Page 58 of Wretched Thorns

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

His palm was flat against her chest, thumb and forefinger cupping a breast over the place where the thrum had been all day. Steady. Like he’d known exactly where to put his hand.

She found her underwear and her jeans.

Some time later she was sitting on the cottage floor against the foot of the bed with Dex’s denim jacket over her shoulders. He’d put it there without being asked.

He was on the bed. One boot off. One boot on. Watching her.

“Don’t make this mean something,” Tara said.

He paused.

“Too late, mon chère.”

Something crossed his face when she said it. Not hurt. Something closer to frustration kept on a short leash. He knew what the thrum was. She could see that he knew, that he’d known since the steps of her grandmother’s house, and that watching her talk around it like a pothole in the road was costing him more than he was going to let her watch. His jaw worked once. He breathed out through his nose and said nothing else, and he did not reach for her, and the not-reaching was somehow the most aggravating thing he could have done. He was going to let her get there on her own. He was a wolf who had already had the floor drop out from under him, standing there patient as a fence post, waiting on a woman who kept insisting out loud that the ground was perfectly level.

She wanted to throw the boot at him.

She wanted to put both her hands on his face and kiss him again.

She did neither.

She let herself, for one breath, acknowledge the thing she’d been refusing to look at since the gas station.

The thrum was still there.

Low. Steady.

Hers and his.

Tara closed her eyes briefly.

Well. That was not on her bingo card. Fate's a bitch.

Chapter twelve

The Magnolia Grove

Callum reached the grove before dawn.

The preserve was still dark enough that the magnolia stood only as a deeper shadow against the trees. The ley lines were already humming beneath the moss. He felt them through the soles of his boots before he stepped into the clearing.

He crossed to the center automatically.

Two days ago a stranger with silver-streaks at his temples had laid him down here half-dead and vanished before Callum could even ask his name.

Callum knelt in the same place now and pressed both palms to the moss.

Warmth moved up through the ley lines and into his hands. The glossy charcoal thread in his chest tightened hard enough to ache.

He closed his eyes.

Serena was still gone.

The wolf in him had not settled since the night Marcus took her.

He had not let it settle. There was a difference, and Callum knew it even if no one else in his family would have said it out loud. A wolf left to itself will scab over any wound given enough nights. He had refused his the nights. He kept the wound open on purpose, kept the memory of the bathroom tile and his own throat blistering under Marcus’s sigils close enough to touch, because a closed wound forgets and he could not afford to forget. Forgetting was a thing for after. After he had her back. After the man who took her was no longer drawing breath on the same earth.