“So, if I’ve got this right, your brother Aspen is definitely evil, your brother Hawthorn definitelyisn’tevil, and Willow is maybe not entirely evil?” Luca surmises, counting off my siblings on his tattooed fingers.
“Aspen’s in on Project Halcyon, for sure. And he knows I know about it, too. He may be even more involved than my father is. Definitely evil.”
“Damn, I thought my family was fucked up,” Luca says, shaking his head.
“Cass got all the good dads,” Simon says. “All the rest of ours are, have been, or should be in fucking prison.”
“That’s my goal.”
“I love it when you scheme,” my sweet beta says, kissing me on the tip of my nose.
“There’s one more thing,” I tell them. “Something Rad thought. I haven’t been able to make sense of it yet.”
“Jeez, Junes, it’s not like you just escaped an egomaniacal alpha, had your heat,andgot mated or anything,” Simon teases. “Kit-kat, you’ve hardly had time to breathe. Whatever you found, we’ll figure it out together.”
“It was six sigils, but it’s not any spell I recognize.” I name the sigils, and Cassian extricates himself enough from our tangle of bodies just long enough to grab a pen and paper, which he passes to Ian.
Ian copies down the sigils, and frowns as he studies them. “It’s not a spell, at least not a full one. It was just these six sigils?”
Saints, did I miss something? Was there more to the string of sigils that I could have pulled from Rad’s mind? Did my heat-addled mind forget something? “So, it’s useless?”
“It could be part of a spell, but it would have to be an incredibly complex one. I’ll look into it.” I know my bookish alpha will dig through every dusty tome in his office trying to track down this could-be spell, and I’ll join him in his research. Igetto join him in his research.
“If it’s a spell at all,” Simon mutters, peering over Ian’s shoulder. Cassian gets up again with a sigh and gets Simon’s laptop for him before settling back down at my side and pulling me into his arms.
“You’re never going to spend another holiday at Rose Manor,” my mate informs me.
“I’m going to burn it to the ground someday.”
“Badass,” Simon says, not looking up from his screen.
I think about the confusing vision I had last Yule, when Hawthorn led me into the manor’s conservatory, how the air in the long-abandoned room still crackled with magic—mymagic. I had a mating bite on my hand in the vision, but when I had the vision, I never truly l believed that I would ever be mated to an alpha of my choosing. I study Luca and Ian thoughtfully and think of how Luca always kisses the silvery scars omega traps have left behind on my wrists. My heart beats just a little faster at the thought. Could the bite in my vision be his?
He catches me looking his way and arches an eyebrow.
“Love you, my alpha,” I mouth.
He grins and scrambles over the others to roll me onto the thick carpet and kiss me all over my face until I’m smiling and then beaming and then laughing.
“I want this forever,” I say longingly.
“You’ll have it,” Cassian, my mate and my heart, promises.
“About that. What’s our plan?” Ian asks, drumming his pen on his knee.
Cassian talks Ian and Luca through everything they’ve missed and before long, we’re hashing out plans. It feels so like how we gather around the dining table at the pack house, talking through every threat we face.
But there’s one alpha missing and I feel his absence like a wound.
Marcus. Saints, how I miss him.
A knock sounds at the door, and then one of Cassian’s fathers pokes his head into the library.
“Ah, pack pile. Lovely.” He raises his hand in a wave. “I’m Colin, by the way.”
I know him by reputation only. He’s the head of innovation at one of the largest tech companies in the world, and just as impressive as the rest of Cass’ fathers. Gerard, the politician; Roman, the famous movie director; Douglas, the hardworking leader of Healers United, the biggest and most impactful medical aid organization in the world. Douglas is the only of Cassian’s fathers I’ve yet to meet.
I’m too entwined in my ‘pack pile’ to stand and shake Colin’s hand, but it’s clear that he doesn’t expect me to. He looks at Cassian with fatherly pride and affection. It’s something I’ve never seen from my own father before.
