Page 15

Every night, I dream about Seraphina.

About going to her room, picking her up from her bed, bringing her back to mine. I dream about shifting at night, running through the woods, running into her wolf there. I dream about being in high school again, sneaking away to be with the girl I knew I was forbidden to have.

Then every morning, I wake up to the reality that she doesn’t want me. That I closed that door a long time ago, and there’s no chance of me opening it again.

Even though I know I have no chance with her, it doesn’t stop my wolf from pacing in anger, howling inside me to do something about her family. That her brother would dare to put his hands on her, that her mother would stand by and do nothing as the abuse continued.

That her mother would dare to call Seraphina a whore.

Even thinking about it, imagining it, makes my blood start to boil, my instincts gnawing at me, wanting me to sink my teeth into the neck of anything that hurts her.

Ironically, that would apply to me, too.

For a week after her return from the market, Seraphina and Nora are in good spirits. Seraphina uses her magic each day to bring more life to the house, painting rooms, cleaning out pests, and shining the floors until they sparkle.

Nora runs through the books I give her at record speed, asking for more and more. And each time, I have to slip into my father’s study, feeling like a kid again as I run my finger along the spines and find what she’s looking for, make a pile, and leave it for her outside her door.

Each morning, I leave before they wake up. It’s easier that way for me, when I wake up turned on to the point of pain, my dreams of Seraphina working their way into my bloodstream.

It’s not good for me, to have her around like this. My body is getting used to her scent, to the pull, and wants only for me to get closer.

Exactly one week after Soren went with Seraphina to the grocery store, he and I are out in the woods on the eastern side of town, walking through the remnants of the fire we fought out here.

“Do you think something about these fires has been different?” Soren asks, stepping over a glob of the extinguisher and looking to me, eyebrows raised.

I stop, turning to him, watching his face carefully to see if he’s been following the same line of thinking as me. At both the fires we responded to this past week, there were three similarities.

First, they were next to housing developments, relatively nice neighborhoods, just like where Seraphina’s house was before it burnt.

Second, each of the other fires had a similar eye-of-the-storm area, where nothing was burnt, right in the center of the carnage.

And third, I caught the scent of gasoline wafting in the air.

So light that I might have been imagining it, or conflating it with the scent of the daemon fire.

Faint enough that I almost didn’t trust my own nose, wanted to wait until the other guys spoke up about it.

I didn’t want to taint their judgment by coming out and asking, “Does anyone smell gasoline?”

Now Soren laughs, shaking his head. “Okay, the look on your face is telling me that you agree with me, but you’re not going to tell me why.”

And that makes me laugh, because he’s right. And even after all this time, somehow he knows me better than anyone else.

“Yeah,” I say, scrubbing my hand over my face. “Something like that.”

For the next hour, the two of us walk through the gnarled trees and burnt roots, looking for anything that might point to a more obvious reason for the recent patterns in daemon fire.

Because the thing about these fires, usually, is that they’re random.

No pattern—just whichever place in the earth gets weak enough to let the daemonic energy through.

“So,” Soren says after a long stretch of nothing but the silence of us and the charred woods. “Are we going to talk about the Seraphina thing?”

I straighten up, eyeing him. “What is there to talk about?”

He presses his lips together, raising his eyebrows. “I mean, other than the fact that you hated her in high school and now the two of you are roommates?”

So maybe there are some things Soren still doesn’t know about me. Some secrets that I’ve managed to keep well.

“I did not hate her in high school,” I say, though I know that’s not what he’s getting at.

“Okay. Whatever you say, man.” He stops, reaching out to touch one of the trees.

“I’m just saying, you skip town and only come home for your old man’s house, and now that you’re here, it just feels like…

I don’t know. Getting the squad back together feels like you’re staying.

Letting her and that little girl stay there, keeping them safe from Declan—that feels like staying to me. ”

What he’s not saying is that it feels like there’s something more between Seraphina and me, but he’s not spelling out the implication. I don’t need him to.

Even if I was honest with him, there would be nothing to tell him about this time around her.

She’d thought so little of me, she’d assumed that I would take Declan up on his disgusting offer, or that I would kidnap her when I was trying to do what was best. She hates the idea of her daughter talking to me.

And I can see in her eyes that she still resents me for the way I treated her in high school. The fact that I’ve never apologized for the way I treated her.

Beyond all that, there’s still the glaring fact that I rejected her. She claimed me as her mate, and I told her plainly, in front of Soren and everyone else, that I didn’t feel it.

It’s far too late now to turn around and admit that I was lying about something as sacred as the mating bond. The most ancient, natural, and inherent of our traditions.

As a teenager, when I realized why I was so drawn to Seraphina, I’d gone to my father with the question of what to do. Naively, perhaps, I thought that he might counsel me to honor that bond. That nature, and the gods, knew far more than I did about which pairing would be right for me.

But the look on his face was nowhere near accepting or understanding.

“Tell nobody about this , ” he hissed, taking me aside and closing the door to his office. “The last thing we need is for whispers to move about the pack that you won’t have a strong luna at your side.”

He was worried. Worried about my brothers, and their increasingly selfish behavior. Worried about my uncle, my father’s adopted brother, who had just returned to town without warning.

I didn’t like what my father had said about Seraphina, about keeping the knowledge of the bond to myself. And I didn’t obey his direction to stay as far away from her as I could. Maybe if I had done that, all this could have been avoided.

Instead, the bond developed, and Seraphina realized it, too. Maybe she didn’t mean to try to claim me that day the way she did. But I’d had no choice. I had to follow my father’s orders and make sure nobody in the town thought she was telling the truth.

To be a good alpha supreme, I would need to have a good luna. And according to the pack, Seraphina Winward was not that. Nature and the gods and all their divine knowledge be damned.

Now, as Soren and I pick our way back through the wreckage of the forest to my father’s house, my mind turns over with thoughts of Seraphina and Nora. How much I’ve enjoyed having them live with me. What it’s been like to come home to them every day.

Maybe when I leave Silverville, I could bring them back with me to Chicago. Declan wouldn’t follow Seraphina there, certainly not if he knew I was with them. We wouldn’t have to worry about what people in Silverville thought.

If I took Seraphina with me back to Illinois, maybe I could broach the subject of us again. Apologize.

Or maybe it wouldn’t matter where we were.

Maybe Seraphina is smart enough to carry the past with her, to use it as a shield to make sure a man like me could never hurt her again.