Chapter 13
My thoughts raced wildly as I helped Aurora back to my place.
If ever I wanted to curse the full moon shift, it would be tonight.
A wolf attacked her, and they weren’t a member of my pack.
How did they discover where she was? Why?
It didn’t make any sense. There was an eerie distance in their eyes, even in wolf form.
It was as if they couldn’t help but try to bite her.
It changed nothing. I’d still deal with them.
The time spent by the fire with Aurora in my wolf’s form claimed a permanent spot in my mind for the rest of my life.
Even if I never saw her past the day the bind lifted, I wouldn’t ever forget it, much like the night we met.
There was so much I wanted to ask her, so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to do.
For fuck’s sake, I kissed her as my wolf.
Her arousal also heightened with me in this form.
I couldn’t explain it, but sure as hells wanted to figure it out.
It took everything in me to keep my cock sheathed from how heady her scent had become.
Aurora was nearly slumping on my back, barely standing on her own when we entered my loft.
Waffles sprang from the couch, barking, alerting to the unfamiliar wolf encroaching on his perceived territory.
I gave him a short, deep bark. Upon hearing my voice, he started panting excitedly and wagging his tail again.
“Thanks, Harkin, I’m just going to—” Aurora started, switching to her other leg to catch herself on the wall by the cellar door.
Fuck. Come on. Shift.
How the hells was I supposed to help her to the cellar? Use my teeth and drag her down the stairs?
Whimpering and pacing, keeping close to her, I tried to force the shift, but even an alpha couldn’t overpower the moon. After a few minutes, the instinctual snap happened at the base of my spine. Thankfully, Aurora was still conscious and upright.
I shifted into my human form, scooped her into my arms, and angled her chin to look at me. Her gorgeous chocolate eyes blinked, and a delicate smile curved her lips. “Welcome back,” she teased.
She must have been really out of it not to glance at my dick, right there near her stomach. “Rory,” I whisper-growled, dipping my mouth to hers.
Aurora became as lifeless as a ragdoll in my grasp, her arms drooping like a scarecrow over mine. Sighing, I rested my cheek against the back of her head, inhaling her, taking a moment to let it all sink in.
Waffles yipped behind me, crying at his owner’s current state.
“I got her, buddy. Don’t worry.” Holding her close, I took her down the steps.
Just as I had the night before, I settled her into my bed, resting her head on the pillow.
I yanked off her boots and pulled the blankets over her.
A wave of relief swept over me when I glided my fingertips across the area that shithead bit her only to find it fully healed.
I’d be getting zero shut-eye tonight. The incident had me far too fired up.
I sprinted upstairs long enough to throw on a tank top and sweatpants. Lying naked next to Aurora, passed out like she was, didn’t feel right. I grabbed the paperwork I had been putting off and brought it downstairs.
What had she meant when she said she missed it?
Running through the woods naked? That could certainly be arranged.
Spending time with family? I’d welcome her into mine.
What really ate into my spine, though, were the tears at watching everyone shift.
There was something she wasn’t telling me.
It had me crinkling a property tax statement in my grasp.
“Fuck,” I breathed out, giving up and dropping the papers before I shredded the damn things.
Had she remembered anything from the night before she passed out? She’d shoved her face into my pillow and breathed it in for a solid thirty seconds, moaning as she did it. I didn’t realize vamps possessed such keen senses of smell, or that such smells could provoke such reactions.
She called me—sweet.
I’d never blushed in my entire wolfish existence, but that caused my cheeks to flush red hot.
My knee bounced uncontrollably as the minutes crept by.
I switched from watching her sleep to standing and pacing the length of the cellar in a square.
More than one hundred wine bottles were stored down here.
I’d collected them through the decades, and each had its own unique coating of dust at this point.
Taking the clipboard from a high shelf, I turned to a page and coughed as dust flew.
“An inventory list,” I mumbled.
I couldn’t recall the last time I had updated it.
With a sigh that my desperation had reached this point, I began with the first bottle I had ever put on the shelf.
Merlot bottled in nineteen eighty-five sporting the head of a Texas longhorn.
Dust collected on my thumb as I swiped it over the label.
I hadn’t noticed how absurdly quiet the cellar could be until I jotted the bottle’s information onto the clipboard, the pen scratching bouncing off the stone walls.
By the time I’d reached the last one, hours had gone by.
I scribbled the wine brand, type, and year, finishing with a harsh dot.
“Glad that’s fuckin’ over,” I huffed, tossing the clipboard haphazardly back on the shelf.
Aurora remained motionless in the same spot I’d left her, making me sulk. I trotted up the steps and cracked the door open. A sliver of light crept through the shutters. Thank the moon. After hurrying to the fridge, I headed back to my sleeping beauty and stood, waiting for her to wake up finally.
My eyes were heavy from lack of sleep, but the adrenaline pumping in my blood was enough to give me energy for days. When Aurora’s eyes fluttered, that added another day’s worth of energy. Sleep be damned.
Aurora yawned and slowly sat up, stretching her arms to the ceiling. “Oh, hey Harkin.”
Oh, hey Harkin?
“Hey, yourself. How’d you sleep?” I stood with my arms firmly crossed, my stance wide.
It took every ounce of inner strength I had not to ramble everything I wanted to ask her.
“Good. Fantastic.” Aurora smacked her lips together, her eyes opening wider. Her gaze traveled over the bed until it finally landed on me, the reality of yesterday falling onto her expression.
There it was. The cue I’d been waiting for.
“We need to talk.” I kept my voice subdued.
Aurora’s eyes fell to her lap, and methodically, she nodded. “We do, but let me grab something to eat first.”
She started to move off the bed. I tossed the remaining three blood bags from the fridge onto the blanket in front of her. Aurora paused and slowly sank back down. “Wow. You’re serious.”
“I am.”
Patiently, but with an impatient itch tickling my cheek, I waited for her to finish slurping on one bag before I continued.
Aurora’s eyes leveled on my hips, and she plucked the bag from her mouth with a loud pop. “Are you wearing grey sweatpants?”
“The vampire’s observant.”
Aurora rolled her eyes, licked her lips of excess blood and tossed the empty bag into the trash. “Alright, Harkin. Can you at least sit down? You hovering like a gargoyle is making me nervous.” She stole a glance at my crotch.
Smirking, I tapped my nose. “Nervous ain’t what I’d call it.” Once I sat down, I scooted until my back met the wall.
Aurora groaned and pointed at me. “And turn that sniffer off, or I’m not saying anything.”
“No can do, pumpkin. All I want is a simple conversation.” I interlaced my fingers over my stomach.
Aurora fiddled with her antler charm. She pressed her knees together and sat back on her heels. “Well, wolf, what do you want to know?”
Shit. Why didn’t I use that time productively, like planning my first damn questions?
“You remember everything from last night?”
Aurora clenched the necklace in her fist. “Of course, I do. It was the first time I got to see your wolf.”
That made my chest tighten. I rubbed a palm between my pecs. “Then what did you mean when you said, ‘I miss this’?”
Aurora’s eyes glistened with blood tears, her hand clenching on the charm in her grasp.
Moving across the bed, I lowered myself directly in front of her. “I’m not askin’ this to make you upset, sugar. Just please tell me so I can stop drivin’ myself crazy assuming, hoping what it could mean.”
“Hoping?” Aurora’s chin raised.
I squeezed her knee. “Tell me.”
Aurora’s eyes floated to my fingers on her leg. She took a sharp inhale. “I used to be a shifter.”
The confession came at me like godsdamned hooves to the gut. I blinked once. Twice. The third time I squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t understand. Used to be?”
Aurora’s jaw clenched, her brow furrowing. “Until the unfortunate day I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What happened?”
Her left nostril twitched, those lethal fangs creeping out. “My maker happened.”
Fuck. How had I thought any part of this conversation was going to be easy?
Silently, I massaged her leg, encouraging her to continue when she felt ready.
“I never wanted to be a vampire. Never asked for it.” Aurora’s eyes met mine. When I remained silent, she continued. “He drained me until I was at the very brink of death. My heart had slowed to the point I couldn’t feel it. Breathing seemed impossible. Then, he fed me his blood.”
It sounded so personal. So intimate. It had my claws extending.
The tip of Aurora’s tongue skimmed her lower lip.
“I didn’t understand how vamps were made back then, but my maker’s urgency, his desperation for me to drink his blood, told me it wasn’t something I should do.
I clamped my mouth shut. It took what little strength I had left, but I fought.
” She glared into the distance. “He easily pried my lips apart, forcing the blood down my throat.”
My chest pumped up and down, my breaths going erratic. I wanted to shred this vamp’s head from his undead body for what he did to Rory. He had no right.
“I was so confused, too, because why did my body not heal the bite? How could I bleed out like that? He was an ancient vampire. That’s why.
” Aurora played with the seam of her sleep shorts.
“Anyway, that night, I became a vampire. Sired by my maker. And with it—” Aurora lifted her eyes. “—I lost my ability to shift.”
“Fuck,” I growled and pulled her toward me, wrapping my arms around her. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
She chuckled against my chest, her limbs loosely curled around me. “The most ironic part is, I’d gotten over it a long, long time ago, Harkin.”
I rested my hands on her shoulders. “Why’s that ironic?”
“Because twenty-five years ago, I hated him again.” Aurora paused, taking in my understanding eyes. “And last night, I wanted to stake him for what he did to me.”
My inner wolf growled, ready to tear the world apart to find this prick. “Rory, I’ll help you bury the damn body. Morcant, right? Think all these weird shifter happenings got something to do with him?”
Aurora stared blankly at me before her brows came together. “I don’t see how they would. He has no connection to shifters. He’s wanted nothing to do with them.”
“And yet, he turned one of ‘em into a vamp? He had to have his reasons.”
“Maybe.” A sense of melancholy floated from Aurora’s skin, a confusing mix of sorrow and longing. “If he did, he never said anything to me.”
I wrapped a hand around my beard, tugging on it. “We shouldn’t rule him out.”
As if she were done talking about her maker for the moment, a tiny smile snuck at the corner of her lips. “I don’t wear this because I like to hunt, by the way. Well, I do, but that’s not what it’s for. It’s so I remember.” Aurora opened her hand, letting the antlers hang loosely from the chain.
I rubbed it between two of my fingers.
“I used to shift into a deer,” she said in a whisper.
That’s what she missed. To run carefree as an animal through the woods. What I wouldn’t give to run with her, to chase her, to shift back into our human forms to fuck in the forest.
Brr. Brr. Brr.
My phone produced three dull vibrations in my pocket.
“You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” I let my head fall back.
Aurora’s lips curved into a tender smile. “Pack business?”
Snarling, I snatched the phone from my pocket.
Phelan
Friendly reminder. Council meeting in ten minutes.
“It’s a council meeting. We discuss—” I cut myself off, catching her staring at me and knowing I was wasting my breath with details. “Sorry. I can’t miss this. After last night, I’ll bring Phelan and Kaida so they can help keep watch this time.”
“Alright,” she uttered, uncharacteristically non-combative.
As I got out of bed, I wiggled her arm. “Promise me this conversation ain’t over.”
“How could it be, Harkin?” Aurora lifted her shoulders to her ears and flopped them back down.
I ground my teeth. “I genuinely hate bein’ alpha right now.”
“No, you don’t.” A sincere grin spread over those pretty lips. “You’re good at it. Fuck that. You’re great at it. I’m fine. Honestly.”
Breathing in the air around me, I grimaced. She wasn’t angry with me. She was just sad. And here I was, the one who asked her to dredge up the past.
“Why don’t you bring one of those for the road?” I nudged my chin at the blood bags.
Aurora snatched one. “Good idea.”
It wouldn’t be the first time we ascended the stairs of one of Aurora’s nightly sanctuaries, but it’d be the start of an entirely different dynamic between us. Would it be for better or for worse?