Chapter 30 #2
I try to settle back into my body and ground myself in this space.
Dark closet. Tangled bedding. The scent of us hanging heavy in the air.
Sweat, sex, and Rennick’s vetiver and leather scent that usually calms me without trying.
But I’m still drifting, caught between this nest and that nightmare clearing, unable to choose which one is real.
Another ragged breath tears past my lips, and I force myself to look down, needing to see, needing to be sure the threads of Mom’s magic didn’t escape with me.
Arms are banded low around my waist from behind, solid and sure, and the tension in them tells me I might have hauled him upright with me.
This unyielding hold is unmistakably real and one I’d recognize anywhere.
I’m not hallucinating. He’s here with me.
In the sanctuary I built with both of us in mind, Rennick anchors me, refusing to let me slip back under.
Needing to see him for myself, I turn my head, and my sharpened vision startles me for a heartbeat—my wolf, summoned by my anguish, must be watching through my eyes again. I don’t have the space to even appreciate it, not when his face fills my line of sight and everything in it unravels me.
He looks as rattled as I feel. His pupils are blown wide, swallowing most of the lighter gray. A thin sheen of sweat coats his forehead, and his chest presses into my back with quick, uneven breaths.
The fear carved across his face is the same one he wore in the dream.
My brows pinch, the need to soothe, to fix, pulling my skin tight.
Even though my hands still tremble, I lift one anyway.
Fingers threading through the longer strands on top, I push his hair back from his forehead.
It ends up standing up in a dozen ridiculous directions, but my mind barely registers it.
There’s a buzzing lingering beneath my skin, and I can still hear the way he screamed for me—his despair a tangible thing as he howled my name.
It’s repeating over and over in my head, pulsing between my ears.
I fight back a wince every time his voice rings out.
He senses it, of course he does, the distress radiating out of my pores a siren call to his own wolf.
A low rumble starts in his chest. Then, without warning, he turns me and hauls my frame into his lap in one smooth move.
My legs shift automatically, knees bracketing his hips, my front pressing into his.
Yes, this is what I needed, I think as I tuck my face into the column of his throat and breathe deep.
“It’s okay, sweet one. I’ve got you,” he rasps against my ear, voice thicker with more than sleep. “I’m right here. Just breathe for me, Noa. You’re safe, I promise. I won’t let anything hurt you here.”
I believe him.
My arms slide around his neck and I curl in, eyes squeezing shut, holding myself as close to Ren as I can get without physically climbing into his skin.
Despite the fear still wreaking havoc on my system, I can’t pretend I’m surprised another one of my mother’s buried memories snapped loose.
Close proximity to Rennick is key to all of this.
His presence unravels every level of her spell work, and now that I’ve stopped resisting—let him touch me, let myself want him, let my heart stop running—her magic is starting to fail at a quicker rate.
I breathe him in again, and again, until the thrashing inside me turns sluggish. Only when I am sure I can speak without my words failing me do I open my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I mumble hoarsely into the flushed skin of his throat. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“Never apologize to me, Noa. Especially not for this.”
“It was another dream. One of hers,” I force out through a burning throat. Wincing again when I remember how hard Rennick fought to get to me. It was all in vain, Mom’s magic resolute. “This one felt more like a fucking nightmare, though.”
Rennick’s muscles flex around me, his wide palms pressed to my spine as if holding me closer might steady whatever’s happening inside him.
He exhales, a harsh sound that vibrates through his chest and into my own.
It’s the opposite of the soft purr he usually offers when he’s trying to calm me.
This is rougher, strained, a tell that he’s fighting to get a grip on himself.
I rest my cheek near his collarbone, trying to understand what exactly he’s reacting to.
I know my alpha is protective of me, but the intensity of his tension can’t simply be because I startled awake with wet lashes and a racing pulse.
“Fucking nightmare is right,” he finally rumbles out. “This was different than my other dreams left by Thalassa.
I go still in his lap.
Then my eyes fly open and I jerk back, heart tripping over itself. They blink into the dark, trying to make out even the faintest outline of his face, before it hits me that my wolf has slipped beneath the surface again and left me once more with my poor, fumbling human eyesight.
No longer able to glimpse what is going on behind his quiet exterior, I reach for him instead.
His cheek nuzzles into my palm the moment I find him.
“You saw it too?” The words scrape out of me in a rush. “The helicopter pad clearing. My mom with her threads. The…wolf?”
He nods into my hand before he speaks. “You weren’t alone, I was there with you.
Not this version of you—a younger one—but I still knew you were mine.
My mate,” he forces out, throat working around the words.
“I kept trying to get to you, but no matter how hard I fought against your mother’s magic, I couldn’t reach you. That fear…fuck, it was too damn real.”
“That’s because it was real, Ren.” My stomach roils and he goes stiff against me.
“That wasn’t a dream. It was a memory—at least pieces of one.
I…I think that was the night everything happened.
When she used her magic on us and tore us away from each other.
I’d bet everything that whatever led up to what we saw, it’s the reason we fled from this territory. ”
It feels like ash when I say it. Because I only saw fragments—brief, jagged glimpses of what happened that night—and even those were enough to turn my veins to ice. Enough to make me hold on to Rennick like we’re seconds from being torn away from each other again.
Another noise tears from Rennick’s throat, this one holding the promise of violence.
“I don’t give a shit why she did it or how good her justifications were, Thalassa’s lucky she’s already dead, because now that I know what she put you through that night…
.” Not needing to spell out the gory details, he lets the threat trail off unfinished.
I know how far he’s willing to go for me.
I know it in the way his arms cage me. In the way his wolf is prowling, all but making his skin ripple.
It’s still a struggle to not flinch. I remind myself that his fury is born from fear, and after what we both just saw, I can’t exactly fault his lash of promised vengeance.
“I knew Thalassa had power. Always kind of guessed she purposefully undersold what she was capable of. But what happened that night…it wasn’t something that should’ve been easily carved from our minds.
It was too big, too important. And yet, somehow, she did it.
Then buried the pieces for us to uncover years later…
” His words die off again, but this time it’s not caused by simmering anger, but awe.
“She was extraordinary.”
“She was terrifying,” he counters on an exhale, guiding us back until his spine meets the white oak built-ins along the closet wall. I stay nestled on his lap, head tucked under his chin.
“Men have always been quick to call powerful women dangerous instead of just admitting they’re afraid,” I mutter, dropping my hand from his face to rest it over his sternum instead. His heart rate has calmed. It now thuds steadily against my palm.
I know it’s a little ridiculous to feel defensive of Mom after watching what she did to us.
But the instinct is rooted deep, and it won’t disappear just because I’m reeling from her actions.
She hurt me. But she also loved me. Both truths live side by side, and I’m only just learning how to hold them without my hands shaking.
She had a good reason for what she did, I remind myself, because I have to cling to this belief to keep upright.
“I was more scared of that wolf,” I admit quietly, taking the spotlight off Mom’s power. “The one made of shadows.”
Rennick hums his agreement. Then his whole body locks like something short-circuits through him.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“It’s something your mother said in another dream,” he answers slowly.
He sounds distant, like he’s half here with me and half there, reliving it.
“She told me I hadn’t been ready to protect you back then.
Not from whatever danger she believed was here.
Said I needed time to learn who I was without… without the shadow looming over me.”
My head tilts as I try to process that without giving in to the inappropriate hysterical laugh bubbling in my throat.
None of this is funny, Goddess no, but I think my mind might be close to breaking, along with my body, with the absurdity of it all.
My mother was never this cryptic in life, but apparently death has given her a flair for half-truths and vague-as-fuck hints.
Inconvenient, sure. Also painfully on brand for my life lately.
“Shadow,” I repeat under my breath. “Who was the shadow?”
The question hangs in the air as my mind drifts back to the beast from the nightmare. That massive, shifting body made of inky smoke and mist. The way he laughed cruelly. The way his eyes looked. Pitch-black. Empty. Devoid of any warmth.
A shiver crawls through me as something old begins to stir at the edges of my mind. Not another message left by Mom. No, this is mine. Whatever my subconscious is trying to uncover hovers right there, but every time I reach for it, it slips through my fingers like sand.
“I’m not sure,” he mumbles, resting his head against mine. But the way he says it makes my stomach knot. It’s not uncertainty, it’s hesitation.
Because he has a guess.
And so do I.