His words made me snap my eyes up to meet his. He looked at me with stark sincerity. “I don’t want to let you out of my sight even for a moment,” he admitted with sudden vulnerability that caught me off guard.
I couldn’t help the flush that crawled up my cheeks. “Oh.”
He let out a sigh and took my hand in his as he pulled me toward the corridor. Once we were in his room, he let me go and pulled his shirt off.
Trying not to stare, I simply stood there as he got into bed. When he realized I was still standing, unable to move, feeling out of my depth, he turned to look at me. “Would it be better if I turned into your wolf?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d said he wasmywolf, but it was definitely the first time I felt a little sense of possessiveness. But I had no right to be possessive. Lucien wasn’t mine. I might be his Eteria, but that was all there was to us ...
And suddenly, my flush, the heat, the fuzzy feelings I got from him telling me we would sleep together in his room disappeared.
He said he didn’t want to let me out of his sight not because hecaredabout me as Drew, but rather because I was his Eteria. His weakness.
His vulnerability from before was about me being his Achilles’ heel, and nothing more.
I’d seen the way he cut Oz’s throat. Lucien refused to show weakness to anyone. And I was a walking, talking, sentient weakness.
Of course he wanted to keep an eye on me.
It had nothing to do with the fact I was a woman and he was attracted to me. Because that was all my stupid, hopeless hopes in my head talking.
Lips thin, I quickly changed into pajamas in the bathroom before getting into the bed, pulling the duvet over me. Then I flatly said, “You don’t have to shift,” before I turned to my side, showing him my back.
That night, there was no spooning.
Chapter 21
What the Fae?
“We should go back to Seattle.”
Thayer’s words barely registered as I sipped my coffee the next morning, tired and dejected. I’d barely slept a wink, and when I woke up, Lucien was gone.
According to Enoch, who was sitting in the living room with us for the morning coffee, he’d gone out with the Betas earlier to bring them up to speed before they came back for the continuation of the meeting from the night before.
Now, I looked at Thayer, pushed back my glasses, and sighed. “I can’t go back to Seattle.”
My brother’s gray eyes sparked. “When you were out yesterday, Lucien told me about how you came to know him,” he said through gritted teeth, his own coffee mug forgotten in his hand. “I know you don’t care what I think, you think I only care about you for selfish reasons, but that’s not true. You’re in way over your head, and you know it.”
I shot him a foul look. He was right. Iwasin way over my head. But the truth was, I was already involved in this whole clusterfuck. Until the threat to Lucien, and therefore to me, was resolved, I couldn’t go anywhere.
Lucien himself said that it was not an option to believe what was written in that letter Thayer received. That the authors, the Syndicate, were fickle and cunning.
That meant Thayer was in danger too.
“We can’t go back,” I told him now, giving him a pointed look. “And to be honest, even if we could, I still wouldn’t.”
Thayer grunted. “Why the fuck would you stay around these ...” He glanced at Enoch, who was reading a medical book next to us, and added in a whisper, “Monsters?”
It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but all Thayer had seen ever since his arrival yesterday was pain and violence—especially from Lucien. A part of me understood why he seemed to think of the supernatural creatures, the Otherborne as Lucien called them, as monsters.
But that didn’t mean it sat well with me.
“They aren’t monsters,” I said, downing the rest of my coffee before slapping the mug against the coffee table a tad too hard. “They might be different from us in essence, but they are still as human as one could be.”
Thayer did not like my response. “If I am to believe everything I’ve witnessed in the last twenty-four hours,” he murmured darkly, “and believe everything you shared about what happened eight years ago, then theyaremonsters, no matter what you say.”
I froze, not believing my ears as I stared at him with wide eyes. “What did you just say?”
