Page 27

The pizza is... warm. It’s cheese. It’s Papa John’s in a mountain town in upstate New York, and my grandmother would roll over in her grave if she could see me eating it. But it’s food, and my stomach stopped being picky about twelve hours ago.

“Good?” Ruby asks.

“Great,” I lie, and Logan’s knee presses against mine, which means he knows I’m lying and he’s choosing not to call me on it.

We eat. The fire crackles. The wards hum outside, or maybe that’s just the electricity in my skin.

Somewhere between her second slice and her third, Ruby sets her plate on the arm of the chair and says, “I should probably tell you my story, since I know yours.” She glances at Connor, who gives her a small nod. “It’s a lot.”

“I’m sitting in a wolf town in the Adirondacks after setting off divine wards with my lightning.” I take another bite of the okay-ish pizza that might be starting to grow on me. “I can handle a lot.”

Ruby smiles, takes a breath, and starts.

She was a college student in Florida. Completely human—or so she thought. Her parents were regular people living in Naples—or so she thought. She went to school, studied for exams, and ate Easy Mac in her dorm room with her best friend who was also her roommate.

“Luna,” I say.

“Luna.” Ruby’s smile goes soft. “She turned out to be the moon goddess living undercover as a college freshman. She was doing laundry, setting alarms, studying for exams, acting completely normal… and the whole time, she was waiting for the right time to gift me with her magic. Illusion magic, in case you were wondering.” Ruby shakes her head. “The entire time, I had no idea.”

“T did the same thing,” I say quietly.

“The goddesses are patient,” Ruby says. “Terrifyingly patient.”

She tells me about the ski trip when she shifted into a wolf for the first time on her nineteenth birthday, in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, with no warning and no understanding of what was happening.

“I ran to the nearest house I could find,” she says. “Which happened to be Connor’s.”

She glances at him. He holds her gaze, and an entire conversation passes between them in the silence.

“I didn’t exactly welcome her with open arms,” Connor says.

“He told me I’d caused nothing but trouble and that it would be a relief to get me out of his hair,” Ruby says matter-of-factly, but I catch the ghost of the old wound in the way her jaw sets. “Which was really encouraging to hear while I was standing in his kitchen wondering why I’d turned into an animal.”

“I was engaged to someone else.” The regret in Connor’s voice is sharp enough to cut. “Autumn. She was… we’d been together for a long time.”

“The first time Connor and I touched, the mate bond ignited between us,” Ruby adds. “It’s a wolf thing. The universe decides you belong with someone, and your body knows it the second you touch. Because of Autumn, he spent weeks trying not to touch me. It was like I was a bomb he’d set off if he got too close.”

“You were a bomb.” Connor’s jaw tightens. “I was trying to do the right thing.”

“You’re always trying to do the right thing.” Ruby gives him an appreciative smile, then turns back to me. “Autumn made it clear she could end my life with a flick of her wrist. So, between Connor rejecting me and Autumn threatening me, I left Pine Valley with the witches. Which is how I ended up with the Blood Coven.”

The room goes quiet. The fire pops.

Ruby ended up with the Blood Coven?

“The rejection is the thing I regret most in my life,” Connor says before I can ask more. “I broke the engagement with Autumn, and what I feel for Ruby is so much deeper than the bond now.”

Ruby’s hand finds his on the arm of his chair. The room gets so warm that my electricity prickles against the inside of my skin, and the ache in my chest sharpens, because I want what they have. I do have what they have, minus the whole wolf-mate thing.

And the person I have it with is the reason I can’t be honest with the people sitting across from me.

Ruby tells me about the Blood Coven next. How the Pine Valley witches—including a girl named Hazel, who Ruby thought was her friend—turned out to be working for the Blood Coven. How they took Ruby to a place called Spring Creek and locked her in a basement cell with a vampire named Tristan.

“They starved him until he had no choice but to feed from me,” Ruby says, her voice going flat. “That created a blood bond, which amplifies attraction and messes with your emotions. I spent weeks thinking I was falling in love with him.”

I press my bracelet into my wrist until the metal bites and force myself to breathe. Ruby’s describing something that was done to her. A bond that twisted her feelings until she couldn’t tell what was real.

Logan feeding from me is different. I loved him for months beforehand. The bond can’t force love on me when that love already existed.