“My mate?” It was so far from anything she’d expected Ash to say that for a moment Rose wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “What about him?”

“Your mate is the reason I never said anything about…my feelings.” Ash’s head made the tiniest jerk, as though he’d started to look down but then forced himself to keep holding her gaze. “And he is the reason why I cannot be with you.”

“Ash, we’ve already been over this. I refuse to let my life be dictated by a man I never met. It doesn’t matter to me that you aren’t him.”

“He is the reason I cannot be with you,” Ash repeated, more forcefully. “Not why no one can be with you.”

His face was utterly unreadable, as closed and expressionless as she’d ever seen. She looked at his hands instead. That was how Ash betrayed emotion, she knew.

Right now his left hand was clenched tight over the scar on his right forearm, knuckles white. His nails dug so deep that she feared he was about to slit his own wrist.

She reached out to him, to make him break that shaking grip, but he jerked away.

“Do not—” He stopped, closing his eyes for a moment and taking a deep breath. “Don’t touch me. You would not want to, if you knew what I have done.”

And suddenly, she did. It was an impossible, ridiculous conclusion, but she knew, knew that it was right.

“You knew my mate,” she said.

He had the face of a dead man, gray and frozen. Very slightly, he nodded.

It was like a candle kindling in her mind, throwing new light on piles of shadowy memories. Innocent, perplexing mysteries about him, suddenly illuminated.

Suddenly made monstrous.

“You.” She could barely force the words out past the hurt and betrayal tightening her throat. “You had something to do with his death.”

“I did not kill him.” His hand twisted on his wrist. The old scar stood out stark white against his tanned skin. “But I might as well have done. In any event, I am the reason you don’t have a mate.”

“How?”

He flinched as though the word had been a gunshot. “You know that I was imprisoned, once.”

She did, though he’d never explained how on earth anyone could have shackled the Phoenix. It had taken her over a decade to tease out the barest facts—that he’d been a captive of a secret military program in America, that he’d grown up there, that he’d eventually escaped and sought asylum in England.

“Your mate was there.” His eyes met hers for a fraction of a second. “Do not ask me how I know. There are things I cannot—will not—tell you. But he was there. And when I destroyed that place, I also destroyed your future. Your happiness. And so I destroyed us. What chance we might have had.”

She felt cold inside, cold as ice. She picked up her glass, draining the whiskey in a single swallow. It might as well have been water. The burn didn’t touch the numbness in her chest.

She’d never told anyone the date of her mate’s death, the exact moment when she’d felt that shock of loss. She wouldn’t have been able to stand having people creep around her, pitying, uncertain of the correct protocol. She’d always pretended it was just another day.

But now she realized that Ash had always been there. No matter whether the date fell on a weekday or weekend, he’d made sure she wasn’t alone at that hour.

He’d known.

“All this time,” she said, through the ringing in her ears. “All this time. Would you ever have told me, if I hadn’t forced the issue?”

“No.” His tone was flat, final. There was no hint of apology in it.

Distantly, she wondered if she should be angry. If she should throw him out, ban him from her life, never speak to him again.

But he was still Ash, her friend. Even now, with her soul raw and bleeding, she simply couldn’t believe that he would ever hurt her. That he could hurt her.

“You didn’t tell me for a reason,” she said slowly, things connecting in her head. “And not just because you didn’t want me to hate you.”

He stopped breathing. She’d never seen anyone so utterly motionless.

“Do you hate me?” he said, after a moment.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, honestly. “This is—it’s—damn it, Ash, talk to me! Tell me why you didn’t tell me this before.”

He stared down at his knees. “Because I knew that it would bring you nothing but pain. And I could not bear to hurt you any more than I already had.”

She digested this for a moment. “I have questions.”

He straightened his spine, shoulders setting. He looked like a prisoner facing a firing squad. “As I said, there are things I cannot tell you. But I will answer what I can.”

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.