CHAPTER THREE || LEE #2
“Hey,” he said brightly, hovering at the edge of the table, not sitting down. His fingers were tight around his plate of food. “Is it—er, do you mind if I—”
He lifted a hand from his death grip on his plate and gestured vaguely at the empty spot next to me, across from Hunter, at the very edge of the bench.
My twin’s jaw tightened. I could almost feel him gearing up for a refusal.
Just as I could sense Daniel, I could feel Hunter too.
It wasn’t as strong as with the warlock, but it was like the emotional equivalent of an echo.
I wasn’t sure if it was because we were born of the same person—a twin bond, maybe?
Or maybe it was because we were both mate-bonded to Daniel and I was somehow experiencing Hunter’s emotions echoed through Daniel. Both, most likely.
And I understood Hunter’s impulse to shut Daniel out, of course. We’d both been keeping an ice-cold distance from him for two years. It was mostly habit, at this point. And it was definitely the smart thing to do—the safe thing.
Things had changed between the three of us when the Algea had attacked and temporarily paralyzed Hunter.
Then, I’d watched Daniel put himself in harm’s way to help drag my twin—my literal other half—to safety.
And I’d seen the way he had collapsed inward when he’d thought Hunter’s injuries might not be reversible.
Whatever else had happened between us, the warlock still cared about us in a way no one else ever had. And I knew Hunter understood that, too.
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be smart or safe anymore. I missed him way too much.
Still, I almost let my other half tell the warlock to sit elsewhere. No matter how I felt, his presence was… confusing.
But the look on Daniel’s face—braced for rejection, trying so hard to seem like it wouldn’t bother him—decided me.
“Sit down, Daniel,” I said.
Hunter shot me a dark, mutinous look. I ignored it.
Daniel sat down beside me. He set his plate in front of himself, but he didn’t start eating right away. He cast a look at Hunter with those careful, dark eyes, clearly trying to gauge the temperature.
“You look like shit,” Hunter said flatly, finally looking over at Daniel. A little unwillingly, as though he couldn’t quite help himself.
“Hunter,” I said.
“What? He does.”
Daniel let out a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. “Yeah. Well, I haven’t been sleeping great.”
“Join the fucking club,” Hunter muttered, and then seemed to realize what he’d implied, because his ears went red and he returned his attention to his coffee with sudden intensity.
“Pretty sure he already has,” I said. “None of us has gotten a restful night’s sleep in two years.”
Hunter looked back up, his eyes wide and disbelieving that I’d just all but admitted to having the mate dreams. It was one thing to talk about them with each other, another to tell Daniel. But I was done with being cruel to him.
I’d meant what I said: I wanted to forgive him. I wanted a lot more than that, besides.
At my bald admission, Daniel blinked, darting a startled look between Hunter and me.
Emotions chased each other across his face—surprise, confusion, hope—before he tamped it all down.
He’d tried to talk to us about the mate dreams. Several times, in fact. We’d completely iced him out of anything resembling an actual conversation. About six months in, he’d stopped trying.
And yeah, it wasn’t the most emotionally mature thing either of us had ever done, but we’d both still been reeling from having been split into two people, becoming wolves against our will, suddenly having to fight monsters for a living, losing our human lives, and discovering that the guy we’d loved for most of our lives had been keeping a huge life-altering secret from us the entire time.
We hadn’t been ready to talk about any of it then.
But I was ready now, even if my twin wasn’t.
“You’re not eating,” Daniel said, glancing at Hunter.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m sitting down,” Lacey said, approaching our table. She put her plate down on the table and slid into the seat beside Hunter, across from Daniel and me.
“Hiya, Lacey,” I greeted her. Unlike Hunter, I didn’t mind her. I was glad Daniel had her friendship, in fact.
“Lee,” she said, nodding at me. The expression she wore was cheerful, but I suspected that was mostly for Daniel’s benefit. The dangerous look in her eyes was anything but cheery. It darkened fractionally when it landed on my other half. “And Hunter.”
He shot her a look of open dislike. “Welcome to our table, Lacey. Don’t mind the fact that no one wants you here.”
“Daniel wants me here,” Lacey said, with narrowed eyes.
“Please, both of you, just stop,” Daniel said, rubbing his temples. “I can and will cast a silencing spell.”
Hunter’s gaze flicked up at that and his whole expression enlivened. “Speaking of magic—”
And that was when my head split open.
The mess hall was still there: the comforting hum of conversation between pack members in other parts of the room, the smell of bacon and coffee.
Hunter was speaking, and whatever he’d said had caused Lacey to bristle. Daniel was still seated beside me, frozen and unhappy.
But I couldn’t follow any of their words, because suddenly, layered on top of all of that was something else: another reality I was living in parallel. A terrible one.
A sudden streak of something pale and metallic, a blur of deadly motion I caught out of the corner of my eye, hurtling through the air at tremendous speed. I turned, much too slow, and saw that it was aimed directly at Daniel’s head.
A split second later, before I could act, it hit him.
Daniel’s body jerked and his eyes went wide with surprise. Then the light drained out of them all at once, and he collapsed face-first, motionless. Blood poured from his head, pooling onto the wooden table.
Buried in his forehead was something narrow and silver.
And my mate was gone.
I let out a strangled sound of horror and absolute denial.
Then I blinked. The parallel reality vanished.
It hadn’t happened.
Yet.
My brain processed that even as I flew into motion.
I grabbed Daniel and hauled him sideways off the bench, where we hit the floor together.
An instant later, there was a whirring noise above us. It was followed by a loud thunk that silenced the entire room.
I looked over in the direction of the sound. A perfectly ordinary metal fork had buried itself in the log wall behind where Daniel’s head had been a half-second earlier. It had sunk deep, its prongs completely embedded in the wood.
For a moment, nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Daniel was underneath me, and when I glanced down, his dark eyes were huge, his heart hammering so hard I could feel it against my own chest. His hands had come up instinctively to grip my arms. His mouth was open.
He stared up at me, and I stared back down at him and the world contracted to the space between our faces.
“What—” he started.
“Are you hurt?” My voice came out rough and strange. My hands were shaking. My entire body was shaking. I was still gripping his shirt. My skin felt ice cold. The vision was still seared into my mind.
All that blood.
Daniel motionless—
He had died. The light had gone out of his eyes.
The eyes I had spent most of my life looking into, the face I had loved more than my own since before I even knew what that word meant, gone slack and staring.
The man I’d wanted to come home to more than anything else, the man I’d taken for granted, gone from the world forever in an instant.
Except, he wasn’t dead.