“Well, you shouldn’t be calling me little wolf anyway.”
But it fit him. “It isn’t my doing if the evidence is right in front of me.”
He leaned back, his shoulders jerking. “I mean if you want to, I can’t stop you.”
I wanted to laugh. I held back and said, “You don’t think you’re allowed to request what you want?”
His lips parted slightly as he shook his head. With the firelight splashing over him, he looked like something from the ancient lore of the sidhe. Not quite human, but fae. Was he? Were we making slaves of genetic throwbacks from our pre-ice age history? No, the sidhe were myths.
I flexed my neck muscles, trying to shake the thoughts. I wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t poetic. I had a set slave sitting in front of me, not a damned pixie sprite.
“Just to be clear, little wolf. You’re not my slave.”
He gulped. “But I am a dependent.”
“Yeah. So?”
He winced. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Then don’t.”
He took a deep breath, then said, “I think I ate too much. It’s making my mind fuzzy.”
“There’s leftovers if you want some.”
He clutched his stomach. “How can you even think that after everything we ate?”
“Shifting burns a lot of calories, little wolf.”
As soon as the fire warmed my core, I got up and went into the kitchen.
To my surprise, Cassius followed.
18
Cassius
Ihad a lot of time to think. Survival mode demanded it. Look at every detail. Let all your senses absorb the environment. If you didn’t have real wolf instinct, trust your gut.
For all his smug bravado, Malin was generous. Even nice. He didn’t want to show it but I saw. I observed. Everything he did was calculated to show what he wanted to show, a mask. But that slipped more day by day. He hadn’t tricked me. Not from day one. Any alpha who could stand up to Klonis for me, who offered me his non-see-thru swim trunks and tipped big to hang onto me for the whole night without asking for sexual favors was the definition of nice.
Even if he didn’t want to show it.
That first night in my new bedroom, I slept soundly. Lots of covers. Lots of pillows. Along with a feeling of safety. I hadn’t felt that in a long time.
I almost didn’t want to get up the next day afraid the feeling would go away, that I wasn’t sane and everything was some delusion.
I went downstairs and encountered a breakfast buffet all laid out on the dining room table. Malin was in the kitchen.
I walked in. “You did this?”
“It all came by delivery.”
Glancing back at the full table of food, I said, “Every morning?”
“When I’m hungry.”
“You know, breakfast is one of the easiest meals of the day to cook.”
