Page 21

How did she think it should feel?

“You know how it is in books? Where it’s like two souls merging or something?” she would say.

“Maybe that’s just in books,” I would say.

“Maybe,” she would say.

Back in the car outside the funeral, my dad was still talking as he fitted the keys into the ignition. He made a face, looking chagrined, and he didn’t meet my gaze. “I guess I could have protected you better, sweetheart.”

I let out a breath, looking out of the windshield at the parking lot, at all the people in their funeral garb, getting into their cars, driving off to go out to that house for Opal’s celebration of life. “You couldn’t have known how it would go.”

“I wonder about Hank sometimes,” said my dad. “Did he play us? Did he plan it all out?”

I turned to look at him. This was the same theory that Walker had last night. “You think the cyning put Opal up to it?”

“Well, it’s no secret that before you showed up, that was what he wanted. He wanted Damian to marry Opal. It was the perfect way to preserve the bloodline.”

Yeah, my dad was right. The shaman had been “finding” the markings on a Hardesty family wolf for the past six generations, after all. Then, there was only Opal, no other children in the family, and no male for the shaman to find markings on, so then… Damian. His parents had just been killed in a car accident and he and his brother lived with his aunt and uncle and their three kids. He was compliant and impressionable, a perfect surrogate son, the right age for Opal.

Had the old cyning influenced the shaman? Who knew?

“Us showing up ruined his plans,” said my dad. “Except, in the end, he got exactly what he wanted.”

“But he was so angry at Opal,” I said.

“Maybe that was because of the backlash,” said my dad. “You know there are still people who feel that we incurred the wrath of the ancestors when you weren’t the cwen. They think that there’s a reason Opal died, and it’s because she was being punished for what she did, which went against the sacred ways of the current and the wind, and all of that.”

“Really? So, they probably want me and Damian to get together now.”

“I sort of assumed that was a given,” said my dad as he pulled the car out of the parking space. “But I get it, sweetheart. I get why you wouldn’t want it. In the end, maybe I want to blame anyone except him. He was such a sweet kid. I felt like I half-raised him. He was always at our house in those later years. You two…” My dad let out a sigh. “Should I have made that harder? Should I have said he couldn’t sleep in your bed when you two were already obviously sexually active?”

“Dad.” I was still embarrassed about this, even years later, because it wasn’t so much that my dad was permissive about my sleepovers with Damian, more that he just didn’t say anything when Damian was there at breakfast and we never really talked about it other than for him to make sure he was taking me to get special omega birth control filled.

“Your mother was not pleased with me,” he said quietly. “Maybe it was my fault, all of this. I could have kept you away from him, from this pack, from this town—”

“But this is your home now,” I said.

“Yeah, but maybe that’s just me being selfish.” He was driving now, pensive as he held the steering wheel. “I loved it here from the moment we arrived. It felt like home to me. And when you and Damian matched, it felt to me like it was a confirmation of what I wanted to be true, that I belonged here. I had been hiding the wolf side of myself for so long, and I wanted this to be the right place to be. So, maybe I didn’t push hard enough. But you coming back here, you telling me you don’t want him… well, I’m seeing it differently. Obviously, sweetheart, he should never have done that to you. If he loved you, he would not have.”

I squirmed in the other seat. I had not realized how much I wanted him to say that.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was never angry enough on your behalf.”

“You were,” I said in a tiny voice. I did remember him being really angry. I remember that he’d confronted the cyning, Hank Hardesty, Opal’s dad, but the cyning had been furious with Opal, condemning her to the entire pack, and Damian was the one who stood up for her, saying she was his mate, saying that it was done, saying that there was no undoing it.

And there wasn’t. Short of killing her, that is.

Back in the deep and disgusting past, two hundred years ago, that did happen. They killed omegas if alphas lost their minds and accidentally mated them and the alphas wanted free. But back two hundred years ago, no one blamed a man if he shot a woman if she was in bed with another man, either. The past has always been brutal to women.

“I think I hoped you’d come back,” said my dad, smiling at me from the driver’s seat. “I think I wanted you and Damian to work this all out, and to have my little girl just down the road from me. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m going to do a better job at putting your happiness first.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said, trying to reassure him that he was being hard on himself, because I honestly had never noticed before that he’d not been putting my happiness first. But as we drove the rest of the way home, I wondered if anyone had been putting me first. I wondered if I had been putting me first.

When I lost Damian, everything hurt so much that I simply wanted the pain to stop. Whatever made it easier, that was what I did, whether it was the right thing for me or not. Maybe this is why I came back here, to put right what I couldn’t put right before.

Thinking that made me feel good.

But when we got to the cabin, Damian’s car was parked right in front of mine and he was standing outside, leaning against the trunk, gazing at me.