“If you track her down,” she murmured, “what do you think you’re going to do next? Drag her back here? And then what? What justification will you give her for doing that? She needs to grieve in her own way. You owe her that.”
Like a fool, I listened to her.
I nodded my head and returned to my room. But not for long. My wolf paced inside me the whole time. He whined at me. He howled at me. He pressed against the bars of my skin, trying toget out. I put my hands on the wall and held on to it like a man holding on to a ship’s railing in a violent storm.
Then, I went outside. Just to make sure she came back. And she did, covered in the scents of so many men that my heart is still shaking.
I know she didn’t cross a line, but she wanted me to know she could have. That she still could.
I have not slept.
The glass in my hand is trembling. I can’t hold it steady. I set it down on my desk.
I hear her voice in the corridor outside my office. Low. Professional. Saying something to Jason that I cannot make out from here.
I look at my watch. Two-thirty. This is the time when she usually leaves her office for the oak tree. The twenty minutes she spends with her face turned up to the sun.
I cross to the window and wait. But she doesn’t appear.
The oak tree stands empty for the rest of the afternoon. The minute hand on my watch crawls around the dial. At five, her voice goes quiet in her office. At six, her door down the hall closes. At seven, the dinner bell sounds. I don’t go down.
I sit in my chair in the dark.
The days pass.
She eats at the dinner table, sitting at the far end. She answers questions directed at her with unimpeachable politeness. She does not look at me. Not once. She has become someone I don’t know. The woman who spent weeks chasing me has been replaced by a stranger wearing her clothes. She treats me like I’m furniture now. Her greetings are polite, her workflawless. If I pass her in the hallway, there’s no sly smile, no mischievous curl of her lip. There’s no heat in her eyes when she accidentally meets my gaze. Only blankness, as if she’s looking right through me.
My wolf is losing his mind.
He paces in me all night. He will not eat. He will not sleep. He howls inside my skull at three in the morning until I am on the bathroom floor, pressing my hands to the sides of my head, begging him to stop. He does not stop. He smells her through the walls. He can feel the bond between us thinning in real time. It is driving him toward a frenzy like I have never felt before.
On the second morning, I snap at Monroe over nothing. He apologizes. I close my office door behind him and put my fist through the wall beside it. Plaster dust coats my hair. A knuckle is split open. I flex my hand and watch the cut close itself over in under a minute. I stare at the damage to the wall for a long time. A fist-shaped hole in the plaster. A record of how little is left of me.
Monroe comes back at midday and notices what I have done. He asks if he should call a contractor. I tell him I will handle it myself. He looks at me for a few seconds and leaves without saying anything else about what he has seen.
On the third morning, I go outside before dawn. I sit under the oak tree. I rest my back against the trunk and close my eyes. I sit there for an hour, pretending she is coming. She does not come.
Lydia finds me there as the sun comes up. She doesn’t say anything. She sits down beside me on the damp grass, and her hand finds my forearm. She stays beside me for twenty minutes without speaking. At some point, she leans her head on my shoulder. My wolf doesn’t growl. He is too tired. He just presses against my ribs and keens.
“It will get easier, Lucas,” she says eventually.
I’m silent.
As I tilt my head back, I see the light is on in Sienna’s office. She is standing by the window, looking down at us. I immediately jerk free of Lydia’s touch. She makes a bewildered sound, and I look at her. When my gaze drifts back, Sienna is no longer standing in the window.
“I–I apologize.” I help Lydia to her feet. I see her glance toward the window, and a shutter falls over her face.
“It’s fine.” She gives me a pained smile. “I have to go back inside to deal with some things. Will you be okay?”
I nod. As she walks away, I feel nothing but guilt.
Was this really the right choice? Hurting two women at the same time? Lydia is a wonderful person. She deserves somebody who will love her back. And Sienna doesn’t deserve what I’m putting her through.
I stare blankly in the general direction of Sienna’s window. Is this what the curse is meant to do, the curse that has passed down to me from my great-great-grandfather? To destroy my relationships, to destroy me?
I lean my head against the tree trunk and close my eyes. For a brief moment, I allow myself to imagine a perfect world where Sienna would curl up in my arms and tell me about her day, that teasing smile I adore playing on her lips. I would kiss her, feel the weight of her small body against mine, and revel in that moment.
When my eyes open, I’m still alone.
