Page 13 of My Unbearable Mate

“You mean, my grandmother’s necklace,” I corrected, taking another bite of food as he nodded. “It’s a gorgeous piece of jewelry. I swear every color is in that stone, and the metal is silver. Possibly platinum.”

“We know what it looks like,” he said with a faint hint of a rumble. “We want to know where it is.”

“Don’t we all.” I laughed. “Can’t help you there. I’m on the hunt for it too.”

“That locket belongs to us.” All the adorable was gone, replaced with pure alpha.

I couldn’t stop my mouth from dropping. “No, it doesn’t. It’s been in our clan for generations.”

“That’s true,” Alba chimed in. “Your ancestors stole it from us.”

The way she said us was like she meant that the bears who came generations before me had taken it directly from the bears sitting on either side of me.

Great, not only was this a cult, it was a ghost bear cult.

And to think I’d felt at home here. I was such a fool. I set the plate down and rose on shaky legs, wiping dirt away from my jeans.

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” That sounded much better in my head. “But like I said, I can’t help you.”

“You can,” Anders said. “Would you like to know the truth about your clan?”

“I’ve lived with them for forty years. It’s pretty impossible to keep secrets from me for that long.”

They shared another one of those looks. They weren’t looking through me this time, it was more like telepathy.

“Forty years is a blink of an eye in this story,” Anders said.

Run, my bear said. But my feet were pretty much rooted to this spot.

“You owe it to yourself to hear our story, and then you can decide what to do with the information,” he added.

I lowered myself back to the ground, equal parts pissed at myself for giving into this nonsense at every turn, and curious about what bombshell these bears could possibly drop. Maybe they could explain why I had no magic.

Now I was the adorable one, still believing this story had a happy ending. “Fine. Tell me everything.”

Anders cleared his throat. “Generations ago, there was only one bear clan in Idaho. We were strong and our magic was very, very powerful.”

“We didn’t consider it magic then,” Alba corrected. “It was simply being in tune with nature. Working with our surroundings. Listening to what the spirits have to tell us.”

“The Lynwood family had produced a long line of alphas,” Anders continued. He’d never clarified if he was also a Lynwood. “The Crowley family wanted to make a deal. They offered their daughter, one with strong intuition, as a bride to the next alpha, mostly as a business arrangement that they claimed would strengthen both families. It was an excellent deal. They were in control of one of the most prosperous farms in the clan. But our alpha was fated to another bear. And no force on earth is stronger than fate.”

It took everything I had to bite my tongue and say sheer, personal will could trump fate any day of the week, but things were different back then. That arrangement was probably the best my long-lost ancestor could’ve hoped for.

Hell, no. I needed to come to my senses. This pack was creepy AF and she probably dodged a major bullet by getting rejected.

You can’t deny this story has some major parallels to your situation, my bear said.

I wasn’t following her.

I could feel her rolling her eyes. Your family promised you to an alpha that would awaken your magic.

Okay, she did have a point, because they thought the key to their future depended on me producing a magical baby.

But until the locket went missing and I got abducted, everyone was doing just fine without it.

“We refused the offer,” Alba said, in case I was expecting a happily ever after. “The elder Crowley was furious. He refused to accept that we would reject his daughter, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer. Families started to take sides. Clan members stopped talking to each other. Tensions rose to an unbearable level. Then, the talisman went missing.”

“The Crowleys thought they could destroy us,” Anders rumbled. “It didn’t work.”

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