Page 246 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

Dad stared at him.

Aunt Linda turned toward Cormac with sudden interest. “Are you always this honest when bleeding?”

Cormac looked up at her. He was pale, soaked, and bleeding through the makeshift pressure bandage Sava had slapped onto his shoulder. Somehow, he still managed a faint, dry smile.

“Only with strangers.”

Linda smiled back. “Good to know.”

Tessa made a choked sound beside me.

I looked at her. She was watching Aunt Linda flirt with an injured werewolf in the middle of a murder courtyard. Her face suggested this was somehow the detail that finally broke her.

“Cassie,” she whispered. “Is Aunt Linda flirting?”

“Yes.”

“With a wolf?”

“A bleeding wolf.”

“I hate that this clarifies nothing.”

Cormac’s gaze flicked to us. “For the record, I am not shifted.”

I started laughing.

Sava gave me a look. “Stop laughing. It uses abdominal muscles you have forfeited.”

“I didn’t forfeit them. They were taken.” I pointed out.

“By foolishness.”

“By werewolves.”

“Today, those categories overlap.”

Ronan’s mouth tightened as if he was considering whether he had time to develop a headache.

Ian’s hand moved over my shoulder, warm against the exposed mark. The gold under my skin had dimmed, but not vanished. It pulsed once when he touched it, and his breath shifted.

My mother saw and her eyes widened.

“Marianne,” Aunt Linda said softly.

Mom took a step toward me. “Does it hurt?”

The question was small. Not about wolves. Not about laws. Not about what she had seen or what we were all supposed to pretend this could become.

Just me.

I swallowed. “Less now.”

That was not exactly true. My body was a map of terrible decisions and supernatural consequences. The mark still burned. My hip was wet with blood. My ribs felt like they had entered negotiations with gravity and lost.

But the bond no longer felt like it was being torn out of me.

It felt settled, terrifyingly settled.