look at me, and then Soren. They look positively horrified, but they don’t say anything, so Soren doesn’t either.
“His was so weak that it didn’t really take all that much effort to go against him,” I say. “I only feed what feeds me, so to speak.”
“It’s not a completed bond,” Dad says.
“Then what is it?” Vaughn asks cautiously, still looking at Soren.
“When a hybrid feeds their blood to a marked mate that is not their own, but hasn’t been turned, it creates a foundation,” Dad explains.
