Page 40 of Ruthless Monsters

I’m not the only one who notices the unusual encounter, because gasps come from the rebels milling around us.

“What?” Blake asks, confused. “Haven’t you guys heard that sharing is caring? We all have mouths to feed, and mine just happens to belong to a feisty crow who gets mean when she’shungry.” She peers down at the large pile of birdseed that remains on the ground. “I mean, it’s not like I took much.”

I smile. “That you managed to take any without losing a hand is a wonder. No one would dare take food from a Pecos, not even me. Many of the birds were warriors once. Now they help us in other ways, but they’re still to be respected.”

“It’s not like I stole its food,” she defends. “I asked politely. Maybe if more did the same, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.”

I’m not sure what she means, but she turns and walks down the street and away from me before I can question her. Waylen goes to follow, but I wave him away and move quickly to catch up with her.

Blake walks until she finds a stall laden with different colored crystals cut into intricate shapes, and she stops to browse. “What is with all the crystals?” she asks without looking at me. “Is it simply a resources thing, and because you have tons of them you figure you may as well utilize them, or are you all genuinely obsessed with crystals?”

She picks up a green crystal that’s shaped into a winged centaur and appreciates the small sculpture. The merchant watches kindly, stepping back to give us privacy, even though his eyes are practically bulging out of his head as he stares at us.

“It’s a long story,” I reply.

“And let me guess,” she says. “One that you’re not willing to tell me right now?”

I don’t answer, and she places down the crystal. “I get it. You’ve only just met me, and I’ll bet after what happened with the witches, any outsider must make you nervous.”

My brows slam down. “What do you know of the witches?”

She frowns, and even now, even as talk of the witches has painful memories flashing in my head, those golden eyes draw me in.

“I guess I can’t be sure of anything now. Not after what your brother told me,” she replies. “My kind, the demons, have been at war with the witches for as long as I can remember, but for the first time…” She trails off, shaking her head before continuing. “Well, I’m second-guessing everything I thought I knew about them.”

“So he told you, then?” I mutter.

She studies my face. “It’strue, isn’t it?” When I don’t immediately reply, her expression hardens, and she turns to another crystal. This one is shaped into a star with six points. “Countless lives could have been saved if the witches knew the truth.”

The pain I’ve worked hard to bury rises to the surface. Because she’s right. And it’s that truth that I can never seem to escape. “I only found out what he’d stolen from the witches when it was too late,” I admit, regret tugging at my chest.

I’m not sure why I do it, but as she turns toward me again, as the memories of the past threaten to overwhelm me, I step closer to her.

Her rich scent of honey and cinnamon rushes at me, and it instantly dulls the pain building in my chest, and replaces it with an intense hunger unlike anything I’ve felt. It’s not the hollowing pain I had grown accustomed to, from the periods of starvation in the prison, but a hunger that comes from the deepest parts within myself. A hunger that could only mean one thing…

I don’t think, I only act as I pull the dark-haired female to me. When my lips press against hers, her warmth chases away the darkness inside of me, and for a moment, I’m not drowning in my mistakes. In my failures. For a moment, all there is, isher.

A moan slips from her lips as her arms slide around my neck, and I realize that every rumor about having a fated mate is true. Because she ismine.

She’s panting when she breaks the kiss, and she blows away a stray strand of dark hair that has fallen in front of her eyes.

“Lady Fate can’t seriously be doing this to me right now,” she says, her breathing labored.

I can’t stop staring at her. At the way her lips move when she speaks. At the way her golden eyes glow brighter as she stares back at me. And at the obvious flush in her cheeks betraying her own desire.

“How?” It’s all I can manage to say as I keep holding her.

“That’s a great question,” she replies. “I tend to go with asking ‘why’ instead.”

“A fated mate pairing hasn’t happened for any of our kind since our arrival in The Haven,” I tell her gravely. “And it was uncommon even before that.”

“What can I say, Lady Fate likes to make the weirdest matches,” she replies, then looks at me oddly. “Now when you say ‘pairing,’ you do realize that Dante and the others are also my mates, right?”

I breathe in deeply again, and my cock throbs, my body responding to her scent.My mate.It’s so strange saying the words in my head. Like something from a fable I had once read as a child. An impossible dream, just like the notion that my kind might one day again be above the surface, able to soar through the clouds.

“It’s already weird with the four of them, and adding you is going to be…strange,” she goes on when I don’t respond.

“The only thing that matters is that I have you,” I reply, not bothered by the idea of having to share her. “To be bonded by fate to another is a privilege I never thought I’d experience.” My fingers skim gently over the side of her face, and I press a kiss to her forehead. “Provided your other mates treat you with the respect and adoration you deserve, I am sure we will all get along.”

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