Chapter 0196

I work hard to fight my grin, wanting to be serious, but his own smile brings mine forward. “I know,” I

whisper, nodding, “I saw you with Daphne.”

“Oh my god,” he mutters, taking a deep breath before slowly releasing it. “I thought my heart was

going to pound through my chest when she came in.”

“Why!?” I ask, laughing. “Daphne is really nice –“

“Because she’s a girl – it’s like meeting…I don’t know, a gigantic whale, or a unicorn or something.

Even if you know it’s nice you still don’t know what to do – what it’s going to do –“

“We’re unicorns to you?” I squeak, pleased to death.

He laughs, shaking his head. “Almost nearly as mythical,” he murmurs. “To me, at least.”

I narrow my eyes a little, suddenly struck by something. “That was one hell of a kiss, Jackson,” I

say, tilting my head and wrapping a hand in the fabric of his shirt, possessive, “if it was your first

one.”

His mouth twists a little and he looks away for a second. “Well, no,” he murmurs and I gasp a little at

the drama of it all. “I knew…I knew one girl. For a little bit.”

My eyes go wide and a thousand questions are instantly on my lips, but they all fall away when he

turns back to me.

“Please,” he murmurs, shaking his head, his eyes a little sad. “I…I will tell you about her, okay?

Just…not right now. Not when I’ve just found you, and…there’s so much else to explain first.”

I nod, agreeing to it, though my hands tighten their grip on his shirt. I find that I do not like, at all, the

idea of this singular other girl. It is somehow, bizarrely, worse than Luca’s fifty anonymous women.

So, I let him move on from it, because I’m…honestly not sure I want to know. At least, as he says,

not right now.

“The world I grew up in,” Jackson begins, his voice soft and hesitating, “well, we called it the

Community. It’s way, way up North, in the mountains. It’s really pretty there, honestly, Ari. Like…

much prettier than here.”

I smile a little, cozying up against him, settling in to listen and pleased that he grew up somewhere

beautiful. But I don’t say anything, wanting him to talk.

“But, um…” he hesitates again, “we do things…really differently. Like, for instance, I grew up with

boys. And only boys. The girls were…kept elsewhere.”

“Kept?” I murmur, confused.

“Yeah,” he replies, and I can feel him nod. “We grew up in barracks – which is why, I think, it was

easy for me to fall into life here, I’m kind of used to it. Except you all talk a lot – like constantly, Ari,

everyone is always chatting – most of the time about nothing –“

“Jackson,” I murmur, lifting my head to look into his face, frowning, “what do you mean grew up?

Like, from how young?”

He pauses his harangue against chattiness and goes a little still before he shrugs. “Since I can

remember. That was my home.”

I frown, not understanding, and then I remember suddenly something that he said last night…

God, was that just last night, when Daphne came over and Jackson mentioned that he…

“Jackson,” I murmur, shaking my head, “where were your parents? Were they there too?”

“No,” he replies, his eyes suddenly wary as he confesses what, I think, is part of the great secret of

his life. “I don’t…I don’t have parents. Or, I mean, obviously biologically I do, but…I was raised apart

from them. We all were. If I ever met them,” he shrugs, “I didn’t know who they were. And they

probably wouldn’t have known I was theirs.”

My mouth falls open in shock and horror as I stare at my mate.

Because what…what the hell!?