Before His Fated Mate

Chapter Four: A Conversation She Was Not Ready For

Zevran was looking at her like he had been standing there for a while.

Not coincidentally heading in the same direction. Just standing there on that path in the early morning light, waiting, like he had known exactly where she would be and had come specifically to find her.

That alone made something tighten in her chest, because she had not told anyone where she was going this morning. She had just walked. And somehow, he had found her anyway.

Sorelle had gone very still beside her.

“I will be right there,” Eirlys said quietly, without looking at her.

Sorelle did not move immediately. She looked at Zevran the way she looked at things she did not trust, slow and measuring, before she finally got up and walked past him without a word.

The look she gave him on the way past could have cut glass.

Then it was just the two of them.

Eirlys did not walk toward him. If he had something to say, he could come to her. She was done closing distances that were not hers to close.

He came to her.

He stopped a few feet away and looked at her, and she looked back, and neither of them said anything for a moment.

He looked tired in a way that had been building for longer than one night. She had noticed it over the past weeks and told herself she was imagining things.

She had not been imagining things.

“Eirlys.”

Just her name. Said quietly and carefully, like he already knew this conversation was going to cost him something.

“You knew where I was,” she said. “How?”

He did not answer that directly.

“I needed to find you before the rest of the pack was fully up.”

“Why?”

“Because I owe you a conversation.”

She laughed at that. Just once, short and completely without humour.

“You owe me a lot more than a conversation,” she said. “But go ahead.”

He exhaled slowly. Looked away from her for just a second, then back.

“What I said last night, it is not what you think it means.”

“Then tell me what it means,” she said. “Because from where I am standing, it means you have been keeping something from me deliberately. And I want to know what it is.”

“Eirlys, —”

“Do not,” she said.

The word came out sharper than she intended, but she did not take it back.

“Do not say my name like that. Like I am someone you need to calm down. I am not upset, Zevran. I am asking you a direct question, and I want a direct answer.”

He looked at her for a long moment. That measuring look she had seen him give other people, but never her.

Or maybe he had given it to her before and she had just not recognised it for what it was.

“The situation with Veyra is complicated,” he said.

Veyra.

There it was. The name that nobody had said out loud in that hall last night. Sorelle had noticed it, and now here it was, just dropping out of his mouth like it was nothing, like he had not just handed her exactly what she had come looking for without even realising it.

She filed it away and kept her face neutral.

“Complicated how?” she said.

“There are things happening in this pack that go beyond what I have been able to share with you,” he said. “Political things. Things that involve other packs and agreements that were made long before you came here.”

“Agreements,” she repeated slowly. “You are standing here telling me that your fated mate is the result of a political agreement?”

“I am telling you it is not simple.”

“You keep saying that,” she said. “Complicated. Not simple. But what you are not doing is actually telling me anything. You are just putting words between me and the truth and hoping I will get tired and stop asking.”

He was quiet.

“I know you,” she said. “I have spent enough time around you to know how you manage conversations you do not want to have. And I am telling you right now that it is not going to work on me today.”

Something shifted in his expression then. Something that looked almost like relief, which made absolutely no sense to her, but it was there for just a second before he put it away.

“Veyra and I have a history,” he said finally. “Before you. Long before you. And when she came back, it was not just about fate. There are things tied to her return that affect the safety of this pack. Things I could not ignore even if I wanted to.”

“Even if you wanted to,” Eirlys said quietly. “So you wanted to.”

He did not answer that.

She laughed. Not the hahahaha kind. The quiet kind that had nothing funny in it at all.

“You wanted to ignore it,” she said. “And you could not. So instead, you said nothing to me. You just let me keep living inside something that was already over, and you said nothing.”

“It was not over,” he said.

His voice had an edge to it now that had not been there before.

“What I said about her being my fated mate, that is true. I cannot change what she is. But what existed between you and me, —”

“Do not finish that sentence,” she said. “Do not stand here and tell me what existed between us like it is something I need to be reminded of. I know what existed between us. I lived it. I believed it. I built my entire sense of safety in this pack on it.”

She stopped. Took a breath.

“And you knew the whole time that it was going to end like this.”

“I did not know how it was going to end,” he said.

“But you knew something was coming.”

Silence.

That was her answer.

She nodded slowly. Not because she was okay with it. Just because it confirmed what she had already known since last night, and there was a strange hollow kind of relief in having it confirmed.

At least she was not crazy.

At least she had not imagined the distance in him over the past weeks.

At least she had not been falling apart over nothing.

“Who is she really?” Eirlys said. “Because Sorelle noticed something last night. She was not surprised by the announcement. She stood there calm while the whole pack went crazy around her. That is not someone who just found out they are someone’s fated mate. That is someone who already knew.”

Zevran’s jaw tightened.

“Who is she, Zevran?”

“She is someone from my past,” he said carefully. “Someone connected to decisions that were made about this pack’s future before I became Alpha.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one I can give you right now.”

She stared at him.

“The only one you can give me, or the only one you are willing to give me?”

He did not answer that either, and she was starting to understand that his silences were their own kind of answer. Every time he went quiet, it was because the truth was sitting right there and he had decided she could not have it yet.

Not yet.

There were those words again.

She took a step back. Then another. Putting distance between them deliberately this time.

Not because she was done. She was not even close to done.

But because she needed to think, and she could not think properly standing this close to someone who still made her chest do things she did not have the energy to deal with right now.

“I am going to find out,” she said. “Whatever it is you are keeping from me, I am going to find out. And when I do, the fact that you had every opportunity to just tell me is going to matter.”

She turned and walked away.

He did not call after her.

She had not expected him to.

But some small stupid part of her had hoped.

She kept walking and did not look back and turned the name over in her head with every step.

“Veyra.”

Sorelle was going to want to hear this.