7. Brynn
brYNN
Six hours ago, Leo Van Alstein kissed me against the dining table like the world was ending.
Then he stopped and pushed me away like he’d been shot.
One second his mouth was at my throat and his hands were the only thing holding me upright.
The next he went rigid, every muscle locking at once, and he pulled back with a strange look on his face.
Not disgust. Worse. Like he’d found something.
Like he’d been handed a piece of a puzzle he hadn’t wanted solved.
Then he called it a mistake. What a jerk!
Manufactured, he said. Chemistry the resort cooked up to hit a quota.
He stood there with my taste still on his mouth and told me to keep whatever I’m hiding out of his bed, and when I called him a coward he said goodnight like he was closing a meeting and walked straight out into a lunar storm that nearly took him off his feet.
So. The Ice King reassembled himself, brick by brick, and walked away from the best kiss of my life like it was a rounding error on a spreadsheet. Then he walked into actual lightning rather than spend one more minute in a room with me.
Cool. Normal. Just great for my self-esteem.
Then, he came back.
Of course he had to come back. There’s nowhere to go.
The dome’s sealed, the corridors aren’t safe, and the storm doesn’t care how badly he’d rather freeze on the lakeshore than share a villa with the woman whose blood made him flinch.
He let himself in an hour later, soaked through, said nothing, took a shower, and we’ve been orbiting each other in silence ever since.
Which brings us to the bed.
One bed. One storm. One villa sealed up tight as a fist, no second room, no chance of either of us braving the corridors while the dome screams.
We negotiated it like a hostage situation.
“I’ll take the floor.” His first words in an hour.
“You’re the size of a vending machine. You won’t fit on the floor.”
“I’ll take the floor.” Same words, lower, in the voice he probably uses to end careers.
In the end we both took the bed, because I refused to let a grown Blood Shifter sleep on cold stone to prove a point, and we built a wall of pillows down the middle that neither of us mentioned and neither of us crossed. A demilitarized zone. Goose down and denial.
He fell asleep first. Or did the dead-still thing that passes for it.
I barely slept at all.
The magic wakes me at 3 a.m. like a hand around my throat.
I ease out from under the blanket, careful not to wake the mountain breathing beside me, and before I’m fully awake both my palms are slapped flat to the cold stone wall of Villa Nine.
The wall is warm where I touch it. Glowing.
Faint gold lines crawling out from under my fingers like roots looking for water.
“No, dammit! Not here.”
I press harder, like I can shove it back inside me. The lines spread. They curl up the wall and across the ceiling in shapes I’ve never learned and recognize anyway. Spirals. A crown of teeth. A word in a language that died before Eclipse had foundations.
My skin is humming. My teeth ache. This is the third time this week, and it’s getting worse, and the symbols are new.
I yank my hand off the wall.
The glow snuffs out. The room goes dark. My heart is going like a trapped bird, and I stand there in the black, breathing, listening for the man asleep six feet behind me.
Nothing. Just the storm, still grinding against the dome.
He sleeps like the dead. Or he’s pretending, same as me.
I don’t go back to bed.
The restricted greenhouse is locked, which is adorable.
Marguerite keeps the old Fairmont records in there, sealed behind a door that thinks a polite warding spell is enough to stop a desperate woman at four in the morning. I press my thumb to the lock and feed it just enough magic to believe I’m staff.
I am staff. Technically. The “do not enter” was always more of a suggestion.
The door sighs open into rows of moon-fed orchids and a back wall of locked cabinets, and the air smells like wet earth and old paper and something green that only blooms in the dark.
I find the drawer marked FAIRMONT in faded ink and I make myself open it.
I’ve avoided this my whole life. My mother avoided it before me. We don’t read the records. We don’t look up what we are. We keep our heads down and our magic small and we don’t draw the eye of anything that might be looking.
But the symbols on my wall tonight weren’t small.
The file is thin. Most of it’s water-stained nonsense, marriage lines, a sketch of a sigil that matches the one that burned itself across my ceiling an hour ago. My stomach drops.
There’s a sentence underlined twice, in a hand that shakes.
The Resonance does not break. It wakes.
“That’s ominous,” I tell the orchids.
“It usually is.”
I drop the file.
Leo is standing in the greenhouse doorway in a black shirt half-buttoned and an expression that could freeze the lake outside. He doesn’t look like a man who just woke up. He looks like a man who woke up, found the bed beside him empty, and came hunting.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I say.
“Neither are you.” He steps in. The door swings shut behind him on its own, which it has never once done for me. “What are you reading at four in the morning, Brynn?”
The way he says my name does something inappropriate to my pulse. I try to ignore it.
“Gardening,” I say. “Very into orchids lately.”
“Fairmont.” He’s looking at the open drawer. His jaw goes tight. “Why are you reading old Fairmont records?”
And there it is. The thing I can’t name.
Because he doesn’t ask it like a man who’s curious. He asks it like a man who already knows the answer and wants to watch me lie about it.
“Funny.” I shut the drawer with my hip. “Six hours ago you told me to keep whatever I’m hiding out of your bed. Now you’re chasing me through a greenhouse at four in the morning to ask what it is. Pick a lane.”
His jaw works. He doesn’t deny saying it.
“Research,” I say, before he can answer. “For work. The matching system’s been glitchy, I’m cross-referencing old bloodline data...”
“Don’t.” His voice drops. “Don’t do that. Not with me.”
“Do what?”
“Make yourself smaller.” He’s closer now.
I didn’t see him move. Predators never let you see them move.
“You’ve been doing it since the foyer. The bright voice.
The jokes. Whatever you’re hiding, it’s tearing you apart from the inside, and you’re standing here at four in the morning reading the records like that’s normal. ”
My throat is tight. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Something flickers across his face. Guilt, almost. There and gone.
“No,” he says, too quietly. “I suppose I don’t.”
He’s lying. I can feel it. The bond between us, the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t there since his mouth was on my throat six hours ago, pulls taut like a wire, and across it comes a single clear note of he knows something. I just don’t know what.
“Leo.” I take a step toward him. The wire pulls tighter. “What aren’t you telling me?”
For one second I think he’s going to answer.
Then the orchids die.
All of them, all at once, every bloom in the room blackening and curling like they’ve been dropped in fire. The temperature drops. My breath fogs. And the gold light comes screaming back out of my skin, uninvited, flooding the greenhouse so bright I throw up an arm.
“Brynn.” Leo’s hand finds my shoulder. “Brynn, your eyes...”
“I can’t stop it.” Panic claws up my throat. The symbols are everywhere now, on the glass, in the air, written in light across the dead flowers. “Leo, I can’t pull it back, it won’t...”
That’s when the dark behind him moves.
It comes through the back wall like the wall is water.
Wrong-jointed, too many limbs, a long flat head with no eyes and far too many teeth, the kind of thing that shouldn’t exist in a luxury resort or anywhere with carpet.
It’s made of the same dark that’s been turning over beneath us since the storm sealed the dome.
And it’s looking at me. At the light pouring off me.
“Get down!” Leo says.
I don’t move fast enough.
The creature lunges, a blur of black and teeth, straight for me, and I have half a second to think this is how I die, in a greenhouse, in my pajamas, before Leo moves.
He doesn’t move like a man.
He gets between me and this thing and he changes, and there’s no time for it to be gradual or pretty.
Bone cracks. His shirt tears off his back.
He grows, shoulders splitting wider, dark blond hair rippling down a spine that’s reshaping itself, and the sound that comes out of him isn’t human and not wolf but something older and far worse for anything that wants to hurt me.
The creature hits him instead of me.
They go down in a tangle that shatters a cabinet. I scramble back against the orchid table, magic still bleeding off my hands, and watch Leo Van Alstein tear apart something out of a nightmare with his bare claws.
He’s enormous. Half-shifted, caught between forms, all muscle and black fur and silver eyes blazing in the gold light.
A Blood Shifter. The real thing, the thing the files only whisper about.
He pins the creature, and his teeth find its throat, and the dark thing shrieks once and comes apart into smoke.
Silence.
The light drains out of me all at once, like a plug pulled. The symbols fade from the glass. The storm grinds on outside, indifferent.
Leo turns.
He’s still half-shifted, chest heaving, claws dripping black, silver eyes fixed on me with an intensity that pins me to the spot harder than the monster ever could. He’s checking me for injuries. I realize that’s what the look is. Frantic. Possessive.
Mine. Is she hurt? Did it touch her? Mine.
“Are you hurt?” His voice comes out wrong, too deep, his wolf still in it.
I should be terrified.
I look at him, this massive feral thing that just put itself between me and death without a second of hesitation, all that cold control burned away to show what’s underneath, and the storm in my blood goes quiet for the first time in weeks.
I should be terrified.
But that’s the problem.
I’m not.