Page 40 of Curvy Sold Mate

Caitlynn’s expression didn’t change, which meant she’d already guessed. The woman missed nothing.

“Caitlynn. Did the magic make a mistake?”

“No.”

“You said that very quickly.”

“Because the answer hasn’t changed since the last time you asked.” Caitlynn pulled one knee up, and the posture was more Caitlynn-the-woman than Caitlynn-the-Luna. “The magic that drew your name and Viktor’s—it reads the connective tissue between people. Compatibility, resonance, the places where two systems would strengthen each other. It doesn’t account for history or timing or whether the people in question are ready to hear it.”

“So it accounts for what people need.”

“Yes.”

“What about what they want?”

Caitlynn was quiet for long enough that Olivia heard the wind in the garden, the distant clang of the training yard, and the steady thrum of the wards beneath her feet.

“I don’t know,” Caitlynn said. “The old writings describe the magic as infallible, but they were written by people who didn’t draw a line between need and want. For them, the two were the same.” She looked at Olivia. “For what it’s worth, I think the magic is right about you and Viktor. Whether you’re ready to agree with me is a different question, and it’s not one I’m going to answer for you.”

Olivia drank her tea and let the bitterness ground her.

“He left before I woke up,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it, and the saying of it cracked open something she’d been holding shut since she’d walked into the kitchen that morning and found his mug already rinsed and drying on the rack, his early departure as meticulously managed as everything else about him.

Caitlynn’s hand found her knee and rested there, warm and steady.

“I sometimes think that not even Viktor understands Viktor.”

“That’s his problem.”

“It is.” Caitlynn squeezed her knee and let go. “But I know you too. I know you’re going to pretend you don’t care about the answer, and I love you too much to let you get away with it.”

Olivia looked at her closest friend with a sigh. Only Caitlynn could tell her the truth and know that she’d listen.

“I hate that you’re right,” Olivia said.

“I know.”

They sat with it. The garden was warm around them, the stone bench holding the afternoon’s heat, and somewhere below their feet the wards pulsed with the new strength of Olivia’s restored connection—a frequency she could feel in her shins, in the soles of her boots, in the deep vibration that ran through the territory and said mine, ours, home.

“Can I ask you something?” Olivia said.

“You’re going to regardless.”

“Did you know? When you channeled the ritual—when my name came up, and then his—did you know what it would mean? Did the magic show you anything about what was between us before you spoke the names?”

Caitlynn’s hands wrapped around her mug. The gesture was slow, deliberate, the gesture of a woman choosing her words the way she chose her magical instruments—with precision, with awareness that the wrong tool in the wrong place could do harm.

“The magic doesn’t narrate,” she said. “It doesn’t show me a picture of two people and say these ones, here, for these reasons. What it does is—” She paused, searched the air in front of her for the shape of the thing she was trying to describe. “When I channel, I can feel the connections that exist between people. The ones they’ve built, the ones they’ve denied, the ones they don’t know about. The connections have textures, weights, colors, though colors isn’t right—it’s more like temperatures. Some are warm. Some are hot. Some are so bright they hurt to hold.”

“And ours?”

“Yours and Viktor’s was the brightest thing in the room.” Caitlynn met her eyes. “It had been there for years, Olivia. The magic didn’t create it. The magic found something that had been growing in the dark for a decade, and it pulled it into the light, and neither of you were ready for what it looked like when it was visible.”

Olivia’s hand went to her sternum, pressing against the place where the bond hummed. “He feels different now. Through the connection. Before, when the shard was in, and my wolf was gone, the bond was—muffled, like hearing music through a wall. I could feel that he was there, that he was alive, that he carried some general weather pattern of emotion I couldn’t read clearly. Now it’s—”

“Loud?”

“Detailed.” She swallowed. “I can feel the edges of his moods. I can feel when he’s working, when he’s pretending to work, and when he’s thinking about something that makes his chest tight. I can feel—” She stopped. The next word required a vulnerability she wasn’t sure she was ready to spend, but Caitlynn was looking at her with the patient, unflinching attention of a woman who had walked through fire for this pack and had earned the right to hear the things Olivia kept behind her teeth. “I can feel that he wants me. Through the bond. It’s there all the time, underneath everything else, a heat that he tries to bank and can’t, and feeling it is—”