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Which pissed me right the hell off.
“I’ll have that right out for ye,” she said. “Can I bring ye more stout as well?”
“Please,” Mark said. Their fingers brushed as she reached for his glass, and he tried to push it to her. The table jumped as he jerked upon contact. The smile evaporated from her moony face as they stared at each other.
Unable to contain my curiosity, I accidentally-on-purpose brushed the side of her palm as I reached for my napkin.
Nothing. Not one damn thing.
“What did you say your name was?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” she said, sounding hypnotized, her eyes fixed on my brother’s.
“Hanna,” Mark said. “Her name is Hanna.”
The wench’s eyelashes lowered to her lightly freckled cheeks. A single tear beaded below them and slipped down to the corner of her full lips. “How did you know?”
Because they’ve all been Hanna, I wanted to shriek at her. You’re nothing special. No different than the rest.
My brother lifted her hand from the table and pressed it between his, deepening the strength of their connection. Speaking to part of her mind both private and primal.
“I know because you’re the chosen werewolf heir who will unite the shifter kingdom and end our bitter battle with humans for all time, issuing in an era of peace and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known. You’re the alpha, and I’m the Omega. We are the end and the beginning, and together, we’ll complete the cycle.”
The glazed look in her eye evaporated, and she shook her auburn head like a bird that had just run into a glass pane. The overwide grin returned to her features. “Has he been licking any toadstools that you know of?” she asked through the side of her mouth.
“All his life,” I reported.
“Riiight,” she said. “I’ll be right back with that cheese.”
Hanna sashayed away, bumping a table, and accidentally upending another wench’s tray on her way to the bar.
“You ever thought that your delivery might be part of the problem?” I asked, massaging a tight spot on my temple.
My brother stared after her with an expression of such longing it almost brushed the desiccated petals of my cold, dead heart.
I’d seen this look before.
Five times to be exact.
This one wouldn’t end any better than the others. And I had no intention of being here to see it.
Shifting in my rickety chair, I looked toward the door. I could get an early start, maybe. The road to Glasgow passed a well at the top of the hill. I could meet the carriage there. It would be easy to spot with the light of the almost-full moon.
So why wasn’t I reaching for my cloak?
Why did my legs feel like they were welded to this stupid cheap splintery chair in this grease-coated people-pustule of a pub?
The answer was, as always, right in front of me.
My brother.
The boy who’d bloodied young Angus MacLeod’s nose the first time he’d stuck a tree branch beneath my skirts, trying to get at me under things. The boy who had fought off a wild boar when I had insisted on taking a path through the forest he thought unsafe. The young man who told our father to go fuck himself with a fireplace poker when he had said that if I left, I would inherit nothing. The man whose unfailing belief in a magic solution to a terrible world had made me want to believe as well.
Once upon a time.
“I hope she’s the one,” I whispered.
Mark nodded, his unflinching gaze still fixed on his Hanna.
