Page 47 of Wolfsbane

I let out a long breath. If he was right, I suspected that I’d never see my mother again. Guilt twisted through me when I realized that was a relief.

I . . . loved her. Didn’t I?

If I did, I should’ve been pissed that she’d been willing to hurt me, that she’d sacrifice my life for her own power. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even surprised. Just kind of . . . numb.

“Thank you,” I whispered back to Viktor. It might’ve done me some good to talk about it, but I didn’t know that Viktor had any more insight about my feelings than I did, and we were both exhausted.

I was sure I fell asleep with his hand in mine, but in the morning, I woke on my side. He was curled around my back, his arm draped around my waist, my fingers still tangled up in his though—yeah, it wasn’t the same hand as before.

And there, where his legs curled around my ass, I felt his morning wood pressing into my flesh.

My eyes flashed open, my breath caught. And—and sure. I was hard too, but that was just . . . it was why they called it morning wood. It was every morning, pretty much, and it didn’t have anything to do with who you were with or why or⁠—

Was Viktor awake? Did he know?

He must’ve felt me move or noticed my breathing change, because he sighed against the back of my neck. It tickled.

“Good morning,” he mumbled.

“Morning,” I rasped back.

Did it mean something? No. It couldn’t. It didn’t mean anything. We were just in the same bed, and in bodies that were . . . vaguely human. And did vaguely human things, like getting inadvertently hard.

And I was not going to make more of this than it was just because I was needy and pitiful. I wasn’t.

CHAPTER 25

Viktor

In theory, I was aware I was attractive.

Just a few days earlier, Evie and Altair had been looking at videos she’d taken of my brothers and me working on the houses, and talking about something called a “thirst trap.” From what I’d gathered, the concept was a good indication of the way in which I was attractive.

I looked good. People found my body impressive, and they liked the way my hair looked, and somehow my laziness about shaving constantly was “sexy.”

If the only part of me they were exposed to was my shirtless body in a video, carrying logs or hammering nails, then I seemed impressive.

Maybe if I’d been a painting rather than a person, people would have liked me more.

But that wasn’t how human—or werewolf—relationships worked.

There were interactions involved. Talking. Sharing. Acting like a person, and not a soldier, or as Evie sometimes joked about me, a robot.

Maybe Evie was one of the few people who liked me for what I was, but she wasn’t wrong. I didn’t give people what they expected from a person. No smiling and laughing and chatting for hours about things that didn’t matter, like Leo always did. My twin? He was the master of people. Everyone liked him, and his very presence made them happy.

I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate or ironic that as his twin, I was the opposite.

So it never surprised me when people gave me the same looks he got. We were twins, and while thanks to the different environments we’d had as teenagers, he’d gotten taller and bigger than me, we were still formed around the same base. Tall, dark-haired, and I supposed, handsome.

But I also knew I wasn’t what Daire had wanted.

Maybe he hadn’t told me in so many words, but Daire was . . . well, he was special. Soft, but without all the negative connotations I’d learned to put next to that word. He wasn’t weak, just young and untried. Not useless, but the opposite, constantly trying to help the people around him. He just didn’t have the experience to always know what to do.

It didn’t help that his mother had somehow convinced him that he was always wrong, so he was hesitant to even try anymore.

Not that his mother had anything to do with how he’d leaned back into me, rubbing his ass against my hard cock, making me want things I’d never really cared about before. Making me think that maybe, just maybe, he also wanted those things.

But Daire was soft. He didn’t want a fumble under the covers. He didn’t want rough and gruff and . . . well, me.