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“Just one night, Little Nightshade,” he’d said before shutting the door.
Now, I’d been pulled onto Dusk’s lap while he studied. I’d loitered too long in the living room, anxiously incapable of bringing myself to vanish back to the nest.
His hand trailed gently up and down my arm as he hugged me close, flipping through the pages of a Physiological Adaptations Arkology textbook.
Not my favourite, since there weren’t many equations involved, and my mind drifted.
Finally, a question nagged at me, twisting my stomach and making itself impossible to ignore. I couldn’t help thinking tothe blue registration card in my pencil case. The one I carried everywhere I could get away with.
“Ransom uh… didn’t sort out my registration and papers, did he?” I asked quietly, tilting my head and peering up at Dusk. I don’t know why that made me want to cry.
“He would have,” Dusk murmured without pause, barely glancing away from the textbook, though I noticed a distinct clench to his jaw. “Ransom fights for people with nothing no matter what it costs him,” he said. “I did it because he made me what I am.”
“Oh.”
Okay.
“So,” he said after a pause. “Are we going to keep pretending?”
I looked up at him with a frown. There was a slight smile curving his lips as his eyes drifted inattentively across the page. “You begged me for my knot, you bit Umbra, and you went into heat with Ransom—even though there were pills and mates nearby.”
“I didn’t know where the pills were, and I couldn’t get to my mates in time,” I said.
His grin widened. “You could have left.”
“It wasn’t… Iwasgoing to leave.”
“But youdidn’t.”
I shrank in his arms, hating that he was saying exactly what I’d been trying not to think about. Especially now that Ransom wasn’t a present distraction…
Dusk tilted my chin up, and I found myself swallowed by piercing yellow eyes. “Tell me what I need to do for you to let them go, Shatter. I’ll do it.”
I blinked, completely lost for words.
“I…” He trailed off, swallowing, and I followed the movement down his throat, suddenly needing any distraction. “I don’t know how to tell you the truth without scaring you away.”
Whattruth?
My heart was thundering in my ears.
“Why do you need them?” he asked. “Just tell me so I can fix it.”
It wasn’t something he could fix.
What I needed from him was impossible: trust that transcended a dark bond. The kind of forever it would be foolish to trust to anyone but mates.
“You’ve seen us. All of us. You know our secrets, our worst parts, and it’s not…” He took a breath. “If it’s not enough?—”
That word splintered every concern I had.“Enough?”
That’s what he thought?
How could Dusk Varis not think he wasn’t enough?
“That’s… not the issue?” He seemed to see the shock on my face.
“I…” I couldn’t think straight.
