Her mate.
“My mate,” she said out loud.
“Yes,” he breathed. “My mate, my Rose, yes.”
Not our mate! Her swan’s scream split through the chaos in her mind. Its furious wings beat back the old memories, fighting them, refusing them. Our mate is gone, our mate left us, this is not him! Not our mate!
Her throat felt sliced open. She couldn’t speak, choked by pain. She remembered, remembered what he’d been to her. Remembered how bright and fierce he’d burned in her mind, how he’d lit up her entire soul.
Now…her heart was a barren, charred wasteland. And it had been for twenty years. She’d huddled over cold ashes, and thought herself content, because she’d forgotten she’d ever known fire.
She lifted her head, looking at him. The young man she’d loved so passionately, the older one she’d loved no less deeply. She saw them both at once. Blaze reignited in Ash’s careworn face, hope burning bright in those eternal eyes.
She jerked her gaze away, unable to bear the sight of him. Sliding off the bed, she snatched up their discarded clothes.
“Get dressed,” she snarled, hurling his uniform at him. “And get out.”
He caught his garments, but made no move to put them on. “Rose, you remember me. That should be impossible, I was sure it was impossible, but my fire touched you just now, and you remembered—”
He stopped abruptly, his breath catching. The joy transfiguring his stern features faded, turning into horror.
“Ten years.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, hiding his expression. “I wasted ten years.”
“Twenty.” Rose could barely do up the buttons of her blouse, her fingers were shaking so much with rage. “Twenty years, Ash—Blaze—oh, for heaven’s sake, what am I supposed to call you now?”
He dropped his hands again, emerging looking gray and weary. “Ash will do. That’s how everyone else knows me, after all. And I couldn’t have returned to you earlier. I had to hunt down the warlocks, had to make sure none of them were alive to follow me to you. It took me a decade.”
More fragments of memory flurried up in her head—cages, despair, an ocelot’s spotted fur. She remembered her own righteous fury, how she’d burned to bring the warlocks to justice. Her own raw, young passions washed over her, disconcerting in their intensity. When had she stopped feeling things so deeply?
When he burned our mate bond.
“Well, at least one good thing came of this,” she muttered. “I’m glad you destroyed all those evil monsters.”
His mouth tightened. His fingers crept up to rub the old scar around his right wrist. “I didn’t. I never found Corbin.”
She stared at him. “But you came back to me.”
“I’d made a promise,” he said, very quietly. His shoulders dropped in a long sigh. “ I shouldn’t have come back to you. We never found a trace of him, not in all those years.”
“We?”
“I didn’t hunt alone.” He hesitated. “Do you remember the wendigo?”
A blizzard in July. Icicles and antlers. She flinched. “You teamed up with that thing?”
“He…wasn’t what he seemed.” He shook his head. “In any case, we killed every warlock from the base, tracking them down one by one. Except for Corbin. Ice—the wendigo—was certain he had to be dead. He wanted to give up the hunt. And I…I’d reached a point where I couldn’t bear another day without you.”
He looked away, down at the clothes still draped across his lap. He absently smoothed a thumb over the fire service crest embroidered on his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to stay. I just wanted to know that you were well. That you’d made a life for yourself, like you’d dreamed. So I came to England. I found your pub.”
His voice went soft. “And when I walked through the door, you smiled at me, whole-heartedly, as though you’d been waiting for me all that time. Even though you didn’t know me.”
She remembered the first time she’d seen him—no, not the first time, oh, this was far too confusing—she remembered when she’d first laid eyes on Ash. How she’d looked up at the door just before he opened it, though she hadn’t sensed anyone approaching. How her stomach had given an odd little flip at the sight of his tall, quiet form, even before she’d seen his face. How her swan had said not our mate, the way it always did…but how her heart had said otherwise.
That wasn’t a new memory. She’d worn that one smooth, reliving it night after night. Tryi
ng to decide if she was just being fanciful, or if she really had felt that strange, bright spark when their eyes met.
Now she knew that she had.