Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
Alone in Nico's room, Elise didn't get a wink of sleep. Not exactly surprising after all of the excitement of the night before.
Every time she closed her eyes, she imagined Nico getting all up in her space and burying his face in her neck and breathing her in like he could ingest her soul. It should have been an uncomfortable reminder that he was a werewolf if he hadn't been so fucking hot.
She was so out of her depth.
What was it about him? Was this a werewolf thing?
Did they affect all women this way? Was this why witches were supposed to stay away from them?
So that they didn't do insane things like kiss their kidnappers in the middle of the night after they were almost caught performing secret magic on the pack alpha?
Because if that was the case, she could definitely understand. But she feared it was something about Nico, specifically, because she wasn't feeling this pull to any of the other betas. In fact, she would really like to run and hide from Reece.
Unfortunately, the person she wanted to hide behind was Nico, which was not helping anything.
Just after sunrise, she paced back and forth in Nico's room and debated whether she could find a corner to hide in all day.
His window was probably big enough that she could jump out of it and try and escape, but they were on the second floor, and her legs were unfortunately very breakable, even if she did manage to get away from the house.
She was miles from the city, and there was a giant forest to get lost in. She thought she was a pretty capable woman, but she wasn't stupid enough to try and outrun a bunch of werewolves in the woods. That just screamed insanity.
Sitting put like she was felt a little bit like giving up, but what else was she supposed to do? She didn't know how to hotwire a car, and she hadn't gotten anywhere near their garage anyway. She couldn't fight the werewolves. And if she tried, she would give away the fact that she was a witch.
The truth was, her best option at this point was to try and heal the alpha and hope they let her go. It was so passive, and she hated it, but she didn't see another option.
Where were her sisters? It had been days now.
They'd had plenty of time to scry out her location and find her.
Of course, if they had found her, they would realize she was in the middle of a werewolf pack, so that would present its own problem because it wasn't like a handful of witches could expect to win against dozens of werewolves. Not without a lot of planning.
But she would have expected a message or something by now. They really needed to have some kind of "what to do if one of us gets kidnapped" protocol in place, and she would be suggesting that at the next coven meeting. Just as soon as she was no longer kidnapped.
After a shower and another fifteen minutes of hesitation, Elise forced herself out of the room and down the hall to Cole's room. Nico had said she was free to leave his room after sunrise, and she would take him at his word. He was waiting for her in Cole's room when she got there.
There was a small tray on the dresser with a muffin, a banana, and an insulated carafe of coffee that smelled divine.
"Are you going to eat your breakfast?" she asked him.
"It's for you," he said. He didn't look away from Cole as he spoke. Was he … embarrassed about last night? He probably felt gross for kissing a witch—but, no, that couldn't be it. He didn't know she was a witch.
She looked at him and then back at the food and wondered if this was some kind of trick. She didn't think Nico had poisoned it, though she couldn't use magic to confirm that. But why would he poison it? She was completely at his mercy, and he didn't need to go to those kind of lengths.
Then she wondered if this was a werewolf thing. Was it some sort of power move to provide food for someone? To demonstrate that they were weaker than you and under your control?
Or was it just morning? And that was when people ate breakfast. He wasn't allowing her to go down to the kitchen, but she still needed to eat.
That was probably it. She was just reading too much into it.
Cole seemed fine if a little sweaty, and Nico was running a cool cloth over his brow. There wasn't much more she could do.
She decided to enjoy the breakfast, and she tried not to feel a little weird when she sensed Nico watching her every time she took a bite out of the muffin.
The banana was a little more complicated because no way was she stuffing that in her mouth with the guy that she had very stupidly made out with the night before staring at her.
Instead, she broke it off into little pieces and popped them into her mouth like bits of candy. In the end, her fingers were sticky and she rubbed them against her shirt instead of licking them clean.
Elise plucked at the fabric since it was so big on her and silently wondered again why Nico couldn't get her a top that fit when it didn't seem to be any trouble to get her properly fitting yoga pants.
She was really trying not to think about him at all, which was hard when he was right there and so big. He took up so much space.
She wanted to think of the kiss last night as a mistake. It was a mistake.
He was a werewolf. She was a witch, and that was a 100 percent no-go situation. If anyone found out she was crazy enough to have tingly feelings for a werewolf, they would banish her from polite society or something like that.
She had never actually heard of a witch having tingly feelings for a werewolf, so she wasn't sure what the procedure was, but it couldn't be good.
And even if that weren't the case, he had kidnapped her.
Why she had to keep reminding herself of that fact when he was holding her prisoner in his room and she had been confined to the same fifty feet of the house for days, she didn't know. But Nico didn't exactly feel like a jailer.
At times it felt like this was a predicament that they were in together.
If she was being honest, it had been the best kiss of her life by a long shot.
Her coven sisters thought Elise was some untouched, virginal little flower who didn't know what an orgasm was. But Elise had had her fair share of boyfriends. Some of them had been fun, most of them had been disappointing, and none of them had kissed her the way Nico had.
Like he would die if he didn't get a deeper taste of her. Like he wanted to crawl inside her skin and live there forever.
That should have been a little creepy. Instead, it was so freaking hot that her cheeks flushed just thinking about it.
She had it so freaking bad.
And that was a problem.
Elise was already sure that no guy was going to measure up to that kiss.
She was going to think about it for the rest of her life, dream about it, fantasize about what could have been if Nico wasn't a werewolf or maybe if she wasn't a witch and if they had just met like normal people.
Nothing about this situation was normal.
Which brought her back to the alpha lying in the bed.
"How long have you been in here?" she asked and was proud that her voice sounded almost normal, as if there was anything normal about the situation.
"I slept in here," he said.
"Did you think I would sneak back in?" She wanted to curse herself for asking.
She really shouldn't be bringing up the fact that she had snuck out of his room and into Cole's.
That was only inviting comment, and if he thought about it for too long, he might start questioning her story, and she really did not need him to do that.
"It was just a place to sleep," Nico said. He sounded tired. Almost defeated. And a bit … gentle?
He hadn't talked to her in this tone before. He had to feel awkward about the kiss. Did he regret it? Did he have a werewolf girlfriend somewhere who would kick his ass because he had kissed an alleged human?
Elise curled her hands into fists and dug her nails into her palms. Oh, she did not like the idea that Nico might have some little she-wolf somewhere waiting for him.
But that wasn't any of her business. Nico was nothing to her except her kidnapper and her jailer.
She had to ignore any other inconvenient feelings.
It didn't matter that he was the best kisser she'd ever had the pleasure of kissing.
Elise finished her coffee and came around the other side of the bed. She reached out to grab Cole's arm and then paused for a moment. Nico was staring at her hand like snakes might grow out of her fingers.
"I'm going to check his pulse," she said. She wasn't sure why she was explaining. She'd checked Cole's pulse a hundred times already, and it was always steady. But the tension was riding Nico high today, and she didn't want to add to it.
But she didn't wait for his permission. It was one thing to warn him about what she was going to do. It was another thing entirely to pretend that he got to control who she touched.
Cole's skin was feverishly warm, but his pulse was strong. She hoped that her magic had done a little bit to help last night, but she didn't see any signs of it other than the possibility of the fever coming back.
Was that a good sign? She was out of her depth.
She wished she had another healer with her, someone she could bounce ideas off of and ask questions of. She wondered why this pack didn't have a healer of their own.
Healers were one of the core members of both covens and packs. If you were forming one, that was basically a necessity. A pack without a healer was destined for injury and death and so was a coven.
Some things about supernatural life were the same, no matter what species. But because she was pretending to be a human, she couldn't ask, because a human would have no reason to think anything was amiss. Aside from the obvious.
"Do you think we could get him some broth?" she asked. "Maybe Jello. I'm concerned he hasn't had any calories."