“Penelope,” Lavinia said, sharper now, “I said enough.”
Penelope’s mouth snapped shut. She drank her tea with aggressive interest instead.
Dani stared into her own mug. Her magic hummed low, restless, picking up every thread of tension in the room.
She understood the anger. Of course she did. Witches had been killed by shifters. They, too, had suffered because of witches. With their lifespans, the war was not that long ago. Both people carried scars.
She also remembered Arthur on the ridge last night, voice rough as he said he was a coward and that he was sorry. The way he’d wrapped the blanket around her after without thinking, as if keeping her warm had always been the most natural thing in the world.
“It’s not just politics,” she said quietly, “not after we… spent the night together.”
There it was. Out of her mouth before she could call it back.
The coven room went very, very still.
“Oh, Dani,” Tamsin said, half pity, half exasperation.
Penelope groaned softly, “You didn’t.”
“Did what?” Dani demanded.
“Fall for him again,” Penelope said. “Tell me you weren’t that stupid.”
Dani’s fingers tightened till the ceramic creaked. “It’s not—” She bit off the rest. Because it was that, wasn’t it? Wrapped up in duty and bonds and Aurelia, but at the core of it, yes, she still felt something stupid and fierce for the man she’d once run from.
“You mated him,” Lavinia said, more gently, “you share a bond. Of course you feel…more than you’d planned.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Dani muttered.
“We just don’t want you hurt again,” Penelope said. The flippancy had slipped now; what was left was rawer. “You’re one of us, whether we like it or not. We don’t want to lose you to these overgrown idiots.”
“They’re not idiots,” Dani snapped.
A couple of brows rose.
“I mean, yes, some of them are idiots,” she said, ploughing on, “but when the hybrid threat rose, it wasn’t witches who faced them. It was wolves.”
The room absorbed that, quiet.
“And Arthur?” Lavinia asked softly.
Dani’s throat closed.
“Arthur,” she said, “is an idiot. And a good Alpha. And someone who’s trying very hard to unlearn the hate he was raised on.” Her mouth twisted. “Even if he does still flinch whenever he sees magic.”
“There it is,” Edith said quietly.
They all looked at her.
Edith pushed off the doorframe and came further into the room, setting her mug down with a small click.
Dani instinctively hunched her shoulders in, glancing up nervously at her tutor.
“You wouldn’t be the first woman in history to try and change a man,” Edith said, “and there is no judgment for trying. I just want you to remember that the same man who was speaking platitudes is the same one who looked you in the eye ten years ago and said he could never be with someone the pack viewed as weak.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, not cruel.
“I’m not weak, not anymore!”
Edith held up a hand, “I know, I know. But that just changes things; it doesn’t solve them. He hates what witches did to his people. He hates that he wants what he was told would ruin him. That doesn’t vanish because you and he spent the night together.”
