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“Yes. You deserve to follow your dream.”
We walk in silence for a time, breaking through the trees and walking across fields. Perhaps Ilsa and Liam sense Ruby and I want some alone time. They walk ahead, out of earshot, dim figures in the light of the moon and stars. It’s far brighter without the cover of the trees, the moon howling to me silently, calling to me.
A young wolf would snap, but I have to be stronger than that.
For my woman, I can’t put her in danger again.
“What about your parents?” she asks.
“A wolf murdered them,” I tell her, my voice steady, the way it always is when I tell this story. “It infected me when I was twelve. But I managed to hide. There was a crawlspace. I was smaller back then, and I...well, I hid. The wolf attacked them. I heard it all.”
“Ramsey,” she whispers.
She’s stopped walking.
I face her, devouring her features, the way she shares my pain, and how I’ll always share hers. I’m not sure when we started holding hands, but she feels so right, so warm, somine.
“It was a long time ago. Liam killed the wolf who killed my family. It was a week after hunters killed his mentor. Josefine. Obviously, I never met her, but Liam says she was the best wolf he knew. Liam was a wolf from birth, so he’d had time to learn about it. His dad was a wolf, passed now, and his mother was a human.”
She squeezes onto my hands. “Thanks for telling me that.”
I try for a smirk, pretending this moment isn’t pulsing with wolfish energy.
Her beauty brings me closer every moment, with all her energy and heat.
“The world’s just so unfair sometimes,” she whispers, her voice shaking. “It’s like with my Mom. She’sfinallygetting over all that cult stuff, sort of. Maybe she’s depressed. I get that. But she’s stopped believing in all their crap, all the horrible stuff they told us,didto Mom....”
I pull her into a hug, laying my chin atop her head, closing my eyes, and breathing deeply. I breathe in her sadness, pain, and bravery beneath it all.
I breathe in her anger at how evil the world can be.
Squeezing her tightly, I almost sayI love you.
Even those words don’t feel like they describe it properly.
Ruby has yet to understand how deep my need for her goes.
“Was it bad?” I ask, just to say something, to try and deny the fact I’m rambling again, shivering from the inside.
But I don’t want to let her go.
“Mom said Master Pete would torture her with horrible lies, telling her demons were going to get her, getmeif she didn’t do what he said.”
“What he said?”
She leans back in my embrace, staring up at me. She turned off her flashlight a while ago, so I can clearly see with shimmering eyes, the light dancing across her cheeks as though joining the flushed gorgeousness.
“Master Pete is the cult leader.”
“Don’t call him master,” I growl, my voice brimming with the wolf, thundering with the wolf.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be.” I clench my teeth. “I just can’t...he isn’t a master of anything.”
“You’re right. He’s an evil man. He’s acultleader, Ramsey. They did that to Mom. She doesn’t talk about it a lot, but she’s told me enough.”
My skin burns for my woman’s mother.
