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“She’s beautiful,” he said. “And strong. Andveryfucking smart.”
I felt my cheeks heat under his praise. My wolf was wearing her version of a satisfied grin; it wasn’t a pleasant look on her, but I understood what the expression meant. She was giddy and excited at the direct praise, preening and prancing around and rolling onto her back to expose her tummy.
That hussy.
“She sniffed every inch of me.” Sariel laughed lightly. “Even—”
“No,” I interrupted quickly. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I was going to say my feet,” Sariel’s smirk was knowing as he glanced at me. “She’s cute, and not at all what I expected her to be like…”
He trailed off, of course, because he had been expecting a half-feral bloodthirsty animal that would maul him at the first scent of his blood. Instead, he’d met a furry, snuggly, 101-Dalmatians-looking wolf.
I wondered when he’d met fallen-blood wolves before to make his dislike for them so passionate. Did he really hate them just off the rumors about them?
“Have you met many fallen-blood wolves, Sariel?” I asked.
His entire body tensed at my question. The temperature in the car dropped a few degrees. His jaw clenched, bunching the muscle in his cheek and making it twitch.
I was smart enough to understand when I’d stepped on a proverbial landmine, so I began to backtrack. “Nevermind, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I was just curious, but I know curiosity killed the cat—”
“They killed Auren,” he said.
My jaw snapped shut at this piece of information. My first instinct was to ask how, but I kept my mouth shut. I felt it was the wise thing to do, since the steering wheel was creaking beneath Sariel’s sudden death grip.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead.
“Youdidn’t kill him.”
The answer surprised us both.
I wasn’t thinking that I was responsible for his death, but based on Sariel’s expression, it was clear that he’d been grouping me in with his brother’s murderers. Until now, it seemed.
We didn’t speak again, except for when Sariel informed me that we would be driving through the night, and then asked what I’d like from the Chick-fil-A drive-through we stopped at. At one point, I offered to take the wheel so he could rest, but he just shot me an incredulous look and ignored that. Following this, we made a few more stops, two of which were for me to pee and one was for us to pick up breakfast.
We pulled into King Charles at around three p.m. the next day. When Sariel drove us to a massive plot of land littered with trees, no houses in sight, I was so tired and uncomfortable that I immediately assumed the worst.
“You’re going to kill me now, aren’t you? This is where you plan to hide my body, huh?”
His expression hardened. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”
He climbed out of the car, groaning as he unfolded his long legs from the cramped space. “Get out. We have to walk from here.”
I eyed the trees skeptically before I turned back to him. “You don’t actually expect me to follow you in there, do you? Do you remember what happened to us the last time we were in a forest?”
He paused to smirk at me. “I don’t know aboutyourfeelings, but I was taken care of by a pretty little wolf.”
I blanched. “You could have died!”
“Aria. I’m a half-eternally-damned angel. If anything kills me, it won’t be a car accident,” he said with a scoff. “Now get out of the car.”
“Then maybe a bullet will,” I snapped as I stumbled out the passenger side. I pulled my hair up and propped my hands on my waist as he adjusted the backpack of things we’d gotten from the old Irish man.
“A bullet will not,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Come on. It’s a fifteen-minute walk before we reach the boundary line.”
“Are we just leaving the car here?”
Sariel and I looked at the car before turning to each other.
