CHAPTER ELEVEN || DANIEL
“We should get some sleep,” Hunter said. Then he glanced over at Lee and added, “We ought to push our beds together. They aren’t big enough for three.”
We’d moved from the kitchen area, and I was sitting between them on the couch. They were each holding one of my hands. I wasn’t sure who had reached for whom.
Lee nodded. “Yeah, we ought to.”
Alarm surged through me. “What are you guys talking about? Pushing the beds together?”
“Just temporarily,” Hunter added. “We’ll need to get a bigger bed. Eventually.”
Eventually. A whole future was packed into that single word.
But… wow. This was so fast. The about-face was giving me whiplash. Hunter had only ever looked at me with pain and anger in his eyes. Now he was gazing at me with a softness I’d only ever seen in him before the split. Lee, too.
“Do I get a say in this?” I asked.
Hunter’s confidence wavered and his brows furrowed. “Of course you do.” Then he swallowed. “Are you—are you saying you don’t want to?”
Big yikes. Yeah, this was not a fun feeling, was it? Because, yeah, of course I wanted to. The idea of being close to Hunter and Lee was… everything my body and my heart craved.
But I was still trying to mentally catch up to the fact that Lee and Hunter no longer seemed to hate me.
Which was confusing, because the split had still happened, and it was still all my fault. It was my fault they’d become wolves, that their lives had been ripped away from them without warning. How could they just get over that so easily?
“Don’t you think it’s a little… fast?”
“You’re right. It is fast,” Lee agreed, ignoring Hunter’s mutinous glare. His gaze was locked on mine. “But it might be helpful if we begin how we mean to continue. None of us can undo the past two years, but we can choose what we do next.”
What he was saying made sense.
It was just…
Okay, Daniel, I told myself. You need to be brave all over again.
“How do I know if this is real?” I asked, forcing the words past the sudden tightness in my throat. “If I can trust any of this?”
Hunter let out a slow breath. “Oh, wow. Yeah, I deserve that.” His gaze flicked to Lee, who was watching me with a pensive expression. He didn’t seem especially surprised by my question. Hunter added, “I guess we both do.”
“I just—if this isn’t real, I couldn’t handle it. I can’t get close to you, either of you, if you’re going to shut me out again.”
“We won’t,” Hunter swore.
“Hunter,” Lee said softly, giving his twin a meaningful look. “He’s right.” His gaze returned to me and he gave me a gentle squeeze of his hand. “I wouldn’t blame you if you needed to take some time to figure out how you were feeling.”
“I know how I’m feeling,” I said immediately.
“I want to. I always want to be close to you. I’ll probably always want that.
” I wasn’t able to make myself look at either of them.
And maybe it was selfish and ridiculous of me, but I needed to know.
“But it was two whole years. Why didn’t you—either of you—ask me what happened? ”
Hunter went rigid beside me, and I could feel his shame and guilt through the bond. Lee, too, but it was a pale echo of his twin’s emotions.
But it was Lee who answered for them. “When we woke up, we were confused and freaked out. We were dealing with a whole new life, without any warning. Our humanity was gone and we were suddenly werewolves. And we had to learn how to fight literal monsters, risking our lives with a bunch of strangers and never being able to tell anyone else. And Jeremy told us you’d begged him to do this to us.
” He shook his head. “It was completely insane. We didn’t know what to think. ”
He continued, “And the worst part was that man we’d always loved, who we’d always trusted, was this whole other person, and we’d had no idea.
You had this secret double life that you hid for so long.
” He paused. “And we built up this narrative that you were this bad guy—a liar. That you had been, all along. And that we couldn’t believe anything you said.
That you’d done this to us on purpose. That or you’d just been careless. ”
Beside me, Hunter flinched at Lee’s words. I understood completely. Because the baldness—the ugliness—of what he’d just said was awful.
A fresh round of tears stung in my eyes.
“All of that was wrong,” Lee said gravely. “We were wrong about everything, Daniel. We see that now. We were wrong to think any of it.”
The tears spilled over and I pulled my hands away from both of theirs to wipe them away furiously. It was humiliating, how easily I could cry in front of them. As if I’d saved up years of tears for this exact moment, and now I couldn’t stop.
Everything he was saying made perfect sense. And I’d known all of it already. Because of course they’d hated me for what I’d done. They’d been right to. But knowing that it didn’t undo the pain of it.
Hunter slid off the couch and dropped to his knees in front of me.
I jerked back, startled. And then I looked away from him, not wanting him to see how much hurt was in my eyes. Hurt they’d caused, even if I deserved every second of it.
“Daniel, look at me. Please, I’m begging.” Hunter took my hands. Forcing myself, I met his gaze. His eyes were glassy, his whole expression miserable. “I should have known better. I should never have assumed the worst of you. You didn’t deserve that.”
“No, if I hadn’t—”
He shook his head. “No. We forgave you. I told you before, that part is done. It’s over.” His gaze searched mine, luminous with tears. “This is the part where we ask—beg—you to forgive us.”
“But I understand why you guys hated me,” I choked out.
“We never hated you,” Lee said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“Trust me, I tried really hard, but I couldn’t make myself do it. So I settled for pretending like you don’t exist,” Hunter said thickly. “And that was… I was so stupid, Daniel. And I’ll never do it again. I’ll always let you explain yourself.”
“Daniel, we need to apologize to you, too. Hunter is right—what we did to you was foolish and cruel. We never should have doubted you for a second. We were both so wrong.” Lee hesitated, giving his twin a long look, before turning back to me. “It won’t happen again. I—we—swear it.”
“For the record, it wasn’t Lee,” Hunter said harshly.
“If it had been up to him, we would have asked you for the truth around month four, once we’d fully adjusted to what had happened to us.
It was me.” His voice broke. “I did this, Daniel. I was the one who kept stopping this from happening. If you need to hate one of us, hate me. This is my fault.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said. Some of my hurt slid away and I realized I’d been clinging to it, too. Creating a narrative in my head that was just as untrue: that they couldn’t possibly forgive me or love me, ever again. I let it all go. “I understand why you guys did what you did.”
“Can you find a way to forgive us?” Lee asked.
Through the bond—and in his voice—I could hear and feel the sudden vulnerability in him.
In both of them, in fact.
“I forgive you,” I said, meeting Lee’s gaze and then Hunter’s. “But if this ever happens again—”
“It won’t,” Hunter said simply.
“Just don’t ice me out, okay? Ask me. Let me explain.”
“Done,” Hunter said solemnly, searching my gaze. “And I have a request, too.”
Lee’s brows shot up and he gave his twin a questioning look.
“Anything,” I said immediately. Because it was true.
“Please don’t ever keep anything big like that from us ever again. It wasn’t your fault. We know that. But no more secrets, okay? From now on, we tell each other everything. Total honesty.”
Doubt flashed through me. Because I hadn’t told them everything, had I?
I’d been working on a reversal spell, a way to undo all the harm I’d caused. But the spell wasn’t even done. It wasn’t a real possibility yet. And it was cruel to get their hopes up—that they might be able to go back to a normal life.
And then there was the selfish part: I didn’t want to upset the closeness we now shared. It felt fragile. As if any of us could shatter it at any moment.
Now wasn’t the right time to tell them.
“Okay,” I replied. “No more secrets.”
Tonight was for beginning to heal. And for learning how to do this—whatever this was—together. After all, we were three now, when before we’d been two.
“Okay,” I added. “Let’s try this.” My gaze slid to Lee, who was watching me with an oddly thoughtful expression on his face. “We’ll begin how we mean to continue.”
While I was in the bathroom getting ready for the evening, Hunter and Lee worked on pushing their beds together.
When I emerged, freshly showered, from the bathroom wearing only a thin white T-shirt and a pair of Hunter’s sweatpants—baggy on me, because Hunter and Lee were both taller and broader than I was—I caught sight of what they’d done.
They’d stripped their mattresses off the beds and pushed them together, piling the makeshift bed with blankets. They’d stood the wooden frames on one end of the cabin to make space in the center of the room. The result looked very bizarre. And structurally unsound.
“It didn’t work,” Hunter said, watching my expression. “There was a huge dip between the beds. You wouldn’t have been able to sleep. So, we did this instead.”
I hesitated at the edge of the makeshift bed they’d created, eyeing it warily. “Is this going to be weird?”
“It’s going to be a little weird. There’s no getting around that,” Lee said. “But if you’re comfortable with it, we want you to join us tonight. If you’re not, we’re okay with that too. It’s okay to say that, even now. It’s always your choice.”
Hunter shot him a glare, but he didn’t disagree. Instead, he turned back to me and said, “We’ll respect your choices. But if you’re okay with it, Lee’s right. We want you between us. We have a lot of lost time to make up for.”
My cheeks heated up at the implications of that and I nodded. “Okay. I’m—I’m okay with that.” I swallowed. “I want to.”
Hunter grinned, his eyes sparkling and filled with emotion. He didn’t even seem to try to hide it. Lee’s expression matched his almost exactly.
I lay down in the center of the bed. And then Hunter settled on my left, facing me. Lee turned off the lights in the cabin and checked the door to make sure it was locked. Then he settled down on my right side, closest to the door.
And it wasn’t that weird at all. It was somehow perfect.
Hunter was asleep within moments, his weight and heat a comforting reminder of his presence. Lee took a bit longer. I could feel his gaze on me in the dark. But his breathing eventually evened out as well.
I lay awake for a long time, almost afraid to sleep. What if I woke up and discovered that this was all a dream?
But I finally let the comforting presence of Lee and Hunter pull me into sleep.