“No, Enoch, it’s not the same.” I run my fingers through my hair and try to select the words that will help put all the pieces in place for him and for me. “Torrez and I had a connection from the very beginning, but I didn’t know myself well enough then to identify what that meant. I know myself better now, and what I wanted from Torrez was different from what I want from you, Kallan, and Nash.”
Enoch turns his head away from me to stare off into the dark, and I put a hand on his cheek and move his eyes back to mine. “I feel a connection with you, Enoch. We train well together, we think similarly in how we fight, our drive to win is the same. You push me to be better, and then you show me how to achieve that. I’m comfortable around you, it’s easy to be in your presence, and I trust you. You feel…I don’t know…like family maybe, like we’ll always be friends, always watch each other’s backs,” I explain, my eyes begging his to understand.
He sighs. “So I’ve been friend-zoned,” he quips, and I roll my eyes.
“Honestly, Enoch, I think if you really look inside your soul and study the truth there, you’d realize that you don’t actually want me. You want these.” I point to the runes on my arms and hands.
Enoch’s blue eyes frost over, and he opens his mouth to argue.
“Fine, you want me in all of my glory, and the runes mean nothing to you?” I challenge. “Then don’t you want to win me the right way? By proving yourself to my Chosen, by earning their unwavering trust and loyalty? If you had that, then why would they object to usfucking for answers. If you had that, and it turned out you were right all along about being Chosen, they would welcome you with open arms. You’d haveearneda place as one of them, instead of stealing it in the night, behind their backs, knowing how they would feel about it.”
He watches me for a moment and then nods his head.
“Okay, I’ll earn you then, Vinna.”
And with that, he pushes off the fallen tree and disappears back into the night.
15
Itake a deep breath. “Okay, but what if I turn into a wolf?” I ask again for the tenth time, and Torrez shakes his head.
“Would that really be the worst thing?” Torrez asks.
“No, it would probably be amazing, but I just don’t think I can deal with that on top of everything else going on right now,” I tell him, my tone a little more hysterical than I mean for it to be. After my talk with Enoch, I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I blame that for my current state of panic.
“Listen, Witch, the only thing you need to fear turning into right now is a chicken. So stop clucking, and let’s see what your new runes do.”
“You suck at pep talks,” I snark.
Valen grabs the back of my neck and pulls me toward him. “Sentinel up, or none of us will be sucking on anything for the next week.” He lets go of my neck, and I lean back to glare at him.
“Fine, be that way!” I growl and then stomp away from all of them.Have lots of mates, they say. It’ll be so much fun, they say. Yeah, until the fuckers gang up against you, and you never win an argument again,I grumble.
“You’re right; sex, or the lack thereof, really motivates her,” Valen observes, and then he proceeds to fist bump Torrez.
I point an aggressive finger in their direction. “There will be nobro-ingout. And consider yourself warned—if I wolf out, I’m biting both of you.”
“Ooh, your kinky is showing again, Bruiser,” Bastien announces as he joins Valen and Torrez. “Why is she all riled?” he asks casually.
“We threatened her with no sex for a week,” Valen fills his twin in.
“Yup, that’ll do it,” Bastien chuckles.
“I can fucking hear you,” I shout at them.
“None of us care,” Bastien shouts back.
I glare at each of them in turn as I pull magic from my core and feed it into the new runes I now have from Torrez’s mating mark. I feed the magic into the new runes slowly and from one blink to the next, everything changes.
My vision sharpens and alters. I’m assaulted by what feels like a billion different smells. I can see so much more in my periphery than I could before, and I can’t seem to decide where I want to focus.
“Whoa,” Torrez comments offhandedly, and I don’t know if that freaks me out or makes me excited.
“Am I a wolf?” I ask, unsure. I look down at my hands, and all I see are my hands, although now I feel like I could count every hair on my arm. When did I get so hairy? Does Torrez see himself as a wolf when he’s in wolf form, or is this what his body looks like to him even though he looks like a wolf to everyone else? Man, this is trippy. I wonder what color my coat is. Black maybe?
“You’re not a wolf,” Torrez tells me, stepping closer. “Well, not a fully shifted one anyway.”
“Uh, what the hell does that mean?”
