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“Don’t call me that,” I said, rolling my eyes, but I smiled. She would always call me that, I would always complain, and both of us liked it. “You look tired.”
“You know you’re not supposed to tell a woman that, right?”
I didn’t answer her.
Carletta sighed, giving in. “It’s just been a long… life.”
I gestured for her to follow me to the living room, and we sat down. Carletta kicked off her ballerina flats and tucked her feet underneath her, sipping her coffee.
“Felix tells me the pack is restless.”
“Felix is full of shit,” Carletta said. “And Felix can go fuck himself.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He keeps checking in on me, and it’s pissing me off.”
“He cares,” I said. Felix and Carletta were great together, back when we still thought about something as fickle as love.
“I told him to move on,” Carletta said. “He’s not moving on; he keeps checking in on me like I can’t take care of myself.”
I thought about all the women Felix had been with at the club. He was pretending. Sex didn’t mean anything to him with all of them. He would never stop loving my sister, but she wouldn’t take him back.
“You’re struggling,” I said.
“I know.”
“You can’t keep doing this. Your magic is going to consume you if you don’t do something about it.”
“I’m not shifting, Jamie,” Carletta said. “I don’t care what you and Felix and the rest of them say.”
I furrowed my brows and sipped my whiskey. I understood what Carletta was trying to do. Delaney hadn’t been able to shift, so in her memory, Carletta was carrying on, not shifting. Delaney hadn’t had an animal to turn to, so her not shifting wasn’t killing her. Carletta hadn’t let her bear out in years. The magic was building up, and even though she tried to deal with it, at some point, she was going to descend into madness. Most people who didn’t shift on the regular just lost control, but Carletta’s power was so strong, she could stop herself from losing it. The alternative was that she lost control of her mind.
“Delaney wouldn’t have wanted this,” I said. “She wouldn’t have wanted you to suffer.”
“She’s dead, Jameson,” Carletta said, but instead of snappy, she just sounded tired. “She didn’t want any of this.”
That was true.
“I wish I’d known how much she’d hated it. I wish I’d known so we could have done something.”
I pressed my lips together. “I know.”
Neither of us had known just how desperate our sister had become. She’d been shunned by a lot of the pack members, and she went through a tough time.
“She was always so positive, so brave,” Carletta said. “If she’d just dropped that damn mask and told us what was going through her head…”
She’d always put on a brave face and told us that she would just integrate herself into the human world. When she’d started disappearing more and more, we’d thought that was what she’d been doing.
“Wearing a mask runs in the family,” Carletta added, giving me a pointed look.
“Don’t act like you’re not wearing one, too,” I said.
Carletta shrugged. “Have you found him yet?”
I gritted my teeth and sighed heavily. I hated having to say no. It had been years, and I was still looking for the man responsible for Delaney’s death.
Instead of going to the humans and making a life where she would be normal among them—just someone with magic that didn’t amount to anything else—she’d looked for fae who could help her. She’d wanted them to build her a beast out of thin air.
