Petra nearly sagged in her seat. “Thank you. Really.”
“It’s what we do,” he replied. “You’re my son’s— You’re important to him. And even if you weren’t, I swore an oath to heal the sick and injured. So don’t you worry about it.”
She could only nod.
“It’s important that you rest as much as you can this week,” he instructed her, using the gentle but utterly implacable voice all healers seemed to possess. “I can’t stress that enough, Petra. Your wound is healed, but your body was severely weakened in the process. You need nutrients, sleep, and fluids.”
His gaze momentarily dropped to her neck. A confusing protective impulse brought Petra’s fingers up to touch the shadows there.
Yanking his attention back to her face, he continued, “This is damn bad timing, I tell you what. This time of year is hard on all of us even when we weren’t recently shot with molten plasma, let alone when you’re newly?—”
“I’m not gonna hurt her.”
Silas’s energy was a dark, angry buzz along her spine. Petra looked up to find him standing just behind her. Despite the factthat he had locked eyes with his father, who seemed like a soft soul, Silas was once again a predator defending his territory.
Tiger’s back,she thought inanely. A shiver rippled down her spine.
“Never said you would, son.” Scott’s expression didn’t change. He wore a look of paternal concern when he faced off with the glowering demon at her back. “But demons can lose their heads sometimes, especially when it’s so fresh. It’s important to remember that she’s breakable. She needs some recovery time. That’s all.”
“Scott.” Connie’s tone wasn’t quite sharp, but it definitely conveyed the message that she thought he ought to stop while he was ahead.
Glancing between them all, Petra got the sense that they were all having two conversations: one she barely understood and another she didn’t evenhear.
Silas slipped a hand under her tangled hair. His palm was warm and a little rough on her nape, the calluses there catching the fine hairs in a way that made a different kind of shudder run through her.
Speaking in that dark, drawling way he did when he was really beginning to get annoyed, Silas told his father, “I’m not gonna hurt her. Not now, not a week from now, not a century from now. She’s mine.”
Petra wasn’t entirely certain where the notion came from, but she was suddenly certain that if Silas hadn’t been speaking to his father, he would have added something along the lines of,“Are we fuckin’ clear?”
He hadn’t exactly been polite otherwise, but compared to how he spoke to just about everyone else, it was downright respectful.
Connie rounded the table. “Of course she’s safe with you, honey,” she said, a little too quickly, as she looped her armthrough her mate’s. “You know we just want what’s best for you— and Petra, of course.” She flashed a slightly too-bright smile. “We don’t mean to be a bother about it, you know. This is just new and— and unexpected. A happy surprise.”
When Silas didn’t relax, Petra had to step in, understanding of the multi-layered conversation be damned. “You’re not being a bother.” She cast Silas a reproachful look. “I really appreciate your concern. It’s… Well, it’s nice.”
“We take care of our own,” Connie told her, like it was a fact of life that the sky was blue, Blight was lurking in the dark, and Petra was, apparently,one of their own. For a split second, Connie’s gaze lowered, her attention unconsciously fixed on Petra’s throat, before she hastily redirected her attention to her mate. “Well, this has been such nice supper, but we should get along. I’ve got an early shift tomorrow. Si, honey, if y’need anything at all, you pick up that phone, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, eyes glittering with something dangerous but restrained. “Thank you for supper.”
Apparently unbothered by the oddly tense exchange, Scott took a step closer to give his son a wallop on his shoulder. “Make sure she takes those supplements. And if there’s any pain at all, you know I’m here to help at any time.”
That seemed to ease a little bit of Silas’s hostility, but it was a barely discernible change. “Thank you, sir. I will.”
His parents exchanged one last charged glance before they hustled out of the kitchen. Petra watched them go. When the sound of a distant door opening and closing reached her, she swung her gaze around slowly, giving herself ample time to formulate her question.
“Silas,” she murmured, “what the fuck was that?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
It was really startingto annoy him that no one except Petra seemed to believe he wouldn’t hurt his mate.
It didn’t usually bother him that his clan danced around him, always expecting a bomb to go off whenever he walked into a room. He knew he’d earned it. No matter how hard his parents tried, they never could get him to see people the way they did, or feel compassion like everyone else. Eventually, after a few visits with deeply concerned therapists and countless trips to Papaw’s house for stern scoldings, they learned there was no fixing whatever was broken.
Silas understood that he was lucky. His family could have treated him like an outcast or been outright scared of him. Instead, they went out of their way to include him in things, to remind him that he was a part of the clan without expecting him tobeone of them. Whenever he was home, someone wrangled him into babysitting. His matriarch asked for help in her garden. His cousins expected him at cookouts, naming parties, mating celebrations.
If they were more cautious with him, a little more watchful than they were with other clanmates, he couldn’t say he blamedthem. He would be, too. After all, it wasn’t normal to talk to wraiths, let alone have them talk back.
Historically, the Cuttcombe clan never stood with both feet on the side of the law, but Silas took it to extremes even his most wily ancestors hadn’t — and the family knew it. But clan loyalty went deeper than tree roots. So while he made the clan nervous, his place amongst them was fixed, unshakable.
