His brows lowered, and his features fell lax. “No,” he said. “You don’t, but if you want her kept a secret, it would be fucking nice to at least know why.”

He was right.

He was also the closest thing I had to a trustworthy friend and a real brother. But I didn’t know what to do or what to say. Stuck, I decided on some form of honesty. “She’s not from here, okay?”

Impatient, Fang waved a hand before him. “Okay, and…?”

“And,” I gritted, “after everything, it would not be wise for everyone to know that just yet.”

He pursed his lips in thought, then cursed. “You mean to tell me she is indeed from Wistensia?”

I refrained from wincing, adding, “And she’s married.”

Fang tensed, his dark eyes comically wide.

He blinked, slow and then repeatedly. “I see.” I nodded, thankful for that much at least. Though I hated having to even say it, the marriage was a huge problem. A problem I didn’t know how to solve just yet.

What was I supposed to do? Kill the bastard? Simply try to pretend the marriage did not exist? It took two agreeing parties to terminate a marriage, and if he’d been willing, he’d have already let Aster go.

Fang rubbed at his cheek. “Leave it to you to break the law in every way you can possibly get away with.” He chuckled. “Stealing some poor idiot’s wife and claiming she’s a war criminal in order to hide her.”

“You think I want it like this?” I said, close to seething. “She’s my mate, asshole.”

Mirth left his eyes at that, and he sighed. “So what are you going to do?”

“Other than try to keep her from running away again, I honestly have no fucking idea,” I admitted. “She only just came back.”

“Why after all this time?”

“She’d heard of the human army, and she can warp.”

“She feared for your life,” he said with a snort. “How unnecessarily sweet.” I gnashed my teeth, and he grinned. “You know…” His smile wavered. “Dade won’t like this.”

“It has nothing to do with him.”

“Ah, but I think it does. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have lied to him. You’d be marching around the Keep with the smug look of a male who’d found and thoroughly claimed his counterpart.”

He let that sit there for some moments, and I surrendered a little more. “He’ll want to speak with her. Ask her what she might know of the king who sent all those human soldiers here.”

“And why would that be a problem?” he asked in a way that implied he knew it would be.