A million questions whirled through her mind. She rubbed her palms across her face, trying to organize her racing thoughts.
“Did you know him well?” she asked.
“I thought I did.” He made a sharp, hollow noise, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp of pain. “The older I get, the more of a stranger he becomes.”
“Who was he?”
He looked at her, and said nothing.
“You won’t even tell me that?”
“I will tell you nothing,” he said softly, “that would only hurt you.”
Ash had been held captive. He’d never spoken about what had happened to him, but she knew it had been brutal. An experience so traumatic that it had frozen him into the man he was today.
Her mate had been part of that. And Ash did not want to tell her anything about him. Because it would only hurt her.
“Was he…” The word evil stuck in her throat. “Was he…complicit, in what happened to you there?”
He didn’t say anything for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But just as she opened her mouth to ask something else, he said, “Yes. For a long time. He meant well. But yes.”
No, her swan cried in her soul. No. Our mate was good and strong and kind. He would not hurt anyone, not ever, except to protect and defend. He was our mate.
But bad people could have mates too.
If she’d found him…would she have been horrified? Tried to redeem him, to pull him away from that dark place?
Or would her animal’s instincts have overpowered human morals? Ash had said her mate had had his reasons. Would she have listened to them? Found her own excuses?
Would she have become one of Ash’s tormentors too?
We would have stood by our mate, insisted her swan. Never left him. Always loved him, always, forever.
“You’re absolutely certain he was my mate,” she whispered.
“He knew who you were. He knew your name.”
“How?”
Ash shook his head again, silent.
Swans weren’t the only type of shifter to have special powers relating to finding their mate. But the thought that her mate might have been a shifter, one of their own kind, and yet still been part of whatever evil organization had tortured Ash…somehow, that only made it all worse.
“Why didn’t he come for me?” she asked. “I came to find him. I crossed half the world in search of him. If I’d found him, would he have turned me away?”
“I think,” Ash said, with a catch in his voice, “that would have been the only way to keep you truly safe. He stayed away to protect you, Rose.”
“Do you think he was right?”
“Yes.” He met her eyes at last, and there was nothing but raw, bleak honesty in those dark depths. “God forgive me, but yes. He kept you safe, in the only way he could, and even now I cannot hate him for that.”
She hid her face in her hands. It was too much, too fast. Her swan still said no, no, no, even as her human mind had to accept the truth of Ash’s words. She didn’t know how to feel.
“I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, muffled.
“I never wanted to.” She heard him stand. “But now you understand. Goodbye, Rose.”
And she knew that she would never see him again.