Page 24

“I could really go for a burger,” I suggested. Which had absolutely nothing to do with me wanting to eat a whole motherfucking cow so I could stop thinking about how badly I’d fucked up.

“Burger,” Dakota echoed. “Burger sounds good.”

He put his in the cart, handed it back to me, and I got the biggest, most double-down deluxe monstrosity I could find before putting the order in and leading him over to the couch against the wall. I turned around one of the chairs in front of the desk and sat there.

Dakota gave me a haunted stare.

For a few long, deep breaths, I couldn’t speak.

I didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to be his entry point to the supernatural world, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave him in the dark when I’d been the one dragging him into all of this. “What do you think I am?”

“A... guy?” Dakota grimaced. “CEO of Crescent? What are you talking about?”

“I’m a werewolf.”

Dakota snorted. It sounded a little wet. His eyes were suspiciously red. “Shut up.”

I held his eye, leaning forward, elbows on my knees. “I’m a werewolf.”

In my head, the wolf that was always prowling rushed forward as I pulled back the cover on him. My teeth sharpened. My eyes flashed red and held.

“Fuck!” Dakota scrambled back on the couch, pulling his feet off the floor.

That was more like the reaction I’d expected from a mage, but when the wolf shrank back from his fear, slipping beneath the human mask I wore most of the time, Dakota’s brow furrowed. He sank back into the couch. His feet returned to the floor, and he leaned in to get a better look at me.

“Werewolves—that’s a thing. A real thing.” Tentatively, he reached out and touched my face. Maybe he was searching for the sharper features of a predator, but his fingers were still gentle. They lingered against my cheek, and it felt a little less like the world was ending.

I smiled. “Werewolves are definitely real.”

“And so is magic.” He still sounded like he didn’t entirely believe it, but he couldn’t think I was playing a joke on him. Honestly, I wasn’t that clever.

In fact, what I most wanted to do was call Jillian and tell her I’d fucked up and needed her to fix it. She’d sort everything out, make up for my fuckery.

She was the smart one.

The only thing that kept me from dragging her in to help was staring into Dakota’s eyes and knowing that, well, at least I was familiar. Kind of. “Yeah. It’s real.”

And he had it. Magic. Enough to turn his writing instruments into lethal weapons.

I’d been a fucking fool to assume he’d been at Howl of his own free will, knowing fully what he was about.

I sighed, my shoulders sinking deep. “I... I really thought you knew. Regular humans can’t get into Howl, can’t find its website, let alone get in the door, so I figured, if you were there, you knew what you were doing.”

He blinked. “How the hell would I know about werewolves and magic?”

I shrugged, the feeling heavy, like I was a garbage can absolutely full to the brim of trash. “Most mages do. I’ve never heard of a magic family letting go of one of their own. They like to keep a firm grasp of whatever power is born to their line. But you said you’re...”

“Adopted?”

“Yeah. Your parents aren’t?—”

“Magic?” Dakota laughed. “No. They aredefinitelynot magic.”

Dakota was impossible. Not his demeanor—no, that seemed sad and lost—just that he was a mage who’d wandered into Howl without even realizing what he’d done, that he’d been hired by our company without realizing we weren’t human, that he was there in his office instead of tucked away in some faux French chateau hidden behind a hundred different wards with a dozen other mages who’d all, invariably, look down their noses at him for—for me. For letting a “beast” be there for his Awakening. All that was impossible.

Yet there we were, trapped in agonized silence, when my phone buzzed to let me know our burgers had arrived.

I pulled it out of my pocket and waved it in the air. “I’ll go grab our food. Sit tight.”