Page 80 of Waltzing With Witches

“Move into this room with me,” I murmur. “Sleep with me every night. Get dressed with me every morning. I want all those moments with you, if you’ll give them to me.”

She flips in my arms, her expression serious. “Okay. Are you sure it’s not too soon? Technically, this was our first real date.”

For a long moment, we stare into each other’s eyes.

“I am developing an obsession with you,” I admit.

She grins. “Good. You should. I’m awesome.”

Ben flips a piece of wood from the wall out for her to high-five. She does it with a laugh that sends joy through me—an emotion I’ve rarely felt. It’s headier than I remember, all-encompassing and thrilling.

And hopeful.

Ben extends a black dress on a bar out into the room. Morgan cuts it a look and sighs. “Guess fun time is over. Let’s go do this.”

I choke down a groan. I’ll need to call a town meeting tomorrow to address what happened with Leighton.

Morgan slips out from between my arms and begins to dress. I turn from her to pull fresh slacks on, but as I button them, a soft touch surprises me. Her hands slide up my back and over my shoulder as she rounds me, stroking my tattoos.

“What do they mean?” she asks softly.

I cock an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me Thea hasn’t already told you?”

She smirks. “Of course. But I’d rather hear it from you.”

I grab her hand and guide her fingers up to the tattoos under my chin. “It’s a family tree. Every swirl represents someone in the Zeniphon line, starting here with our ancestors.” I slide her fingertips down my neck and along my collarbone, down to the brightest part of the tattoo between my pectorals. “And this is the tattoo for my immediate family—Betmal, Aberen, Evenia, and me.”

She smiles up at me. “It’s beautiful, and it has such a lovely meaning. Why do you cover it?”

I clasp her hand more tightly. “You’ve seen Evenia in action. She’s…horrible. I don’t want my tattoos to be reminders of how the Hearth lords their power over the haven system. It was a brilliant coup for my mother’s power-hungry nature to create the system, but it plays right into her need to control every single fucking thing.”

“Even you?” Morgan asks, the question quiet.

I grit my teeth to keep from grinding them together. “She has always interfered.”

Morgan sighs as Ben tosses me a turtleneck. I slip it over my shoulders and pull it down, but she eyes it like it has personally affronted her.

“You know what? No,” she snaps, folding the turtleneck down. “Never hide who you are, not because of anyone, and especially not because of your bitchy mother.” She yanks at the turtleneck again, pink dusting her cheeks. “Damn, it looks stupid rolled down. Tell me you have some other kind of shirt that’s not a turtleneck?”

Ben slides a post out with one of my old collared shirts.

Morgan grabs it and yanks the turtleneck over my head, casting it aside. She hands me the collared shirt with a demanding look. I don’t look away as I take it and slip it over my shoulders. When I move to button it, she bats my hands away and begins to do the buttons herself, starting at the bottom.

Ben tosses a fitted vest at her, and she grabs it out of the air in a single deft move. Slipping it over my shoulders, she focuses on buttoning it too.

And I stare at her expression, at the fierce determination in her gaze. “You are a miracle,” I whisper.

She fastens the last button and looks up at me. “I thought I was a menace. Which is it?”

I chuckle as I pull her arms up around my neck. “Miracle, menace, misfit. You’re all of those things, Morgan Anne Hector.”

“You forgot mine,” she whispers with a wink.

Thirty horrible minutes later, we’re standing inside the church in Shifter Hollow. Every member of leadership comm’d me at least once on the way here, and Evenia’s name hovers over my band as we speak.

The Shifter Hollow Church is nothing more than dozens of sawed-off tree trunks set in a circle deep in the woods on this side of Ever. I stand up front with Richard and his second, Connall. Next to me is Arkan and the rest of the protector team.

In the middle of the circle, the shifters built a pyre. Leighton’s stiff, dead body lies in the middle, his face a mask of pain and anger.

---