“No, nothing like that.” I can hear the warmth in my voice, can feel the low purr of my wolf, and know I’m in dangerous territory—I just don’t give a shit anymore. “You’re so beautiful.” I reach out to touch her face, stopping short before I can. “I’ve always thought so, even when… even when I pushed you away.”
Pain flashes in Aurora’s eyes, and I feel an echoing ache in my chest through the broken bond.
Suddenly I can’t stop myself anymore. I place my fingers against her cheek, longing to touch her, to close the connection between us. A rush of warmth goes through me at the contact. She hisses—at first in pain or shock, I think. Then my thumb moves over her skin, tracing the edges of her freckles, and she makes a sound like a low whimper. My wolf whines in response, wild.
I’m so close to her now. My eyes fall to her lips, so pink and bare. Her tongue darts out to lick them. In a low voice she says, “You’re drunk.”
“Who isn’t?”
Before she can respond to that, someone rams into me. I curse as I stumble forward, my drink sloshing in my hands. A low growl rises from behind me, and I hear the sound of glass shattering.
Frowning, I try to right myself, reaching for Aurora… and realize that I’m way, way drunker than I knew.
She’s looking at me with concern in her beautiful, mismatched eyes. “Kieran? Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her, “and I never will be again.”
I want to tell her why: because I regret what I did. It makes my wolf howl every single day, the ache in my chest growing even as it dulls. Being close to her is a singular torture, as is the knowledge that I could fix it all, make it go away, if only things were different.
But they aren’t. And what I’m afraid of, more than anything, is that they never will be. That day five years ago messed everything up, and this is just… how it is now.
I open my mouth to tell her.
But before I can form the words, the world goes black.
Chapter 13
Aurora
I dream of ruins. Abandoned homes half-sunk into the earth, their foundations cracked. Crumbling brick walls and graffitied signs. Cars that have rusted out, green vines growing up them like stretching fingers. And all around me the smell of rot and disuse, of mourning and abandonment.
Empty. That’s what this place is, hauntingly empty. When I wake from the dream, my chest is empty too, my heart sluggishly beating a mournful rhythm.
But it’s more than that. In the dream, I’m searching for something—for someone. A figure just out of reach. One with broad shoulders and a familiar gait.
Kieran. Even in my dreams, I can’t escape him.
The image of Kieran disappearing into the mist is still fresh in my mind as I sit up. The room is dim, early morning light peeking through the blinds. Kieran’s oblivious snores fill the air.
Kieran’s drunken behavior from the night before is the first thing that flashes through my mind as I adjust to being awake and shrug the dreams off. He was possessive and territorial last night, but more than that, he was oddly affectionate.
And that look in his eyes as he touched my cheek. I could almost tell myself that he felt regret. Almost.
Our room here at Pack Quartz is shared, in part because Jacen seems to have moved half the pack into his father’s house to have a never-ending party. What Kieran sees as irresponsible, though, I see as loneliness and fear—the young brash alpha-to-be doesn’t want to be alone. So I put up with sharing a room with Kieran last night, our beds on opposite walls, his drunken snoring interrupting my dreams about ruins.
There’s something about the dreams that I can’t quite place. Maybe they’re the fae magic getting to me. They bother me, like a word on the tip of my tongue or a thought lurking in the back of my skull.
Moving around the room, I pick through our belongings to get the things I need to brew a hangover tea for Kieran, using the coffee maker I nabbed from the kitchen to warm some water. Shifter metabolism being what it is, he’ll need the electrolytes first thing—and his wolf will need a little hair of the dog, which is why I throw a dash of orange bitters into the tea.
He groans as he wakes up, stretching his arms above his head. Those ice blue eyes take me in wearily, his brows drawn together as he glances at the half-opened blinds. “What time is it?”
“Later than you want to know,” I tell him, handing over the mug. “You drank a lot last night.”
As I hand Kieran the mug, our fingers brush. A jolt of electricity shoots through me, and I quickly pull away. His scent envelops me as I quietly observe him sip, then gulp down, the tea. There’s something so familiar about the piney smell of him, fresh even after a night spent downing bourbon and tossing in an unfamiliar bed. I try to hate him for it and wind up inhaling another bittersweet lungful of pine and cinnamon instead.
“What happened last night?” Kieran looks around our shared room with drawn brows. “How did I even get here? I don’t remember.”
I do. He practically passed out in the dining room, listing over to one side—all six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-forty pounds of him. No one else was volunteering, so I threw his arm around my shoulders and dragged him down the hallway.
