“Yes.”

“In the East the wolves are ruled by my family, the Rains. In the West they are ruled by the Cavanaughs. The O’Shaughnessy family rules the North, and do you know who the kings and queens of the South are?”

“Obviously not.” His little spiel was leaving me with a pretty good idea, though, and I didn’t like it.

“The royal family of the American South is the McQueens.”

Chapter Nine

“What the hell are you saying?”

“You are royalty. Your grandfather… His name was Elmore McQueen, wasn’t it?”

Grandmere most often referred to her now-deceased husband as that awful man, or more colorful Creole phrases as I grew old enough to appreciate them, but his Christian name had been Elmore. I nodded to confirm his assumption.

“Then your mother must have been either Savannah or Mercy McQueen.”

“Mercy.” I cast my eyes downward. Her name brought bile to the back of my throat and the sting of tears to my eyes. In spite of the large fire, I now felt cold.

“Your mother must have met with a lot of difficulty for settling with a human man.”

“My grandmere approved of it, and I don’t think Elmore really said much about it since he’d married a human girl himself. At least before he left her with three children to raise so he could bed down with a new bitch.” I let my tears turn to a fog of rage. I needed to push the sadness away if I was going to be able to look at him. The insult had a different sting to wolves. If there was a werewolf equivalent to the c-word, bitch was it. Lucas flinched to hear me say it.

A long pause filled the room, broken only by the sound of a log settling in the fire. We stared at each other across the desk, and I ached to touch him so badly my fingers tingled, but I couldn’t understand why.

“Regardless of your grandfather’s second family and your mother’s abandonment, you are by blood and birthright a princess to the Southern line. It all became clear to me when I learned your name.”

“What became clear? At the moment nothing is clear at all here.” I waved a hand around my head to illustrate my continued confusion.

“Let me try to phrase this in a way that won’t frighten you.”

“That’s probably not the best way to start.”

At least he wasn’t speaking to me like I was a child anymore.

“The thing is, while we have genetic explanations to make things easier for us to understand, there is still something primal and magical about being a werewolf. I was Awakened when I was thirteen, and it was like having a light turned on. I was roused from a sensory-debilitating sleep that day, and I haven’t looked back since. I see and hear better, I taste things more purely, and my sense of smell…well, you know how our noses work.”

In truth, since I was born this way I really had no frame of reference for what human senses were. I also had difficulty telling my werewolf and vampire abilities apart as some of them were so similar. I just nodded.

“As wolves, we feel things on a deeper level than humans. Connections between members of the pack are richer and more intense than anything human couples could understand. Within the old families in particular these bonds are almost unbreakable. We have come to understand it as a unique matchmaking system, one that has been built into our bodies.”

Now I was not only confused, I was getting nervous about the look in his eyes and the heat in his voice. As he spoke, something inside of me began to uncoil and rise in response to his words. I was drawn to the edge of my seat as though the thing within me wanted to carry me right across the desk.

“I don’t understand.” My breath was raspy and confessional.

“Among the oldest werewolf families there is a phenomenon known as soul-bonding. It is a measure by which the kings of our race pick those who they can truly trust. There is a call put out by the beasts inside of us that is meant for a select few to hear. It was how I chose Desmond to be my second. His wolf answered the call of my own when we were still very young, before either of us had even been turned. The call is the reason you felt me on that patio tonight. You knew who I was without having ever seen my face. It is why you could taste me in your mouth without having ever had trace of me there before.” The last part was said in the tone of a familiar lover, and I licked my lips.

This felt powerfully intimate, and I was leaning up against the desk now, as was he, the both of us swaying towards each other like trees whose branches longed to intertwine.

“You’re saying we’re soul mates?” As much as I would have liked to smother that last word with sarcasm, my voice would not allow me to.

“Soul-bonded,” he corrected. “I’m saying your body wouldn’t have reacted to the simple touch of anyone else in the world as it did to mine.”

“Y-you felt that?”

“The more you embrace what you are rather than shutting it out, you will find you can also feel what I’m feeling when we are together. I have been told it can make certain situations incredibly fulfilling.” His tone left no doubt of what he meant.

I shivered but felt the urge to remove my jacket. Leaving it on meant I could get up and walk out of the room at any moment, and my life would stay the same. I could ignore all this new information and choose to go on living my pseudo-normal, pedestrian existence. That life, mind you, was filled with executing vampires and other ghouls, and regular meetings with both a vampire liaison and my more frightening partner. My life was anything but typical. I could not deny that it was also very lonely.

If I removed the jacket, it meant I wanted to stay with him longer. To stay meant I had to accept some of the things Lucas was telling me. I would be allowing this man, a relative stranger, into my life simply because he told me we were meant to find each other. That we were destined by a mistake of birth and blood-borne pathogens to be together. Staying or leaving should have been such a simple choice.

But as Lucas rose from his chair, his eyes never leaving mine, I knew nothing would ever be simple again. I couldn’t deny the effect he had on me and I no longer wanted to. I’d been spending so much time with the dead I had forgotten what it felt like to be with the living. I’d ignored my own physical desires to such an extent I often forgot I had them.

He rounded the desk and moved towards me, and I was painfully aware that not only did I have the same desires of any sane woman looking at a man this beautiful, I had urges equal to those of an animal who had just discovered her mate.

He stood next to my chair and spun the seat so it turned to face him instead of the desk. My knees grazed his shins. He looked down at me, one hand on either armrest of the chair, and my breath caught in my throat. Heat radiated off us both, making the air between us stuffy.

I believed in vampires and werewolves, so why not believe in soul mates?

I took off my jacket.

Chapter Ten

I had told Mercedes that I hadn’t come here with the intention of bedding Lucas. I reminded myself of this over and over as he ran his beautiful, long fingers down my bare arms. Everywhere his skin touched mine it felt like fireworks exploding under the surface. I’d been with enough men in the past to consider myself a woman of average experience, but this was unlike anything I’d ever known could exist. I worried, perhaps foolishly, that I might be brought to the edge of orgasm while sitting in a chair as he grazed my arms.

He smiled as if he’d heard my thoughts. Maybe he had? I had no idea how this soul-bonding thing worked. His hands cupped my face, one trailing fingers through the loose curls of the ponytail on my shoulder as the other traced my jawbone with one thumb. He lifted a handful of my hair to his nose and smelled it.

His thumb stopped moving, breath catching in his throat and eyes growing wide.

“You smell like death.”

My whole body coiled like a compressed spring, ready to burst from my seat and away from him. I was terrified that he could tell what I was. If he could read my thoughts, the guilty rambling occurring there at the moment wasn’t helping my case any.

Then I remembered my gun. I remembered Henry Davies. I had a perfectly reasonable and somewhat honest explanation for smelling the way I did.

“I’m a bounty hunter.” I wrapped my fingers around his wrists and pulled his hands away from my face. After the next bit of my speech I didn’t think he’d still want to jump my bones. “Most of the work I do is for the local vampire council, executing rogue vampires.”

He took a step back, and I noticed for the first time he was barefoot. He tilted his head to the side as I spoke, a habit that made me picture him in his furrier form.

“Vampires aren’t the only thing I hunt. I also do private contracts.” I searched his eyes, hoping he understood the meaning of the statement.

“You’ve killed werewolves.”

He was a smart one, at least. It pleased me to know werewolf matchmaking hadn’t saddled me with an idiot for a soul mate. Although I was certain this confession period was going to make him less fond of me.

“Yes.”

“Were they killed because of someone’s hatred towards our kind? Some private vendetta?” His expression shone with rage.

I shook my head solemnly. I didn’t want to tell him the next part. “I’ve killed two werewolves. The first was the pet of a rogue vampire, and he tried to rip my throat out when I came for his master.”

Lucas sat on the edge of his desk. It did not escape my notice that he was now outside my reach. “And the second?”

“The second…” I looked around the room, like I might find the right words floating overhead. “I told you earlier I’d met another werewolf who knew my name. That’s part of what makes the second kill so difficult to explain. I want your word that what I tell you doesn’t leave this room and you won’t retaliate.” I could tell he didn’t like it, but he nodded, his mouth fixed in a grim line. “My second werewolf kill came at the request of an alpha in Albany.”

“Marcus?” Lucas was taken aback at this. I, for my part, was shocked he immediately knew the man who had hired me, though I suppose any good king would know who worked under him.