“We’re in a public place. I’ll be fine, go. He won’t approach if he sees you, and we’re gambling a lot already. What if he picks out your scent?” she asks, trying to walk away. I stay walking behind her, but she abruptly stops again, and I nearly run into her. “Eddie, please.”
My eyes pierce hers. She’s standing on shaking legs, and her baby hairs are frizzy and sticking up all over the pace. She’s stressed—beyond stressed. I’m stressed. But I can’t argue with her. I need her, and she needs space from me to bait Milo, the sick bastard. “Okay, but I’m not going far. I’ll be in the next aisle over.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” I say, forcing each foot up and over. Left right, left right, as I make my way to the next aisle.
26
WILLOW
The boxesthat my tea comes in are yellow. A happy color that used to brighten my day. I haven’t bought a box of tea bags since... the incident. I’m here, looking at tea bags, and Moon Goddess knows what Layla is looking at. Is she being tormented? What would Milo want with her?
Huffing, I trace my fingers over the boxes. My eyes track over the stack of boxes on the display table, finding the little imperfections on each one before finding the one I would have chosen. I can’t believe even after Ghost attacked me in my apartment that I would drink from a tea bag I randomly found. Milo and Ghost knew I would drink it, regardless. Am I that predictable?
Am I that stupid?
As I pretend to browse the aisle, memories fill my head. Milo could’ve never been my mate.
There is only one person who I hated going grocery shopping with. One person who’d follow me around like a lost puppy, yapping my ear off about how long I was taking. Or about how we should try to make something he wouldn’t end up eating, or how his parents were getting on his nerves, and how he hadto leave early—the only time we had to spend together between work and classes—because his parents were calling him home to fix the TV.
I knew fixing the TV would turn into him staying for dinner without inviting me, which always ran over the time he said he’d be home, and that would be the reason he came home at three in the morning instead of being home at seven in the evening to spend what little time we had together with me.
Milo never treated me like a mate.
“Miss me?” The voice makes me jump out of my skin. I itch and ache in all the worst ways as recognition of the voice seeps into my brain, and I turn towards the voice.
He stands there with his hands in his pockets. Wearing a loose, tropical-patterned shirt and matching shorts. His skin is darker, as if the sun and him have become best friends, and his hair is freshly cut. His eyes are still molten brown. Milo Doug Barrow is standing in front of me.
The natural glow of happiness that used to surround him isn’t there anymore. I can see the scar across Milo’s face from when Layla said she almost had him. I wonder why he hadn’t shifted to heal the mark? I don’t care enough to ask, though. Not when I know what he did to Layla. What he could’ve done to me.
Milo Barrow is not the man I thought he was.
My mind is reeling. He’s here. He’s breathing. From the outside, I’m sure we appear as old friends with how casual this setting is and how nonchalant he’s standing. I can sense Eddie racing towards me, but I flex my fingers, hoping he, Jackson and Leo take the sign to wait. I need to know; I need to hear this from Milo himself.
“It took you a while to figure it out, though.” He shrugs as if we’re old friends, and he hasn’t paid someone thousands to kill me. He smiles like a bachelor’s first day on vacation at a villa ona beach somewhere warm and close to the ocean. It makes my skin boil.
My skin tightens around my eyes and breathing is getting more complicated. Heavy? I should feel an immense sense of danger, but all I feel is my bear simmering under my skin, wishing to make her way to the surface. Unfortunately for me, she’s not interested in answers. She wants blood.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“What question?” I ask, my mind going blank, not believing I’m actually having this conversation right now. I want to reach out, and see if he’s real, if my hand would swipe through him like it would a ghost, but I can’t bring myself to move.
“Did you miss me?”
“Why do you care? Better yet, why are you back from the dead?”
“Why won’t you answer me?” His eyebrows furrow as if he’s genuinely confused and angry. I see his jaw lock, and I try to keep my eyes from searching for Eddie. I don’t want to reveal the Pack’s presence yet.
“You want to hear how I was wrong? That we weren’t mates, and that I regret every single moment we spent together, and that I’m glad that you ‘died’ because I found my true mate? Is that what you want to hear?” I hate to be rude. To be hurtful, but I can’t contain my bewilderment. How dare he ask me that? Do Imisshim? No. Not for a long time.
“No. But I needed it. I thought—I don’t know. Wait. I do. I do know. Willow, there’s something wrong with me.”
“You don’t think I know that by now?”
“No, I had it all. I had you, my family, a great job on the way. It was too much.”
“Milo, if you don’t get to the point, I am going to call my angry, surprisingly violent mate, who will come running after me. You want to know why he’ll come running? Because he is mymate, whether or not he knows it. Because he loves me, and he doesn’t have to say he loves me—I just know it. Eddie Enchanted is more a man and mate than you’ll ever be, and I need you to wrap your point up before either he or I kill you in this grocery store.”
