When she hugged Kole, I wanted to rip his head off, but Sophia was all over me tonight, and she didn’t even bat an eye. I know she feels the lust, but what about the possessiveness? It’s not like I invited Sophia here to make her jealous, but seeing her completely unfazed makes me kind of wish she was.
God, I sound pathetic. Who cares if she’s jealous or not? I’m an Alpha hybrid. I have far more important things to worry about than whether or not some human girl cares about me.
Chapter 32
It feels like my skin is being bitten by a thousand fire ants, and I want to swipe them away, but I can’t move. I’m paralyzed, consumed by darkness.
“Come on! Wake up!” a voice in the distance calls.
“What happened?” another voice seems to say.
“I-I don’t know. I just found her like this.”
There’s so much fear and panic coating the words being said, but they sound far away. Almost like they’re being said through a funnel.
“I’ll go get Leo!”
“He’s not here. He’s in Seattle. Go wake Sophia! She’ll know what to do.”
I realize now it’s Thane and Kole talking, but I can’t see them. All I can see is an endless void.
“Shit! She’s freezing.” Sophia’s voice fills the darkness now, quietly making its way through the invisible funnel. “I have to get her out of these wet clothes. Thane, go get me a bunch of blankets to wrap her in. Kole, move her to the couch. We can’t warm her too fast.”
Everything she’s saying seems to swim around me like drifting thoughts. I’m trying to make sense of it, but all I can focus on is the growing ache I feel.
As time goes on, their voices begin to fade. Floating away like the seeds of a dandelion caught in the wind. The biting pain that had been crawling beneath my skin has been replaced with a soothing warmth, the dark void all but a memory as golden light fills the space around me.
A wave of color and sound comes flooding in, pulling me like an undertow.
“She’s awake!”
Thane’s blurry face comes into focus as his golden-white irises bore into me.
“You’re okay,” he says, stroking his fingers down my face. He pauses and presses his forehead to mine, drawing in a shaky breath.
“What’s going on?” I manage with a croak.
Thane lifts me, still keeping me wrapped in a bundle of blankets, and takes a seat on the couch where I had been lying. He presses me into him, cradling me in his lap, and it feels so unbelievably comforting that I don’t even fight him on it. No one has ever held me like this before, and as he wraps his arms around me, there’s a quiet voice inside my heart, pleading for him to never let go.
“I woke up with this pit in my stomach. I just knew something was wrong.” His index finger runs down the side of my face and jaw as he watches the movement like he’s trying to memorize each of my features, though after seeing the painting, I think he’s already done that. “You were outside, half buried in the snow. What were you doing out there?”
My brows pinch, and he immediately runs his thumb over them until they relax.
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember waking up.”
“Maybe she was sleepwalking,” Sophia chimes in.
“I used to do that as a kid,” I tell him, recalling the times I had woken up in odd places, not remembering how I got there. “It’s been so long since I’ve done it, though.”
“You were surrounded by images of that necklace you recognized in my paintings. It was like you had gone out there to draw them in the snow.” Half of Thane’s face is darkened by the shadows, but I can see his concern.
“What necklace?” Kole interrupts. “And what paintings?”
Thane tells Kole about the woman he’s been seeing in his dreams without ever taking his eyes off me.
“Well, what does it mean?” Sophia asks. “Clearly you’re trying to work something out if you’re drawing it in your sleep.”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “It’s probably just my stupid subconscious hanging onto the one thing my mother left for me.”
