The thought that they had was just another deception courtesy of his instincts. Those instincts had attempted to remove a hurdle between him and claiming his mate, had made him believe what he felt for Iolanthe had died all those centuries ago.
But what he felt for Mackenzie was more potent than his feelings for Iolanthe had ever been. It was intoxicating and controlling. Intense and consuming. It drove him wild.
He pivoted to pace back along the length of his bedroom and worried his lower lip with his thumb, toying with a cut in it.
So his feelings for Mackenzie couldn’t be real.
They were too powerful to be love.
It was just a biological, programmed response to his fated one. He was sure of that. It wasn’t real love.
He stilled as he sensed Fuery moving past his door, as he felt his friend enter his own room and sensed the one who waited for him there. Shaia.
Hartt stared at the black wall. Could he be wrong about his feelings for Mackenzie being a lie? Caught up in a desperate need to deny them in case they were a fabrication caused by the fact she was his ki’ara all in the hope of sparing himself the pain of realising the love he had thought was blooming inside him wasn’t real?
Shaia and Fuery were proof that it was possible to have real love with a fated mate. Prince Vail and Rosalind were too. Both of those couples loved each other deeply, had shown feelings for each other that Hartt couldn’t deny were real.
Fuery and Shaia in particular.
They had spent centuries believing each other dead and yet they had remained faithful to each other. Their love had endured.
Gods. He dragged a hand down his face and turned on his heel to pace away from his door. Maybe that was his problem. He had witnessed how Fuery’s love for Shaia, and her love for Fuery, had refused to die, had remained as strong as it had been before they had believed each other dead, and it had coloured his expectations. He wanted that sort of love for himself. Not the sort produced by a possible bond or the sort of love that soon died.
Or ended up broken.
What if he could have that kind of love with Mackenzie and he convinced himself to believe it was a lie created by the possible bond and let it go? What if she was his one shot at a forever kind of love?
The sort of love he wanted for himself, craved like a madman and would do anything to have.
He wasn’t sure he would be able to carry on living in this world knowing he had turned his back on that kind of love, hadn’t even tried to see if what he felt for Mackenzie was real and had just let her slip through his fingers. He didn’t want to be swayed by the bond by going to see her, but he couldn’t just give up on them either.
He would regret it if he did.
It would be his greatest mistake.
He needed to see her.
Hartt strode across his room, stripping off his top as he went, tossing it onto the floor. He stopped at his dresser, scooped water from the large bowl on it and washed his face and neck, clearing the blood away. He ran his hands through his hair, dampening and tousling the blue-black strands, and straightened.
His gaze dropped to the twin black and silver metal bands around his wrist, armour he was liable to need when Mackenzie saw him. She had told him she never wanted to see him again. The sensible course of action would be giving her more than just a scant few hours before he showed up on her doorstep, time in which her temper might mellow and she might not attack him on sight.
He couldn’t though.
He needed to see her. He needed to know if he really was falling in love with her.
He pulled a clean black tunic from his wardrobe and slipped his arms into it, fastened the silver buttons as he paced to work off some energy and form a plan. When every avenue he explored ended with Mackenzie attacking him, he gave up. If she lashed out at him, he would take whatever blows she needed to deliver to unleash her anger, to release the rage he had felt in her back in the alley.
When she had accused him of being in love with another and, like an idiot, he hadn’t denied it.
In his defence, he had honestly believed his feelings for Iolanthe had remained constant, when in reality they had slowly died, had never been strong enough to survive the centuries they had been apart.
He had the feeling that if his growing love for Mackenzie was real, it was the sort that endured. Gods, he was going to need it to be that kind of love, the sort he wanted, because it was probably going to take decades, if not centuries, to convince her that his love for her was true. Constant. Unwavering.
He finished buttoning his tunic, ran his hand through his hair again to neaten it, and focused.
Faint light shimmered over his body and then darkness embraced him. When it receded, he was stood in the square of a small town in the far north of the free realm, surrounded by black stone and dark wooden buildings that all towered two storeys tall, with a third level set into their pitched tiled roofs.
It had been a long time since he had visited this town and he hoped it was home to the guild where Mackenzie lived. Every other guild he could think of refused to employ females or only employed females from particular species, like witches or dragon shifters. One guild even preferred to employ succubi, using them to target unwitting males who were then killed while in the throes of passion.
Hartt made his way along the main street that made up the bulk of the town, nodding to a few of the people coming and going along it. Beyond the buildings that lined it, smaller homes stood. They numbered less than fifty.
He turned down an alley between a tavern and a store selling colourful fabric.
Growled when someone slammed the flat of their hand into his chest and drove him backwards, forcing him to take steps back into a square. Whoever they were, they were strong, and angry. The sharp scent of fury laced the air as they shoved him in the chest hard enough that he felt sure it would leave a bruise.
He bared his fangs and lifted his gaze, pinning it on the one who had dared to block his path.
A female demon stood before him, her huge black leathery wings obscuring his view of the alley and the small building at the other end of it. She casually fluffed her silver-streaked black hair, twisted a few of the shorter lengths around crimson-tipped fingers, making them stick out even more. Her black horns gleamed in the lamplight as she advanced on him, her amber eyes glowing with sparks of fire as those horns grew, curled around her pointed ears to flare past her lobes.
“You stay the fuck away from Mac,” she growled, small fangs flashing between her scarlet lips as she scowled at him.
He frowned right back at her. Mac. Mackenzie. The demoness knew her, which meant this was the right place. It also meant that this was probably the demoness who had come to the bastion of the First Legion and had given Grave the impression she wanted to remove Hartt’s intestines.
Hartt got that impression too as she squared up to him.
“I need to speak with her,” he started.
She jabbed a finger into his chest, hard enough he was sure his sternum cracked, using it to punctuate each hard word she hurled at him. “You. Stay. The. Fuck. Away. From. Mac.”
He went to seize her hand when she prodded him again, but she was gone in the blink of an eye. His senses blared a warning as he felt her behind him and he tried to move, but she was faster, grabbed him by his neck and dug her claws in.
She hissed in his ear. “Men like you deserve to be put down. Bastard. Hurting my beautiful Mac like that. She tells me she dumped your sorry, two-timing ass.”