Page 43 of Bad Blood Alpha

“Right?” Xander said. “It’s Flynn’s superpower. One of them, anyway.” He poured vodka into his own orange juice. “He won’t share his secret recipe, either.” He snitched a slice of bacon off her plate.

“Don’t make me cut you,” she said.

He gave a huff of laughter. “I’d like to see you try, Princess.”

He reached for another slice, and she had her knife out of its thigh sheath before he could even get his fingers on it.

Out of nowhere, a knife appeared in his other hand, blocking hers.

Xander smirked, but he left her bacon alone. “Fine,” he said. “I was full anyway. Want to throw knives with me sometime? I have targets set up. Around the other side of the trailer.”

Kira nodded. “Okay. Sometime.” First the dead glitter squirrel, now this. Xander’s hospitality sure as hell wasn’t like other people’s, but somewhere in all the bizarreness, she could sense the hand of friendship being extended.

She blurted out, “I think I messed him up. Flynn. When he—when we—”

“Did the boinkety-boink?”

Close enough. She toyed with her second pancake. “The thing is, what the draken did to us isn’t like regular bonding. They put all this magic in me, and it’s all going crazy, and I thought being with Flynn would fix it. But what if it doesn’t, and then he’s stuck with me? And he can’t be with anyone he really cares about? The bond wasn’t supposed to be about feelings. Draken don’t care about feelings and love. Their bonds are about duty.”

“You sure about that?” Xander said. “Because you don’t make cutesy pancakes for somebody out of duty. You do it to make them smile. FYI, wanting to make someone smile is a feeling. It’s also one of the first signs of true mate madness.”

They definitely didn’t have that. Kira said softly. “I feel like I’m using him.”

Xander snorted. “Seriously? Flynn doesn’t get used. And he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”

“You think so?” Kira said. “He doesn’t want to love you all. But he does.”

That made Xander smile. “We are a major pain in his ass. But that’s good, right? Because even if you’re a major pain in his ass, maybe he loves you too.”

Kira shook her head. “He doesn’t even know me.”

Xander took a long gulp of his drink. “That’s not really how mating bonds work.”

“I told you,” Kira said, putting the plate aside, one of the dragons still half-eaten. “It’s different with us. It’s a magic spell. An oath.”

Xander sat for a minute, peeling the label off his orange juice bottle. Finally he said, “I was born human. Turned. It’s a long story,” he added, at her questioning look. “And I’m not going to tell it now, no matter how epic and tragic it is. But it means I didn’t grow up with this idea of fated mates, so maybe I look at it differently. But true mates are magic, aren’t they? What makes your magic different?”

“Ours was put on us by a sorcerer, for a specific purpose. It didn’t just happen.”

“Maybe.” Xander ran his fingers around the bottom of the bottle. “But if true mates are fated, like shifters say, then someone somewhere—or some thing—decides about that too. It doesn’t just happen. The powers that be, or whatever, pick out the people who are supposed to be mates and make sure they find each other, right? So maybe that something picked you two out to be these chosen ones.”

“Because we were good for the Draken House of Al-Maddeiri.”

“Maybe. Or maybe because you’re good for each other.”

Kira shook her head. It would be so easy to rationalize it that way, but that didn’t make it true. “You got all this from dragon pancakes? Which he didn’t bring me himself, by the way. To supposedly see me smile. He didn’t even bother to yell from the front porch.”

Xander slid off the porch and dusted off the seat of his jeans. “Well, true mate or not, he’s never gonna be anybody but Flynn. And Flynn doesn’t chase after people. Or try and get them to appreciate him. But it makes him happy when they do.” He nodded at the plate. “You done?”

“I guess.”

“Then it’s time for me to give you the tour. Don’t get overexcited and pee your pants or anything.”

“I’ll try not to.”