Page 57 of Pack Nightmare

His half-smirk appears, but he doesn’t reply.

“So… you want to tell me what we needed to talk about?”

Sighing, he sits up and glances around, gauging the proximity of the other students. “It’s Lily.”

“Lily?” My brows furrow as I try to think of someone we know named Lily.

“Yeah, Layla. She asked me to stop calling her Lex, so it’s Lily now.”

My brows raise in surprise. “Really? Why?”

Milo dips his head and looks at me over his dark glasses. “Why do you think?”

It takes me a minute, but I catch up. “Oh, right.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what about her?”

“I know she’s putting on a brave face, but I know the curse really bothers her. She feels guilty about inflicting it on us, and she hates the idea of being tied to this place for the rest of her life. She’s trying but, she’s not really happy.”

“She told you all of this?”

“More or less. Last night, we kind of… tightened our bond, and I can feel more of what she’s feeling. I’m making educated guesses about why she feels what she does.”

“I see. So what do you propose we do about it?”

“Well, I think we should revisit what the old woman said, Shuya.”

I snort. “She didn’t say much.”

“True, but what she did say was important. She said the cure for the curse was right under our noses, but we were too blind to see it. She said Lily had to accept her true name—that was also part of how we landed on Lily, short for Lilliana.”

“Okay… so definitely not much.”

“Right, but I think we need to really start trying to work it out. What could be the solution that we’re too blind to see?”

“You realize that this is one of those impossible riddles, right? ‘Tell me the one thing you can’t see and I’ll give you a million dollars.’ There could be a million things we aren’t seeing.”

“Yes and no. I think we can narrow it down, if we try. Like, we know it’s about the curse. We know the curse affects us and the entire pack, but most especially, it affects Lily.”

I gaze down at the grass between my knees, letting my vision glaze over while my brain works. “We should assume it’s not something we literally can’t see, but figuratively.”

“Yes, exactly!” Milo taps my shoulder. “It’s something we’re unable to comprehend or think of because of our particular biases or perspective.”

“Biases could be something,” I admit. “When it comes to Pack Montrose we have pretty strong biases.”

“True. But Le-, I mean, Lily doesn’t. She’s called us out on that more times than I care to admit.”

“Also true. But everything she knows about Smoky Falls and Pack Montrose has been told to her by us, by people here. So you don’t think that comes with an inherent bias?”

“Fair,” Milo agrees. “So the likely solution has something to do with Pack Montrose, that our bias, being from Smoky Falls, is affecting.”

“Seems most logical.”

“So, what are our biases about Pack Montrose?”

I snort. “You mean, aside from the fact that they’re selfish traitors who betrayed their own families because they wanted more than their share and heartlessly cursed our entire pack to get their way? Or that they killed our alpha out of cruelty and malice and even sent assassins to kill subsequent Smoky Falls alphas?”

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