AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Our night carried on like that—just dreaming about what we’d be doing and who we would be at the end of it all. The general criteria just seemed to be“happy.”
Apparently, we would paint our house blue—this was a dealbreaker when I tried to argue for white—and our front door green. She was no good with plants, but she wanted flowers all around the porch and a swing for her to sit on during the day so she could look at them.
Yearly vacations with her sister werealso non-negotiable, even though we’d managed to knock a few places off her bucket list just from running around with the fae, so she’d have to come up with new places to see. Aria didn’t have our kids' names picked out yet, but ever since our adventures in the Free Kingdom, she’d been weighing the pros and cons of having babies in the first place and thought it would be a rewarding experience. But, of course, she also let me know her opinion would probably change on any given day—especially with the world the way it was currently—so I shouldn’t get my hopes up.
The whole conversation was ridiculous, in my opinion, especially when we started debating the perfect temperature to keep our hypothetical thermometer at, but it made her smile and laugh and lookalivefor the first time in days.
As much as I wished I could spare her the pain of our life right now, moments like this one were worth it. I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world.
When she fell asleep, beaming at me asI agreed to a Doberman, I finally got up and blew out the damn cranberry candles.
10
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
ARIA
Marilyn had given up.
She didn’t say as much, of course, and she’d been supporting me through the last few days of total nothing that the two Captains had been offering, but she’d checked out. It was probably for the best.
Auren had been giving them a meal a day, and the guards posted outside had been allowed to move indoors when the rain chased us over. Although I had never noticed the lack of technology until Sariel told me he’d gotten Johnny to get us a laptop for our date, sure enough, they were playing cards again. Neo was always reading when we found him here working, but everyone else had some variety of cards or board games to keep them entertained. One pair had even been playing chess on the front porch.
Velez looked ready to drop when we headed down the basement steps, and Aster was already asleep in the corner of the room. They’d been given nothing in the small space, probably in fear they’d use it to end their suffering. How barren it was never ceased to amaze me.
“Good morning,” I tried, earning a deadpan look. “I brought you guys sandwiches.”
That earned me a tiny, albeit hesitant, smile from Velez as I unwrapped the plastic from around her meal. We pretended not to notice how voraciously she ate it, after which she eyed Aster’s in my hands.
“Thank you.”
Velez was the politer of the two. Ever since that first day, she’d made a point to be cordial, and while part of me thought it was just a ploy to try and weasel her way free, more of me hoped she was starting to view us differently. Aster rarely even woke up, usually content to stay tucked into her corner and pretend we weren’t even visiting.
“You can have it if you want,” I offered the second sandwich after eyeing Aster.
Velez took it from me a bit more hesitantly this time, looking at her comrade. “Will you bring her any more?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
I would probably get caught if I started feeding them more than Auren’s one-meal-per-day policy, though it seemed needlessly cruel.
She nodded slowly and sat the sandwich on the floor near Aster before stretching.
The fact that they hadn’t even tried to attack us was telling, in my opinion. Both Paras had put together that we were their best shot at a peaceful resolution to all this and responded accordingly.
“Aster won’t give you anything,” Velez started, staring at the other woman with an expression I couldn’t quite place. “Her coven is old. They’re all raised on the same shit we always hear and haven’t stepped out of line in generations.”
Her brown eyes searched the room for something, looking a little lost.
“It happens more than people think. The Upper Council can sniff them out if they’re pointed in the right direction, but they’re not mind readers. There are millions of people in the States.”
I wanted to ask her what her point was, and where she was trying to go with this speech. It’s all stuff I already knew and had grown up thinking anyway, but she seemed to be leading up to something that would hopefully point us to the information we were hunting for.
“My mom is dating a blessed wolf.” Her voice dropped to a husky whisper, like she was afraid we would judge her. “Nobody really cares because she can’t have kids anymore, but why should it have even mattered? I’ve taken in so many hybrids, and none of them did anything I wouldn’t have done to survive. It’s easier to think of them as monsters because if they’re not…”
Velez looked between Marilyn and me with haunted eyes. I rubbed the gooseflesh down, my heart aching for her.
“If they’re not, what does that make us?”
