“Hey,” Dagon murmured, taking my hands in his, “look at me, sweetheart.”
I did. And my breath caught.
The unconditional love in his eyes, the happiness in the gray swirling with purple, coupled with the adoration, took my breath away. But behind the affection, I caught a flicker of something else.
Fear and uncertainty.
I leaned in and gave him a soft kiss. Then nodded, letting him know I was okay.
Dagon took a deep breath… and then blurted, “You’re my mate. Fuck, wait. This wasn’t right. No! It was right. You’re my mate. Hell, this wasn’t how I was going to tell you.”
Mate.
The word didn't surprise me. That was the thing.
It should have. By every reasonable measure, mate should have been a shock – an unfamiliar piece of demon vocabulary I would need to be talked through. But the word didn't land like new information. It landed like a name I had already been waiting to hear.
That fire I'd felt in my chest after the demon reveal. The way our first kiss in the abandoned town had felt like home. The two strings finding the same note. The whisper my soul had been doing for days while my mind insisted I didn't have language for it.
This was the language.
This was what my body had been saying all along.
Pressing my lips together, I did my best. I tried! Still, a smile broke on my lips. For the first time in all the years I'd known him, Dagon was… flustered.
His brows furrowed, but I couldn’t stop smiling. He was cute as fuck. Not that I was going to say it out loud. Still, my smile faded the second I saw the worry lingering in his eyes.
I had no idea what "mate" truly meant in demon terms, but I knew he'd explain. And strangely, I wasn't worried.
“What does a mate mean?” I asked.
Sure, I’d read enough fated mate books to guess, but I didn’t want to assume.
“Only the most powerful demons have mates," he said. "Usually, Starborns, sometimes Nightborns. But being powerful doesn't guarantee one.”
Dagon looked at me with awe that curled around my heart and squeezed.
“A mate is sort of like the human’s version of a soulmate. Our souls recognize each other. We were always meant to find one another. Always.”
We were destined for each other?
It felt too big for words. Too big for me.
And yet… some part of me had always known.
“When… when did you know?”
His body tensed before he answered.
“In the hospital. When I saw your blood, smelled it… I knew." He shook his head slowly. "I should've known the second I saw you in our kitchen for the first time. But my powers were still suppressed. That was the only reason I didn’t know sooner. I guess when I saw your blood, the bond came to the surface and I was able to sense it even with my suppressed powers.”
His words sank in slowly.
I remembered that time. Vividly.
The frantic way he had run into my room. The way his eyes had locked on the blood on my hand and the many emotions that started playing in his eyes. The way he had bent over my hand and pressed his forehead to my knuckles. The way I had felt his tears soak into the bandage at my wrist.
The whisper. The one I never heard. The one I had carried for eight years and yearned to have heard.
