Page 38 of Nightshade

“I don’t want to,” I admitted, throat tight.

Katya stuck her bottom lip out. “Well, then you should accept what he offers you, because he’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

Wonderful. Now I had another angle to come at my guilt.

Katya touched the dough I was working and waved my hands away so she could gather it up and put it in a bowl with a towel atop it.

I took the stool again and watched her cut vegetables for a while, presumably for supper, before the door opened. Leo came in, his misshapen basket dangling from his loose fingers. He heaved a sigh and dropped onto the couch.

I only turned to look at him. A shaft of sunlight still darted across the living room and kept me away.

“No luck, Lyonechka?” Katya asked.

Leo dropped his head back. “It probably doesn’t even grow around here.”

I sat up straighter on my stool. “What doesn’t?”

When he noticed I was there, Leo sat up and leaned over his knees. A smile appeared on his face that made something in my chest jump.

“It’s a plant. It grew in Russia—poisonous to humans, but it helped dull pain for the werewolves in our old pack.”

I swallowed, and my throat was like sandpaper. “Purple flowers?”

He perked up, nodding. “I thought it might help Henry—that’s Cash’s dad. It’s pretty uncommon for a werewolf to have lingering pain like that, but he lost his leg. I thought it could help him.”

If it was the plant I was thinking of, I was . . . intimately familiar. It had grown in Ivan’s night-blooming garden, and more than once, I’d dragged my haggard body to suck on its stem the same way I sucked down those voles in the woods, chewing and hoping to feel better.

“I can’t find it anywhere,” Leo admitted. “I don’t know why I thought it’d be so simple, like it’d grow here just because that’d be convenient.”

I felt Katya’s eyes on me. This was it, that hope for the best that kept Leo going.

I could keep my suspicions to myself, not tell him what I knew, tuck those memories away and try to forget them, but Leo kept hoping. If I wanted to show him my best, I might not have another opportunity to do it.

“It’s a rare variant of nightshade and, ah, it blooms at night,” I said. “If you were looking for blossoms in the afternoon, you wouldn’t have seen it.”

“At night?” Leo’s eye lit up, and heavens, it was so tempting to tell him not to get his hopes up too much. I wasn’t even sure if it grew nearby, but I thought I’d seen some of the blossoms drying in the coven house once. It’d been years ago. “Could it grow here?”

I shrugged. “It likes the cold, so maybe. I could . . . I’d help you look for it, if you wanted to go out again?”

Leo beamed at me. “Really? Yeah! That’d be great. When the sun’s down, I mean.”

Katya turned away from the vegetables. “I’ll make extra then, so you don’t miss dinner.”

And just like that, Katya was sending her son out at night with a vampire.

This pack might be insane.

Well, except for Viktor.

CHAPTER 19

Leo

I wanted to crow about how I’d always known the flowers grew in Idaho, but the fact was that I’d started to doubt my memory of even the conversation, let alone where I might have seen them growing. Maybe I’d been mistaken about their existence at all, and the whole conversation with Polina, even though I remembered it clearly.

I knew that sometimes trauma did funny things to people’s memories; I’d just thought that I was exempt from that particular symptom. Like somehow, just because I smiled through it all, I wasn’t feeling the strain as much as everyone else did.

I knew it was just a way I pushed myself harder than my family, but also, I wanted to take care of them. Them having to take care of me was a failure, because they all had enough to worry about.