Chapter 2: Mates

Rowan POV

After leaving the Sapphire penthouse and taking a seat in his family’s town car, Rowan let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

He had felt tense during the entire meal and couldn’t enjoy his beef Wellington - which was a favorite of his.

He hadn’t been sure how the meeting with his future wife would go, but he certainly hadn’t expected the extremely cold shoulder Ylana gave him the entire night.

Rowan had noticed Ylana’s beauty first. She was tall and curvaceous with her hair up in a curly high ponytail and she had beautiful blue dark blue eyes that almost looked like the same shade of purple as her dress.

Rowan had absorbed all of that in about a second. Then, he became overwhelmed with some other feeling almost immediately.

It began when a rose-like smell assaulted his nose. He felt an intense urge to go to the source of the smell, sniff deeply, and to try and curl up in it. Soon after, he heard a rhythm that sounded like a lullaby. He never knew such a calming sound could exist. He wanted to listen to it for the rest of his life.

It didn’t take Rowan long to know what it meant, despite no one ever being able to describe it to him in a comprehensive way.

Ylana was his mate.

After all the searching and worrying, his mate appeared because of a random deal his dad decided to take with some other mafia boss. A human. Would he have ever found her if this opportunity had never come up?

“Rowan? Rowan!” Ginger elbowed him in the ribs.

“Ow!” Rowan cried, rubbing the spot. “What?”

Harkin laughed. “You haven’t been paying attention to anything we’ve been saying. Where is your mind?”

Rowan looked out the window, considering how to tell his dad and sister about all of it. He settled for blurting out, “Ylana is my mate.”

There was a long moment of silence.

Ginger cracked first, “Oh my god!” The exclamation exploded out of her.

Harkin’s eyebrows were raised in surprise. “W-well, that is, um, certainly a development.”

“Development, Dad?” Ginger was bouncing in her seat. “This is huge! Wonderful even.”

Harkin’s head was shaking back and forth. “I’ve never heard of a shifter’s mate being a human.”

“It explains why he’s had such a hard time finding her,” Ginger stated. “This could be the answer for every shifter who hasn’t found a mate.”

“It’s against everything we’ve ever known,” Harkin breathed.

“You two haven’t talked about the most obvious thing,” Rowan pointed out glumly.

“What’s that?” Ginger tilted her head.

Rowan threw up his hands. “She hates me!”

After the shock of finding his mate wore off, Rowan focused on the intense scowl that had been on Ylana’s face. She had looked him up and down once before staring intently at the floor. She never said hello.

Rowan had tried to strike up simple conversation with Ylana after they sat next to each other for dinner. Her head would quickly turn in the opposite direction. She had even frozen when Ginger mentioned picking a wedding date. As Rowan got into the elevator with his family after all was done, he heard her heels stomping away before the doors even closed.

“You can’t really blame her,” Harkin said. “She clearly never wanted this. She only ever made eye contact with Odo and there was such anger behind those looks.”

“She just needs to get to know Rowan better,” Ginger said with great confidence. “You’re a good person, and all of my friends claim you’re hot.”

“I don’t need to know that,” Rowan said with closed eyes. He was beginning to feel exhausted.

“We’ll have to reconsider when and how to let her know about us,” Harkin mused.

Rowan’s eyes snapped open. “She can’t know! She already hates me. Imagine how bad it’ll be if she finds out we’re shifters. At best she’ll want to call off the marriage and at worst she’ll spread the tale.”

“We can’t predict what she’ll do,” Harkin said in a calm tone. “Ginger proposed the wedding for the end of June. That gives us two months to get to know her. We can try to judge her possible reactions during that time.”

“Carmine is going to lose his mind,” Ginger said with glee.

Rowan recalled that Carmine had initially been against him marrying a human.

Carmine had brought it up when Rowan met with him the morning after he had been told about the plot. Carmine had only given in when Harkin had mentioned that Rowan would need to have children so that a new Alpha could rise once Rowan passed on.

“Having a mate makes a stronger Alpha,” Harkin told his children.

“But I’m not her mate,” Rowan groaned. “Humans don’t have mates. She’ll never know or understand what it’s like.”

“She could come to love you,” Ginger soothed. “Humans fall in love easily.”

“And fall just as easily out of it,” Rowan argued.

“Then we’ll just have to make you the most lovable guy ever,” Ginger suggested as the gates to their estate opened.

Rowan hadn’t realized they arrived home. The stone mansion loomed at the end of the long driveway. The property had belonged to Rowan’s family for about a hundred years. Its original purpose had just been a place for the pack to go for their full moon ritual and have several acres of well-kept green grass to do so freely. The property even included a piece of a forest.

Eventually, one of Rowan’s ancestors built a house on the property. The house grew bigger as the decades went on and as the family’s business ventures grew more lucrative. New additions and a third floor were put on before Rowan was born. A back patio and an in-ground pool were the latest add-ons. Sometimes multiple generations lived together in the home; there was certainly room for it.

Unlike some packs, Rowan’s didn’t all live together on the property. His great-grandfather had hoped it would make it easier to blend in with the humans that way. Instead, a highly exclusive gated community was built not far from the estate for the pack to reside.

Even though his home was huge, Rowan never felt alone in it. There were always people coming and going. Sometimes it was relatives and other times it was pack members. There had always been other kids for Rowan to play with while he grew up. In fact, Rowan met his best friend Keegan when they were children because Keegan and his parents had been staying at the house for a few weeks. They had been in between homes, and Harkin was the kind of Alpha who would allow pack members to stay with him during times of trouble. Rowan planned on doing the same when he became Alpha.

“We can discuss this all in the morning,” Harkin promised. “We all clearly need to sleep on this.”

“Yes,” Ginger agreed, stretching. “We can work on a solid game plan tomorrow.”

Rowan sighed. He just knew he was not going to sleep easily tonight. He wondered if he would ever be able to sleep peacefully again. His life had just changed so significantly.

When Rowan did finally drift off the sleep, he dreamed of purple eyes, roses, and a soothing lullaby.