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3
Dianthus
Hetty
As I close the Sage House kitchen door behind me, my heart pounds hard, and my breaths are labored.
Closing my eyes, I lean back against the cool, metal door, swallowing in an attempt to moisten my dry throat and block out the image of Cass’s dark, threatening eyes.
Stop thinking about it. It’s over.
Trying to wipe his face from my mind, I breathe deeply, soaking in the safe familiarity of the Sage House kitchen.
“Four hours to buy a bag of coffee?”
I jump, my eyes popping open to find my grandmother standing a few feet in front of me. She steps toward me on a wobbly gait, the deep wrinkles around her mouth pinched in a scowl.
Staring at me for a long time, her scowl starts to soften. Abruptly, she pushes her long, gray hair from her face and steps toward me, narrowing her watery blue eyes.
Even though Gran’s been ancient for my entire life, she’s looking more run down with each passing day. It seems impossible that she was ever young or had a mate. But I know she had a daughter who grew old enough to have a mate and a baby of her own.
I always wondered what my parents were like—especially my mother, Gran’s daughter. But whenever I’d ask her, she’d say she was dead, so what did I care what she was like, anyway?
Gran’s a … complicated person.
But while she’s abrasive and has done more bad things than I can fathom, she’s the only person to ever love me. So, I can’t really give up on her.
She’s all I have.
Since she’s not much of a talker, I can usually judge her expressions pretty well. Right now, she’s looking at me like I sprouted a second head.
“I’m so sorry it took so long, Gran,” I say, pushing my sweaty body off the door and handing her the burlap bag of coffee beans. She glances at my palms—still bloody—but I quickly curl my fingers into a fist. “I ran into these omegas at Arabica, and they made me—”
“Stop.” Her eyes dart over my face as she lifts her wrinkled, cold hand to rest on my forehead. “You look unwell. Sit. I’ll make you some dianthus tea.”
Bleh. I can’t help but make a face.
Just like the Sage family matriarch, Isolde, Gran is obsessed with plants and herbs. In fact, she taught Isolde everything she knows. Whether or not that turned out to be for the best, I can’t say…
While I don’t think she’d ever been more disappointed in me than when she realized I had no aptitude for herbs, it hasn’t stopped her from forcing gross-tasting teas and tinctures on me for my entire life.
“I don’t want it,” I insist sulkily as she shuffles further into the kitchen. “It’s too hot for tea.”
She pauses and glances back at me, her face blank. “It’s not that hot, Henrietta.”
“You don’t think so?” I absently pull on the collar of my damp uniform as I fall into one of the chairs that surrounds the scuffed wooden table. “I’m burning alive.”
“You need some tea,” she states firmly, shaking her head as she walks to the counter.
I grunt as she reaches up to a shelf on the wall, pulling down a familiar jar of dried pink flowers.
“Maybe you should go to bed,” she mutters as she starts filling a kettle with water. “And get some rest.”
My mouth falls open, astonished. “What? You think I should rest rather than work?”
That’s something coming from her. When I fell ill as a child and complained that I needed to rest, she’d scoff and tell me to work through it.
There’s no room in a beta’s day for rest, she’d preach, always with a sneer of disgust.
