He hated to see her fear. “My wolf will never harm you. Not a single hair on your head.”
She burst out in hysterical laughter and then buried her face in the pillow. He wasn’t the best at people, but this was an odd reaction.
“That, um, wasn’t a joke?” he said.
“No. It’s the opposite of a joke, exactly and completely the total opposite,” she told the pillow.
“So can I ask why you’re laughing? Are you laughing?”
He wanted to pull her close again, but he didn’t have that right.
“You do know wolves killed witches for like, centuries, right? We have a whole treaty about it.”
He collapsed onto his pillow and stared up at the logs of the ceiling, amazed that there was no snow drifting onto them, given the quality of construction of this place. He had genuinely forgotten the entire history of shifters and witches.
“Does anyone know why?” he asked the ceiling.
She propped herself up on one elbow and finally looked at him again, her black hair a wild spill of silk against the sheets and his shoulder. He longed to run his hands through it.
“Why what?” she asked.
“Why the war started? Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I’m Cat.”
“Mateo,” he said as he started laughing.
“Why is that funny?”
“A cat and a wolf lay together in a storm.”
Cats and wolves never mixed. He didn’t know why that made him feel unaccountably depressed.
She licked her lips, and he couldn’t take it. Was she doing this on purpose? He didn’t think she was.
“Is it colder in here?” she asked, looking around, which also pulled her face away from him. He didn’t know if it was deliberate.
“Yes. Can we burn the shelves now?” he asked.
“We can’t burn someone else’s furniture! There has to be a woodpile around here somewhere.”
“So now we can go outside?”
She looked out the window. “Yeah.”
“But last night we couldn’t.”
She looked at him. “You were never a Boy Scout? Or, you know, spent time where there’s weather?”
“New York has weather! And I went to coding camp.”
She smirked and cleared her throat. “Coding camp? Like computers? You really do like math.”
For a second, he couldn’t fathom how she knew, before he remembered vague and desperate calculating in the snow. “Codes aren’t math. I mean, they are, but mostly they’re logic. If this—then this. Your whole computer is running off of if/then statements.”
“Hm, that’s not that different from what I do. I mean, it’s completely different, but that’s what my magic looks for, too.”
She’d lost him entirely. “You code with magic?”
