The waitress and her spiel were irrelevant, but her final sentence still managed to floor me. Test our relationship? The tenuous whatever-it-was that had been gradually rebuilding between me and Orion since our mate bond broke wasn’t ready to be tested. And I certainly didn’t need an external force manipulating us when Orion refused to so much as touch my shoulder.
No wonder I froze like a deer in the headlights even as Celeste murmured, “Mmm, pancakes.” She jabbed her finger at something on the menu then headed toward the stranger she apparently had no compunction against forming an insta-love relationship with.
Chapter 4
In the end, I ordered the meat lover’s platter. I mean, werewolves need more protein than humans and the stereotypical man liked meat. Surely I was on the right track?
Then I joined the others, sliding in beside Celeste and across from Orion. The bump of his knees against mine intermingled with stray scents carrying over from the kitchen to make my mouth water and my stomach steady. I didn’t need to overthink our future. Where we were right now was pretty darn good.
Orion’s thought processes appeared to be traveling in a different direction. “Have you noticed the paleness of Finnegan’s skin?” he rumbled, voice so quiet only another wolf would have caught the question. I glanced over at Celeste and Finnegan anyway to make sure we hadn’t been overheard and saw that I needn’t have worried. The pair was deep in conversation about their menu choices, heads bent so close together their noses nearly touched.
I still didn’t like how fast my sister was falling for this stranger, who seemed as likely to be a Council employee as their captive. But I could take an emotional step back and assess just as Orion had apparently been doing while waiting for our arrival.
He was right that Finnegan’s skin showed absolutely no signs of tanning, not even as much as you’d expect to get crossing the sidewalk daily from house to car beneath the Texas sun. “You think he really was a prisoner?” I murmured. “Did you ask him outright?”
Away from the smoke, Orion would have been able to smell a lie on Finnegan’s breath. Which, apparently, was a moot point. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Of course he didn’t. I glared at the not-quite-human who was stroking Celeste’s palm while the pair considered their halved tattoos.
“You don’t trust him,” Orion observed.
“I’m having a hard time separating my concern for someone I care deeply about from what I actually think of Finnegan.” I wouldn’t have been so honest around anyone else, but Orion never made me regret sharing weaknesses. Sure enough, he graced me with an empathic hum, giving me space to continue if I wanted to. “You have less skin in the game,” I added after a moment. “Do you think he was a prisoner?”
“Not so sure I have less skin in the game.” Orion’s eyes became pools of darkness in which stars glimmered. “Finnegan’s glib,” he added. “Charming.”
“Sounds like you don’t trust him either.”
“I’m having a hard time separating my concern for someone I care deeply about from what I actually think of Finnegan.”
Before I could fully process the way Orion had turned my words back on me, the waitress showed up with a tray full of plates. “Chocolate overload and meat lover’s platter,” she said, sliding the indicated meals in front of me and Orion. “And peanut butter pancakes…and peanut butter pancakes.”
The pair of identical dishes landed in front of Celeste and Finnegan, who smiled at each other with such gooeyness that the weird not-breakfast in front of me turned even less appetizing than it had looked a moment before. I scraped a mountain of whipped cream off the top with my fork, hoping to find something underneath less likely to result in a sugar crash.
No such luck.
“Need anything else?” the waitress asked, and I got the distinct impression she was grading us on our choices. By her standards, Celeste and Finnegan were ready to elope while Orion and I might as well be on the worst blind date ever.
“No.” Orion’s voice was curter than usual. Even his tacked-on “Thank you” didn’t entirely soften the effect as he picked up a strip of bacon, turned it over, then set it down again.
“Not hungry?” I asked, eying the glistening morsel of deliciousness.
“Orion only eats pastured meat,” Celeste explained, although how she could know that when I didn’t was beyond me. “And El hates dessert for breakfast,” she added for Orion’s benefit. The whole time she was schooling us, her gaze never left Finnegan’s.
“Sorry,” Orion and I both told each other, the words emerging simultaneously. At least our apologies meshed.
We were swapping plates, Orion carefully keeping his fingers clear of mine, when Vega blew in like a storm cloud. She strode past the waitress with a lip-freezing glare and was soon looming above all of us. “Let’s see it,” she demanded.
Celeste and Finnegan’s hands rose in tandem above their pancakes, wrists facing outward. The mirror-image tattoos seemed to ripple under the fluorescent lights and Vega’s already grim expression turned grimmer. Her fingers clenched down on my shoulder hard.
It wasn’t a warning, but rather a giving and receiving of strength. Apparently, the ominous feeling I got from Celeste’s gooey eyes had a basis in reality.
“Get up,” my aunt told us. “We’re not discussing this here.”
There was a park not far from the pancake house where sprinklers moistened the air and allowed the growth of trees and shrubs. It was nothing like the desert where I’d first heard the rhyme about the half-glyph, but a children’s playground off in one corner boasted a large sandpit in its center. Vega led us directly toward that slightly desert-like portion of the park, toeing off her shoes and waiting for us all to do the same.
She didn’t speak the words I’d requested immediately however. Instead, she asked me, “You’re sure you want this?”
Vega embodied the desert in many ways. She was tough and strong, wrinkles baking typical beauty out of her skin. Despite that, over the past month, she’d become beautiful to me.
We shared a pack bond and had hunted together. She’d given me a home, had helped me form friendships with her clan mates. And she’d eased me into understanding what it meant to be a wolf, glossing over the ways my unconventional upbringing made things that seemed self-explanatory to most shifters odd and confusing to me.
Now, though, we seemed to have stepped back in time to when we first met. When my part in imprisoning Vega’s pack had hung heavy between us. When my aunt hadn’t bothered relinquishing her name—let alone the fact we were related—for a good long while.
“Information?” I answered carefully, trying to understand why her question felt so loaded. “Yes, I want information.”
Vega shook her head and her subsequent words reminded me far too much of what Gabi had told me back when I thought my erstwhile mentor was on my side. “This isn’t merely information,” Vega bit out. “Speaking words of power will set events into motion, events upon which you can’t turn back the clock.”
“But you’ve told me this already. Where the glyphs lie halved…”
Vega’s hand slapped over my mouth, stinging my skin and stopping the words before I could continue. “I haven’t,” she countered. “I spoke two lines that everyone in my pack already knew at a time when the events forecast had already come to pass. Then it was safe. Now, it’s not.”
Up until this point, the conversation had involved me and Vega only, even though everyone else was right there beside us. Celeste and Finnegan had become lost in each other’s eyes again and Orion was quite adept at giving me space to fight my own battles.
That space eroded as Orion advanced, removing Vega’s hand from my face with gentle firmness. His skin grazed my skin in the process, but I didn’t shiver with pleasure. Instead, I felt like a bone being fought over as the air around me turned spicy with alpha dominance, half from him and half from her.
Orion growled out a wordless admonition and, after a moment, Vega replied: “Point taken.” Then, turning away from her fellow alpha in what I was pretty sure was a werewolf slight, she addressed me again. “I don’t know the rest but I’ll ask the desert to give me the words if you want them. First though, take a moment to think it through. Make sure you’re deciding with your head.”
My head, not my heart? Or my head, not my libido?
