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“Yes. ”
“I’m not your mate anymore. ”
Desmond shook his head. “You’ll always be my mate. You have wolf DNA, even if you’re not a wolf anymore. You can’t change that. And who fucking cares about the soul-bond anymore anyway? Hadn’t we already screwed that up a million different ways?”
I twisted my hands in my lap. “A million sounds like a low estimate. ”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. ”
But it did. If we were going to make this work, I had to tell him what he’d missed when he was trapped in wolf form. Not what he’d done, but what I’d done. I wasn’t sure how much he would remember from being in his other form, but my memory of a night in bed with Holden was crystal clear. “Something happened when we were gone. When you were a wolf. I can’t blame—”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said again, and when I met his gaze, I saw how serious he was. “I want to leave the past in the past. People don’t get fresh starts like this every day, Secret, and I don’t want to waste a single goddamn second dwelling on what did or didn’t happen, and with who, when we can pretend like it was the bad dream and this is reality. ”
I thought more about Holden and how I’d confessed before the fairy court that I loved him enough not to sacrifice his life. I’d meant it. I did love Holden. When I’d been one of the monsters, he’d even been a more sensible choice for me than Desmond. Desmond had seemed wrong for me somehow. He was too good, too kind for my dark little world. But maybe he was right. Maybe this was exactly what we needed to brush aside all doubt. Now I could love him the way he deserved, because now I wasn’t keeping him trapped in the nighttime.
Maybe Aubrey Delacourte had done me the greatest favor of my life.
Once I’d had to worry about what path my destiny would take—the werewolf life or the vampire life. Now my dual futures had been obliterated and there was only one life.
And that life was sitting across the table from me.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
My happily ever after wasn’t meant to go off without a hitch. Apparently even as a human nothing was going to come easily for me. After spending the better part of my afternoon lying in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park with my head in Desmond’s lap and my mind anywhere but on the problems of old Secret’s life, I got called back to reality.
By Lucas.
Dusk had settled over the city when Desmond and I started walking back to the apartment, and the sounds of my cellphone singing “Maneater” cut through my waking dream. Stupid goddamn phone. I should have thrown it in the Bethesda Fountain when I’d had a chance. Hell, I should have hopped on a plane to Las Vegas with Desmond the second we’d realized what had happened to me. Anything to get both of us as far from New York City as we could get.
But we’d stayed, and now I had to deal with my nighttime life again.
“What do you want?” I asked, not really caring what his response was.
“Where the hell have you been?” roared the response from the opposite end of the phone. “I told you very clearly you had a week to get her back, and three weeks later she shows up? In that time no one has a single fucking clue where you’ve been or if you’re coming back?”
I waited, listening to him shout and curse and shout some more. When he finally took a breath, I interjected, “First, you didn’t give me a week, you gave me to the end of the week. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I did bring Kellen home, didn’t I?”
Silence.
“And can you tell me the last time you went into a different plane of existence, Lucas? Do you have the faintest clue of how time functions in a fairy world?”
“A…what?”
“Yeah. If you’d stopped your bitching for ten seconds and actually asked me what happened to her, I would have told you. Your sister was kidnapped by fairies. ”
“Did you say—?”
“Fairies. F-a-i—”
“Okay, I heard you. ”
“I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I think you only hear the sound of your own voice. ”
Desmond and I had arrived in Hell’s Kitchen and were making slow progress towards my apartment. His lupine hearing would give him an advantage, since he’d certainly be able to hear every word Lucas was saying, even if the billionaire hadn’t been shouting at the top of his voice like a petulant toddler.
“Yes, she is home,” he said. “But she won’t talk to me. She won’t talk to anyone. She’s been locked in her apartment all day sobbing. ”
Sobbing? That was news. I’d remembered her seeming out of sorts when we’d come back through the gate, but I’d written it off as some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. That had seemed likely then, but Kellen was a tough girl. I was surprised to learn she was still upset over her ordeal. Maybe more had happened to her with the fairies than I’d had a chance to learn about.
