Chapter 11 - Soren
The elk stew is perfect, and I can tell Aurela likes it, too. I only wish I’d had the time or ingredients to make something with it, like a sourdough loaf or some rolls.
“I miss Foods Club,” I say, because she’s gone quiet, and I don’t want the goodwill between us to fade. Hunting together was fun—Aurela’s wolf is strong, fast, and she helped herd the elk toward me so I could deliver the final strike, burying my teeth into the thing’s neck.
“Oh, really?” Aurela asks, her face flickering in the light of the lamp.
Her cheeks are slightly pink, those long, loose, golden curls mesmerizing in this setting.
She looks like a goddess, even in that old t-shirt of mine, and I want nothing more than to strip it off her body and spend some time getting to know the new her.
If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought she was purposefully pushing against me this morning. That she felt how hard I was and was trying to get a rise out of me.
Maybe it was punishment.
If it was, I deserved it.
“Yeah,” I say, putting a stop to the thoughts of her in bed this morning.
It does me no good. “I mean, I don’t really have a lot of time for cooking anymore, not with all the fire stuff.
I cook at the firehouse sometimes, but that’s not really the same.
I have to consider all the guys and their sometimes limited palates. ”
Aurela laughs. “I would eat anything you cooked for me. That’s why I loved the Foods Club so much.”
“Did you stay? After I quit?”
As soon as I say it, I know I shouldn’t have asked that. I quit Foods Club because of that night, when her parents came to me and told me what would happen if I kept seeing her. I wasn’t going to make Aurela sacrifice her extracurriculars.
“No,” Aurela says, her cheeks heating, and she must be thinking of everything back then, too. How things ended between us.
That was one of the most painful days of my life.
She reaches for her camp cup and takes a sip of water. “My mom made me quit. She thought…she said the club was making me fat.”
The realization hits me like ice water in the face—how skinny Aurela was back then, how eager she was to eat during Foods Club. The way she’d look at the food—even something like vegetable stew—like it was off-limits.
Like someone had been controlling what she ate. Keeping her that faint, pale, skinny girl.
“Did your mom starve you?”
It comes out harsher than I intend, but when the anger hits me, I can’t keep it down.
Aurela blinks at me in surprise, the light blush on her cheeks turning to a full, deep crimson.
“Oh—I mean,” she coughs, reaches for another sip of her water.
“I…no. I don’t know how to explain it. She was just always really concerned about whether or not I would be able to find an alpha.
And she thought the best way to do that was being extra careful about my… figure.”
I’m biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, breathing hard, trying to relax the grip I have on my spoon.
Shae Cambias, head of several organizations in the community. The woman who approached me about a month before prom.
It was a bright March day, the sun shining, unseasonably warm. I was walking out of the library when I ran into her.
Only later did I realize that she—and her husband—must have been waiting for me. I always went to the library on Saturday mornings.
“Soren Riggs, is that right?” she said, catching me as I walked to my bike.
I blinked in surprise, turning to her and Frederic, Aurela’s father.
I’d been over to her house, not to see her, but to hang out with the guys.
Lach, Xeran, Felix, and I, sitting in Lachlan’s room and playing video games together.
His room was something from a teenage boy’s wet dreams—posters on the walls, every new console money could buy, unlimited games, a foosball table, and a little cooler with sodas and snacks.
My room at home had a single twin bed, a dresser, my desk, and whatever books I had from the library. Not even a comparison. Lachlan’s room made mine look like a prison cell.
And his parents were a stark reminder that at home, it was just me and my grandfather.
“That’s me,” I said, turning to face them, heart pounding in my throat. My wolf already knew something was wrong. That I was going to leave this interaction much worse than when I entered it.
Now, I swallow down the memories, not letting myself get to the worst part. Aurela has gone quiet, moving her spoon around in her stew. I open my mouth to say something, anything to get us past this awkward moment, this lingering on the worst parts of our shared past.
“I found a bottle of wine,” I say, which gets her to look up at me. “I figured we could share it. Since we’re trapped up here, anyway.”
The way she looks at me makes me think she’ll say no. Then, she surprises me by nodding.
“Yeah. Some wine sounds nice.”
***
“Do you remember?” I ask, my voice and head light with laughter, the slight buzz of the wine running through my veins. “When we did this before?”
Aurela shakes her head, looking tired and drunk, and for a second, I think she might not have heard me. But then she says, “But I’ve never been to the cabin before.”
I tip my head at her, wondering if it’s really possible that she forgot that night.
“Oh,” she says, hiccupping and laughing, then reaching for the wine bottle again. “That night.”
That night. When I snuck out, took Gramps’s car, and drove her up to the ridge. When we stayed up the entire night, laughing and drinking a bottle of wine from her parents’ cellar.
“They won’t miss it,” she’d said, struggling with the cork as I laid a blanket down over a grassy spot on the ridge. It was cold enough that I had to bring several of them.
Her parents wouldn’t miss that bottle, but it was the best wine I’d ever had in my entire life. Their worst bottle was something my family would only splurge on for something like a wedding or a retirement party.
Aurela and I had finished that entire bottle, getting tipsy and loose, our thighs and hips pressed together as we sat quietly under the light of the moon.
At that point, I still hadn’t gathered the courage to kiss her.
Everything was little touches, brief glances.
My hand on the small of her back, her knuckles brushing over my arm, our thighs pressed together when we sat side by side.
And that night, I swallowed down my fear and trepidation, sliding my hand over and settling it on her knee. We sat very still together, breathing shallowly, like we were convinced we could only keep the moment if it didn’t know we were taking note of it.
When I glance at her now, her cheeks are flushed, though I don’t know if that’s from talking about that night or from the wine we’ve already gone through.
“That was one of the best nights of my life,” I breathe, the words popping out of me before I have the chance to think about them, to determine whether or not it’s the right thing to say.
The look Aurela gives me is so raw and open, so vulnerable, that I have to look away from her.
I know what she’s thinking—or maybe I’m only guessing. Maybe she’s wondering why I would have broken up with her if that was one of the best nights of my life.
“It was after you…After we were done,” Aurela says, her voice barely audible.
When I glance at her again, her chin is dipped down, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. Even drunk, I wanted to push to ask her what was after. But I force myself to contain the questions, to swallow down my natural predilection for impatience.
“I wasn’t doing well,” she whispers, clearing her throat and sitting up a little. “And I…I found out you were going to prom with Macie Evans.”
The name is like a show you used to watch when you were a kid—it takes me a moment to place that shifter girl. I haven’t thought about her since the day she came up and asked me to go with her. I’d said yes because I thought it might make the sting of losing Aurela go away.
I was a shitty prom date to Macie. Ignored her questions about colors and times, and was late to hang out with her. Made her mother angry when it was time to take pictures, and I was slightly drunk, laughing and sloppy, not taking anything seriously.
Because I didn’t want to go to prom with fucking Macie Evans. I wanted to go to prom—and everything after—with Aurela. I wanted to spend every waking moment with her for the rest of my life.
“I was furious,” Aurela whispers. “I was—I was so embarrassed. And I just wanted you to hurt. It turned out that the other girls were all kind of going through similar stuff. And when we talked to Tara about it, she came up with this idea that we should crash the prom. That we should do something to ruin the night. We were all on board with it—doing a prank or something. Using our magic.”
I close my eyes, already knowing where this is going. All this time, I assumed she had something to do with what happened. I felt the tug toward her that night, knowing that she was in danger. But everything was so chaotic, so crazy, and her name didn’t come out with the others.
“But what Tara had in mind was not a prank.” Aurela pauses, sucking in a quick breath. “It was—she gathered us all out on the ridge. Acted like she had this big surprise for us, but then—then she said we were going to be messing with daemonic energy.”
I wince. Back in high school, I wouldn’t have known that much about the stuff, but now I’m practically an expert. And I know just how dangerous it is to mess with—especially for a bunch of high schoolers.
“She said it would be the perfect way to get back at everyone. For hurting us. But she was like…I’d never seen her like that before.”
When Aurela falls quiet, I clear my throat, reaching out and taking her hand. “Like what?”
“Like…hungry,” she whispers. “The other girls were like…it was like she took their power from them. And she was trying to take mine, too. I didn’t know what would happen, but I knew it was bad.
We fought, and she—she ended up being able to take some of my magic from me.
Then she pulled out the daemonic energy, and it was like…
” I squeeze her hand, and she looks over at me, eyes wet.
“Tara was on fire. Swallowed by the flames. All this time, I thought she was dead.”
“You saw her with the daemon fire?” I ask, brow wrinkling. “And she wasn’t put out?”
“No,” Aurela whispers, shaking her head. “I have no idea how she survived.”
The information-hungry part of me wants to push, press for more, demand she give me more information about what happened that night. But somehow, I know that if I’m too insistent, she’s going to close up on me again.
And I don’t want that. I don’t want to bring back the woman who threatened me with her family.
“It’s not like things were great before that,” Aurela says, wiping at her face with the backs of her hands. “But after that day…everything just started to fall apart. Nothing’s been the same since.”
“But you have your fiancé,” I say, shaking my head and dropping her hand, as though that little reminder is enough for our touch to feel out of bounds. “You’re getting married. Not everything is bad.”
Aurela laughs, shaking her head, her tears flowing freely down her face. “I’m not sure whether Caspian is a consolation prize or a punishment. He’s a total creep.”
I blink at her, my mind trying to organize this new information. “You don’t—you’re not in love with him?”
When she turns to look at me, her expression is so fractured that it makes it hard for me to breathe. “No.” Her lip quivers as she shakes her head. “Of course not. My mom just wants me married off, and he’s the only alpha in this pack willing to take someone like me.”
She pushes against the wall, getting shakily to her feet and crossing the room to the small bathroom.
I sit against the wall, listening to the sound of the sink running on the other side of the wall. I had no idea she was this miserable.
Everything I did—it was all so she could be happy.
And if she’s not happy, then what was the point of that sacrifice?