Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 131 - Chapitre 139

NICKNobody moves.I stand beside Emily in fur, with my forehead still pressed against her neck and her heartbeat pounding against my skull. She’s bigger than I expected. Her shoulder comes up nearly to mine. Her coat is so white that the blood on my muzzle has left a red smear across it, and she doesn’t seem to care.My wolf is doing something I’ve never felt it do before. It’s lowering itself. It isn’t kneeling, exactly. It’s leaning toward her, as you’d lean toward a fire in winter.I pull back and force the shift.It hurts more coming this fast. My bones grind into place and my skin tightens, and then I’m on my knees on the wooden floor, human and naked and bleeding from the shoulder. One of my warriors, a big man named Theo who fought his way in from the corridor, tosses me a pair of pants from a torn duffel. I pull them on without taking my eyes off my father.Emily stays in fur. She paces in front of me, back and forth, her lips pulled back from her teeth. Every wolf left in th

EMILYMy mother’s car went into the river.I remember the phone ringing and my father dropping it, and the sound it made against the kitchen tiles. I remember a closed coffin and white lilies, and a woman from church who kept squeezing my hand. I remember everyone telling me it was an accident, a patch of oil on the road and a stroke of bad luck.I remember my father, after, standing at the kitchen window for hours and hours, not saying anything to anyone. I remember the house going quiet, and staying quiet, and never getting loud again.This man sat and watched.He sat in his car across the road and watched my mother die, and then he went home and poured himself a drink, and six years ago he stood in a hall full of people and watched me crawl.The wolf inside me doesn’t understand words. But she understands me. She feels what that sentence does to my chest, and she lets go.The shift back is worse than the shift out.It tears through me all at once, with no warning. My bones pull in

EMILYThe first thing that comes back is the snow.I’m eighteen, and it’s Christmas Eve, and the snow is falling so thickly on the road to the cabin that I can barely see the trees. Nick is holding my hand inside his coat pocket. His fingers are warm and mine are frozen, and he keeps rubbing his thumb over my knuckles to warm them.“You’re going to lose a finger,” he says.“Then you’ll have to love me with nine.”“I’d love you with none.”I laugh, and my breath comes out white, and he looks at me as if I’m the only thing in the whole forest.It doesn’t hit me all at once. That’s the strange part. At the park, when I touched the pendant, everything came crashing in at the same time and it was only the worst of it, the floor and the voice and the crawling, and it nearly drowned me. This is different. This comes slowly, one piece after another, in order, as if someone is handing me photographs and waiting for me to look at each one before passing me the next.The cabin door sticks in the

EMILY“Emily Hale,” Nick says from my kitchen floor, “I’ve loved you since you were eighteen and covered in snow. I lost you because I was stupid, and I found you because our daughter looked at me across a ballroom. You forgot me, and you chose me anyway. I don’t deserve that. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to.”My hands are over my mouth.“Will you marry me?”I lower my hands. I look at the pancake on the floor beside his knee.“You ruined a perfectly good pancake,” I say.Mason makes a strangled sound.“I’ll make another,” Nick says.“It had a smile. Mason worked very hard on that smile.”“It was crooked,” Mason says.“Emily,” Nick says.“Yes,” I say. “Obviously. Yes. Get up off my floor.”He gets up so fast that he nearly slips on the pancake, and then he has me, arms around my waist and my feet off the ground, and I’m laughing into his neck and my side hurts and I don’t care at all. Derek is whooping. Sage is crying. Marcus has blueberries in his mouth and is clappi