Page 11 of Wretched Thorns

Jasper did not ask, not yet, what.

He went back to the window. The yard was dark. The preserve rose beyond the fence in a wall of shadow, still and thick the way it was every night before dawn. The magnolia tree out front cast a wide soft shape that meant nothing.

He pressed his hand flat to the window glass and watched his own breath fog the pane.

The bond sat dead and muffled in his chest.

Eli turned another page.

***

The air in the kitchen changed.

That was always how Jasper had known. The air in any room his mother walked into shifted enough that it captured attention, the way a room changes when a barometer drops, the way the light goes thin before a storm. He had been acknowledging that small shift his whole life and had never quite stopped marveling at it.

She did not speak when she entered the kitchen. She had never been a woman who spoke before she had decided what to say.

She poured coffee. She came to stand at the counter and read the papers on the table without putting a finger to a single one of them. Her expression did not change.

“Bodie,” Eli said.

“Yes.”

“What did he say to you that he did not say to me?”

Rowena did not answer that for a long moment. When she did, she said it without inflection.

“He said it was in hand.”

“In hand by who?”

“He did not say.”

“You did not press him?”

“No.”

Eli looked at her.

Rowena looked at her son for the same length of time Eli had looked at her, and Jasper had to wonder if they saw their reflection in each other as clearly as the rest of the world did. She picked up her coffee and crossed the floor and stood at the window beside Jasper, and the two of them looked at the dark.

“Both of them,” she said.

“Yes.”

Her jaw moved once. The cup did not. Jasper had watched his mother carry weight that would have folded other women in half, and the only place any of it ever showed was in her jaw when she was working to keep it still.

She did not ask him if he was all right. She knew the answer to that, and she would not insult either of them by pretending it was a useful question. She did not put her hand on his arm. She knew his wolf was at the surface, and a touch would undo him.

She stood beside him and looked at the dark. That was what she gave him.

She set her cup down on the counter behind them without taking her eyes off the yard.

“You stay in this house,” she said.

Jasper did not turn around. He could feel the weight of her certainty at his shoulder and could not make himself disagree with it out loud.

“Until?” he said.