Ashley was still visibly mad but there was less conviction in her voice. She opened a drawer, pulled out a tea towel, mindlessly dabbing at the spilled water as it dripped onto the floor.
‘In the eyes of the blessing, your father was no one,’ she said. ‘Nothing more than a packet of seeds. You know what you do when you’ve planted the seeds, Emily? You throw the packet away. As soon as you arrived, Paul went from being Catherine’s favourite to completely expendable and he did not like that one little bit.’
‘He loved me,’ I said again. ‘He loved you too.’
‘If you say so,’ she replied. ‘You really believe he ran away, abandoned me, gave up this privileged life and hid you for all these years, just to keep you safe?’
‘That’s what parents do,’ I told her as she came closer, holding up the towel to wipe the iced water from my face. ‘They make sacrifices for their children.’
Eye to eye, she paused and shook her head.
‘Not all parents,’ she replied before handing me the towel and stalking out the door.
Ashley didn’t bother me again and Catherine still wasn’t home by the time I fell asleep on my bed hours later, head on my hands, laptop open in front of me. When my eyes fluttered open, my room was pitch black, darker than it should’ve been with the almost full moon casting slivers of milky light through the gaps in the shutters. But something was on the balcony, blocking those gaps.
Not something, someone.
‘Wyn!’ I exclaimed as I vaulted out of bed to throw the window open.
He was only halfway inside but his arms were already wrapped around me so tightly I could barely breathe. My hands travelled up and down his back, his shoulders, his hair, his face. It was really him, he was really here.
‘You’re real,’ he said, holding my face in his hands and shaking his head like he was the one who couldn’t believe it. ‘I didn’t dream you up, you’re real.’
With one finger pressed to his lips, I pulled him the rest of the way inside and closed the window behind us.
‘We have to be quiet, my aunt is in the next room,’ I said softly. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’
He pushed his hair back from his face with both hands and stared at me. It was only a month since I last saw him but he already looked so much older. There was a shadow of stubble across his jaw, the threat of a beard I’d never seen before, and dark hollows under his eyes that made me want to pull himback into my arms and hold him there. But something about the grim set of his mouth and unreadable mixture of emotions in his green-grey eyes held me back.
‘I promised I’d come back.’ His voice was worn and dry. ‘Sorry it took a while.’
‘Kind of thought you’d forgotten about me,’ I said, lacing my words with an attempt at self-deprecating laughter. The attempt was a failure. Wyn looked at me as though I’d just said the sun was green and the moon was red.
‘Emily James, I’ve spent every second since I left trying to get back to you.’
‘Where were you?’ I asked, quickly but quietly positioning a chair underneath the handle of my bedroom door. ‘It’s been weeks. I tried to text and call, I sent DMs—’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ He paced up and down in front of the window, occasionally throwing anxious glances at the closed shutters, as though someone might be watching, waiting. ‘I shouldn’t be here. All this crazy shit is going on and you’re the only damn thing I can think about. I shouldn’tbehere.’
He closed his red-rimmed eyes tightly then opened them again, almost surprised to see me still standing in front of him. ‘I don’t know what’s real anymore, Em. I don’t know what to believe or who to trust. I had to break out of my own home to get here, hitched all the way to Savannah. They’re already hunting me down, I know it.’
‘Who is they?’ I asked, confused, as he prowled around the room, his steps as soft as snowfall. ‘Wyn, look at me, tell me who’s looking for you? What happened?’
‘You won’t believe me,’ he said again. ‘I don’t believe me.’
‘You’d be surprised at what I might believe,’ I replied. ‘Remember what we said before? You can tell me anything, you can trust me.’
I felt a tremor in my fingertips and a swirling sensation in my belly as he rubbed a hand along his jaw, both feelings unexpected and neither completely within my control.
‘I guess it doesn’t matter, right?’ Wyn muttered, more to himself than to me. ‘Either I tell you and you send me away or I say nothing, my family finds me, and you never see me again anyway. Better to get it out.’
‘Would it help if I told you something crazy?’ I asked, suddenly desperate to close the distances between us, literal and metaphorical. ‘Because whatever you have to say, I know I have something even more bizarre to tell you.’
‘I don’t think that’s possible, Em.’ He raised his chin and looked me square in the eye. ‘Not unless you’re planning to tell me you’re a werewolf too.’
Thankfully, when I staggered backwards, my bed was close enough to catch me.
‘I told you,’ he said as my heart stuttered in my chest, pausing for far too long between each beat. ‘I said you wouldn’t believe me.’
