Page 6

When the blindfold is ripped from my face, the bright sunshine comes blaring in, reflected off of bright white gravel.

I recognize the location instantly—the gas station right on the edge of town.

The place with the most travelers, where people might come through if they want to fill up.

A quick five minutes off the mountain road up and down to other towns.

The station is a little rundown building with overpriced snacks and stale loaves of bread. There’s an attendant whose eyes drop instantly to your chest when you try to check out at the counter.

The stocky, thick Sorel brother keeps his meaty hand on my arm, laughing as I bruise myself trying to get away from him. He smells strongly of gasoline and daemon fire, though I suppose everything in this town smells like that lately. The aftermath of consistently being ablaze.

Did they bring me here to sell me off to some out-of-towner? To finally get me out of Silverville? My heart picks up its pace at the idea of being stuffed into the back of a car, hitting the highway, and being miles away in just hours.

I should have left a long time ago. I shouldn’t have let my ties to this place keep me here. And what’s going to happen to Nora if they sell me off? Will they find her? How long would it take me to get back to her?

Declan Sorel laughs to my right. I could just spit at him. Of course, my brother called him first, asked if he had any use for me. And of course, the horrible pack leader said yes. He didn’t like the way I spoke to him during that town hall.

“Like I said,” Declan says, walking over and gesturing to me like I’m a fruit basket or a nice box of cigars, “we wanted to bring a little peace-keeping offer. Something to keep you entertained. Comfortable while you’re in town.”

I’m finally able to see past the glaring sunlight and the reflection of it on the gravel, and my eyes land on the person—the man —I am apparently a gift for.

“I want nothing to do with this,” he says, and I’d know that voice anywhere.

The air leaves my body when I realize who it is standing there next to the gas pump, looking like he’d much rather have a fruit basket. Acting like he’s disgusted at the very idea of me. Of the fact that I’m standing here, ten feet away from him.

“Fine,” his brother laughs, pulling me roughly to his side. “We’ll use her for something else.”

Xeran’s eyes flash in a warning, then they skip right over me and land on his brother. “Get your hands off her.”

It’s a command to the brother, an effort to show that though he’s younger, Xeran is still the one in charge.

His brother—Dallas, I’m just now remembering—reacts instantly, his body obeying the command before his brain can reroute. His iron grip turns loose for only a second.

Then, as though in retaliation, he tightens it twice as hard.

“ Oomph ,” I let out a strangled cry of pain through the gag—a noise I don’t mean to let happen, but that bursts through me at the prodding of bruises that are already deep in my bones.

My body still hasn’t recovered from the night of the fire, from that great draw of power, and my skeleton feels soft to the touch, almost malleable.

Xeran takes a single step forward, and I feel the flinch of the man beside me, the way his body urges him to step back.

If my feet weren’t tied together, I’d be stepping back, too.

If it weren’t for the chance of staying near Nora, I might almost wish for some random traveler over Xeran Sorel.

My heart is already twisting itself in palpitations, yearning toward him, begging me to seek his touch.

As though I haven’t already been there. As if he hasn’t already made it perfectly clear that I was mistaken in my feelings for him, and that he certainly did not reciprocate them.

“Let her go,” Declan orders, his eyes sliding to me for just a moment before they snap back to Xeran. He wouldn’t like this description, but Declan watches his nephew like a bunny in the bushes, twitching, praying the predator before him doesn’t see him.

It’s been years since Xeran was here in town, and it’s almost laughable how quickly the alphas around me recognize his strength, their bodies wanting to bend toward him as their alpha supreme.

Everyone has always known it would be him.

That is, until he surprised the entire pack by renouncing the position and disappearing.

Dallas lets out a low, angry sound but pushes me roughly forward. My left foot catches behind my right foot, and the ground flies toward my face. To my shock, Xeran steps forward, too, intercepting me before I can fall to the gravel, his hands grabbing me roughly but not painfully.

He hauls me to my feet, and the simple fact of his touch rushes through my body.

Last year, I watched a documentary about humans and heroin. This must be like what it feels like for them when they inject that drug and it rushes directly into their bloodstream.

The interesting thing about Xeran is that he has always smelled a little smoky, a little charred, just like this place. But more like the sweet, puckered exterior of a marshmallow thrust directly into a campfire. Something delicious and dark, all at once.

“Get in the truck,” Xeran orders, not looking at me as he opens the door to the vehicle and swings his arm around, gesturing for me to get inside.

It only takes a second for me to do what he says—my body, after all, is already responding to his orders. Something in the DNA of my cells that wants to obey.

And besides, if my options are Xeran or Declan, there’s only one real choice.

I climb into the truck carefully, using my bound wrists to anchor on the leather and hoist myself inside. His truck smells like leather, cedar, and clean clothes. I’m breathing hard when I scoot over the bench, flip my hair out of my face, and look up just in time to hear Xeran speak.

“I’m only here to deal with the house,” he says, that low tenor mirrored among his brothers’ voices, but none of theirs quite so low as his. “Not interested in a challenge, Declan. But ride up on me like that again? I’ll rip you to pieces.”

A shiver rolls over my skin at the weight of those words and the expressions crossing over their faces. Declan, despite clearly attempting to hide it, looks like he might be sick.

Then, as though he’s just said hi to a friend in a grocery store, Xeran turns and hoists himself into the truck, which rocks with the addition of his weight. Without looking at me, he puts the truck into drive and says, “Put on your seat belt.”

I do what he says—not because I have to, but because I always stress the importance of seat belts to Nora, and I’d be a hypocrite not to wear one now.

Xeran pulls out of the gas station without giving his brothers or uncle a chance to leave first, so they’re caught in the dust of his tires as they stand, staring after us. I swallow, glancing at him. I catch the strong profile of his jaw and throat, then look back out the windshield.

A moment later, I find that I’m able to speak. “You can drop me off just up here.”

For the first time since I was yanked out of that SUV, Xeran looks at me, eyebrows raised like he’s amused by what I’ve said.

“No.”

A beat passes, and my indignation takes over my surprise and natural instinct to be quiet around him. “ No?”

He glances at me again, flips on his turn signal, and says, “No.”

“Well, I’m not coming with you!”

“Yes, you are.”

“Are—are you kidnapping me?”

I’d always known Xeran was an asshole, but I thought he was different than the others here. Declan and his gang have been backsliding into old pack ideologies—treating the omegas as property, shirking tradition.

Maybe Xeran isn’t different. Maybe he’s just been gone for long enough that I managed to forget what he’s really like.

“No,” he says low and rough, like he can’t be bothered to clear his throat. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter if he did. Maybe it’s permanently like that from all the time he spent around fires when he was a kid. “You have somewhere else to go, Seraphina?”

The sound of my name on his lips makes a full-body shudder roll through me, and it takes a second for me to compose myself again. I hate this stupid body, the pull it feels to him, the automatic way I yearn to do everything he says.

“I already told you,” I growl, hands tightening to fists. “You can drop me—”

“I’m not letting you out of this goddamn truck, and that’s final .”

His words are biting, and he stares resolutely through the windshield.

I shake with frustration and, annoyingly, something else.

I want to reach out and push him, hit him, take his jaw into my hands like I did once.

Cradle him there, run my hands through his hair, feel the soft pressure of his body against mine.

My mind flashes back to what Xeran’s uncle and brothers were saying in the SUV. That they could offer me up as a plaything for Xeran. That it might subdue him enough to keep him from trying to mess with them.

It was fate that my brother snatched me when he did. Declan is still pissed about the way I spoke to him in front of that council, and he jumped at the chance to make me pay for it.

But Declan clearly doesn’t know his nephew that well.

If his assumption was that Xeran would have his way with me , then he’s wrong. First, Xeran isn’t some Neanderthal alpha from the Appalachians who believes a woman is his property.

And second, even if he was, he’d have no interest in touching me, even just for some fun.

Like they always do, images of him rise to my mind, and I have to swallow them down, force them away before they threaten to take over completely. I can’t be staring at his hands, thinking about what they might feel like on the inside of my thighs, or remembering the devouring way he kisses—

“You’ll stay with me,” Xeran says simply, like it makes all the sense in the world.

My first instinct is to ask why, if he doesn’t give a shit about me, he would say such a thing.

And my second instinct, which wrestles its way into existence, is to fight back.

“Absolutely not. I am not staying with you. Let me out of the car.”

We’re climbing higher into the mountains now, further from the town, and I feel my hand rise to the handle, a question in my mind about whether or not I can use magic to unlock it, magic to cushion my fall, magic to move fast enough that Xeran—shifted—would not be able to catch up to me.

But if I use all that magic, I might not be able to locate and recover my daughter, who is in our car somewhere in the mountains, waiting for me.

“No.”

“I can take care of myself .”

“If that was true, he wouldn’t have had you in the first place.”

It’s the longest sentence Xeran has spoken to me since I climbed into this truck, and I get the sense when he shuts his mouth that there isn’t more where that came from. He’s done explaining himself.

I open my mouth to tell him that it wasn’t Declan who got me—it was my brother who dragged me out of there, gagged me, and threw me in the back of his car while my mother weakly tried to protest. But the last thing I want to do right now is offer Xeran information unprompted, so I snap my mouth shut and watch as the landscape passes us by.

We’re climbing into the thick of the forest now, the road rocky and unkempt from nearly a decade of abandonment. When we finally reach its end, a large, log-cabin-style house towers into view.

Xeran climbs out of the truck and circles around to my side while I’m still staring up at the place in awe. His father’s house—his family’s house. One I never visited. Not once during high school.

Of all the times Xeran and I met up, it was never, ever here.

“Come on,” he says, opening my door and blocking me in, his eyes serious on me. “Don’t make me carry you.”

The traitorous voice in the back of my head—the voice more omega than logic—wants to give into that idea, knowing it would be one of the few situations in which we might feel his hands on us again.

But luckily, I maintain control over myself, and I steel my expression, nodding once to show him that I’m not going to run.

Though I want to, I don’t. I walk up the path with him to his house, my mind already reassessing the situation.

I have to get Nora. It’s been hours since I cast her away from my family’s home, and while I can sense that she’s safe, I’m sure she doesn’t want to be left stranded like that.

When we reach the porch, I stop. Xeran turns, fixing me with a pinning gaze that makes me feel like Declan must have earlier—the bunny in the bush, caught in the gaze of the predator.

“If you’re going to insist that I stay here,” I say, swallowing thickly, my throat somehow dry and like tar at the same time, “then I’ll need to bring my daughter, too.”

For the first time since I’ve seen him again, Xeran blinks, and some of that rock-solid composure shifts, exposing him for a moment. Surprise at the fact that I have a kid. Trepidation at the idea of bringing her here.

And maybe… jealousy?

No, there’s no way. I push the thought from my mind as he opens his mouth, eyes darting out to the forest where daylight is fading.

“Fine,” he says, shaking his head. “Where is she?”