Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 11 - Chapitre 20

•Faye•Clare walked fast for someone giving a tour, like she’d rather be doing anything else with her hands than pointing at rooms, and I liked that about her too. No performance in it. Just a woman moving through her own home like she actually lived there, which, obviously, she did, but it made a difference after two days of everyone in this house treating me like something that might shatter if they breathed wrong near me.“Kitchen,” she said, waving a hand at a set of double doors we passed without stopping. “Dining hall’s through there, but you already saw that on the fake tour. This is the good kitchen. The one the pack actually uses when nobody’s performing for guests.”“There’s a fake kitchen too?”“There’s a fake everything when Shaun’s involved.” She grinned over her shoulder at me. “Wait till you see the library he pretends he reads in.”I laughed, and it came easier than it had in days, easier than it had any right to given everything sitting behind it. We turned a corner i

•Shaun•“Dig into the stepfather,” I said, before Luke had even made it to the door.He stopped, hand on the handle, and turned back to look at me. “The stepfather.”“I want to know who he was. What he did for work, what kind of man the neighbors thought he was before all this, whether he had debts, enemies, a temper anyone bothered writing down anywhere official.” I dropped into the chair behind my desk finally, because my legs had apparently decided they were done pretending this conversation wasn’t taking something out of me. “If she really did it, I want to know what reason she could have had.”Luke’s brow furrowed. “You think there’s a reason that would make it okay.”“I think there’s rarely a body on a kitchen floor without one.” I rubbed a hand down my face. “I’m not saying it makes it okay, Luke. I’m saying a twenty-four-year-old woman doesn’t put her own stepfather down and then run six hours with nothing but the clothes on her back unless something pushed her there. People d

•Faye•The words sat in my throat for a second, heavier than I expected, even after everything I’d already decided walking in here with sore feet and a stone in my chest.“Based on what I remembered I ran,” I said, “because I murdered my stepfather.”Shaun didn’t move. His hands were still curled loose around my ankle, but I felt them go rigid, every muscle in him going very, very still, the way a predator goes still right before it decides whether something is a threat. His thought were quite.“He was about to force himself on me.”The words came out flatter than I meant them to, stripped down to their plainest shape, because if I let any feeling into them right now I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish the rest of the sentence. I’d spent two years learning how to say things about that house without my voice breaking in the middle, and every ounce of that practice was the only reason I was still talking at all.“That night, he’d been drinking. Worse than usual. My mom was working a dou

•Faye•No one has ever cared this much about me.Not once, not in twenty-four years of living, not before two dead parents and a stepfather who wore kindness like a mask right up until he didn’t need it anymore. I sat there with my hands still folded inside Shaun’s, watching him watch me like I was something worth protecting instead of something to be managed, and the strangest part wasn’t even his voice saying it out loud. It was that his wolf agreed. Both of them, the whole furious protective mess of him, pointed in the exact same direction. Toward me.Everything I actually knew about werewolves came from three in the morning scrolling sessions on my phone back before that phone got smashed in a hit and run, fictional novels with covers full of shirtless men and moon-drenched forests, mostly about women getting rejected by mates who found someone better, or the other kind, the kind where the plot mattered a lot less than what happened once the door closed. None of it had prepared me

•Faye•“Well, good,” I said, “because I have no intention of rejecting you. I don’t have anywhere to go if I did.” The words came out steadier than I expected, given everything currently sitting in my chest. “And so far, so good. You’ve treated me nicely.” I looked at him, really looked, letting myself actually study the man who’d just spent the better part of an hour handing me his entire world without asking for anything in return. “So nice it’s hard to believe, honestly.”Something shifted in his expression at that, soft at the edges, and for a second neither of us said anything at all. Just the quiet hum of the room around us, his hands still wrapped around mine, the folded paper with my own face on it still sitting somewhere on his desk like a ghost neither of us had acknowledged in over an hour.“Can I kiss you?”The question came out low, rough, like it had cost him something to actually ask it instead of just doing it, which I was starting to understand mattered to him more th