Chapter 20 : Love Overcomes It All

*Lila’s POV*

I wanted to die. I survived Cole but I wanted to die. I read all 34 books in under 37 hours. There was enough caffeine in me to vibrate my soul out of my body, but I did it.

I had compiled a list of recurring features in shifterstories to the point they had to have some basis within the new reality I was living in.

They weren’t short reads either. One of them was some 100,000-word, slow burn romance about a pair of fated mates that tragically died.

…I had to take a moment after that one.

Despite my research binge, there was a frustratingly small amount of concrete truths about being someone’s mate, seeing as it was heavily romanticized and fantasized and I wasn’t exactly reading history or culture books.

Mate. I—didn’t exactly know what that meant. I could act like I did. Mia did have me read a few soulmate stories before, and I read the classics for school, but that was a while ago and this was…bigger. Real.