Pain rolled through her. She should have shut the door in his face.
Her idiot lioness was simply happy to have him in the same room again.
“You deserve to know it all,” Rhys started in a low, pained voice, “so here it is. I had a mate. We were young, but I knew the moment I saw her we were supposed to be together. The stars aligned, the chorus swelled, all the shit that’s supposed to click just… happened.”
Sage’s ears rang. Had? Three letters came together for an ominous, sickening word.
“We had three years together. I’m not going to lie and pretend we were wrong for each other, or we wanted out. We were mates, and it was good.” He slowly pulled his eyes from the ground and roved them up her frame. Dark blue bored into her with serious intensity. “You? You make me feel the exact same way. I’ve been through that loss before, Sage. The other night? I found lions in our territory. Nothing pulled me off. Not Dash or Colette. Not knowing I should be here with you. I saw them, and they turned into pain from the past. Feeling that, not knowing what was real or not, made me lose my shit and push you away.”
Truth. Absolutely honest, ringing truth.
How he was even on his feet, she didn’t know. He wasn’t an uncaring psychopath like her father, capable of murdering his mate and taking another in just a few weeks. He hadn’t given up like Colette’s father, either. He hurt, obviously, but he stubbornly clung to life.
“What happened to her?” she asked her toes.
“Hunters. Assholes had been through our town just a few days before. They asked questions about wildlife when they stopped in the shop to get a patch on their tire. I should have known they weren’t the typical tourists. I should have known they were looking for something more than deer.”
Guilt swirled in his scent and she understood. He’d survived. He lived and breathed and carried on while his other half died.
“You couldn’t have known,” she murmured. Not unless he’d been a mind reader or the assholes blatantly advertised their plans. Even then, what could he have done without exposing himself? His alpha would have been the one to figure out what actions to take, not him. The guilt he bore was entirely undeserved.
“They found her while I was working.” His voice tightened with sorrow. “I hear the gunshots in my dreams. They send me shifting and running—”
“And attacking everything in sight?” she finished for him.
Rhys nodded solemnly. “Half awake, half asleep, it’s hard to pick out past and present. Everything feels like a threat and I’m racing against time to save her. I felt that the other night. I didn’t know if I was chasing her killers or Jasper’s lions.”
Her heart broke for him. No wonder he’d pushed her away. He wasn’t running from her. He ran from the tremendous loss he carried. And the moment that loss came close to becoming a reality again, he walled himself off to keep from feeling it.
“To this day, I don’t know if our pride was the target or if they just got lucky. I don’t know if they were associated with some bigger group. I assume not because no one came looking for the three I finished.
“The first two were easy. I found them camped in the mountains. Dumb fucks would have tripped over the dragon roost if they’d kept going for the night. The winged ones would have made what I did look like fun and games. The third was harder, but he must have been convinced there were more of our kind. He circled back to town. I found him in the burger joint and didn’t even wait to get outside before I started beating on him.” His hands twitched as if they were ready to swing against that ghost of the past, but he went on, “My father and the second dragged me off before I shifted. It was close. So fucking close. I don’t know what would have happened if they got there a few seconds slower. The place was full of humans. I’d probably have killed them all. As it was, I nearly exposed our pride, which couldn’t be allowed to stand.
“My father, the alpha of our pride, spared me a clean death. He had me bound in silver so I couldn’t shift, then had me whipped. I wasn’t allowed to shift to heal. The sentence had to stick, he said, as if I was ever going to forget what happened. When I had a nice patchwork of scars, he stripped me of my rank and position in the pride and exiled me from the territory. A mercy, he called it, but I don’t know what kind of mercy it is to make a man live without his mate.”
She stayed quiet. Questions built up on the tip of her tongue, but the weight in the air kept her lips sealed shut. He was there. He promised to explain. She recognized the pain that darkened his scent. Fighting through it to put words in the air took time.
So she gave it to him. Time to put them in order. Time to rip through the pain that encased his heart.
Rhys tightened his hands into fists. “For the longest time, rage was the only thing carrying me forward. I fought hard, Sage. You think what I put the rest of the pride through is tough to watch? I left a path of broken shifters from North Carolina to Montana trying to outrun the pain. I wanted to die. You changed that.”
Sage jerked her head up. He reached into his pocket and drew out another carving, then pushed to his feet. Heavy footfalls carried him from her couch to her kitchen bar where the lioness he’d made had sat for days.
He pushed the two figurines together,
