Page 96 of The Wolf

So he tossed it to the floor. “Then we’ll burn it.”

“Why bring it at all?”

“Because I thought it might bring you closure.”

“I left it behind. That was closure enough.”

“Fair.”

They stared at each other.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I want to talk to you.”

That was like a slap to the face.

“Oh, so now you want to talk?”

“Scarlet..”

“No!” Scarlet held her hand up. “I wasn’t finished. You were only too eager to ignore me last time.”

“And that was my fault,” Brine said, earnestly taking a step forward before thinking better of it. Checking himself, his shoulders slumped and he remained a safe distance away from Scarlet. “I should have listened to you, Scarlet, and I didn’t. Believe me when I say I regret that decision every second of every day.”

That was rich.

She scoffed. “Believe you? You can’t be trusted! You had so many opportunities to tell me what you were up to, to include me in your plans, but you didn’t. Oh, Dotae be good, what do you have now? I—”

For Brine had pulled out another object from the shadows: a shoe. And not just any shoe. Scarlet’s shoe—the one she’d lost in her haste to escape Tarros, the Betraz Estate … and him.

She snapped her mouth closed.

He turned it nervously in his hands. “When I came to my senses—gods, it took me three damn days to come to my senses—you were long gone. I went looking for you. Well…” Brine chuckled bitterly. “I had just about every wolf at my disposal looking for you too, but you weren’t to be found. All anyone located was your shoe. So I … held on to it.”

Scarlet didn’t want to guess at what that meant. “Why would you hold on to something so stupid?” she asked, hand still fishing around for the key she had stupidly locked in the door. Just because she wanted to hear what Brine had to say didn’t mean she had abandoned her mission to escape. The man was bad for her. She was bad for him.

Brine offered her a small, almost hopeful smile. “I kept it all these months hoping to return it—using it as a symbol of hope to myself that I would reunite with the woman I love. For there was one thing that my grandmother wasn’t wrong about, Scarlet. I’ve always loved you. I hate that she used those feelings to her own advantage, that she twisted the two of us against each other. More than anything I hate it. But here we both are, still alive and in one piece.” His eyes moved from Scarlet’s face to her belly. “Our child’s alive. Andfree.That’s more than I could ever hope for. And I have to believe that, now we’re free, we can begin to mend what we’ve so horribly destroyed. Don’t you want that?”

This was all too much for Scarlet.

She wanted nothing more than to wipe out what Brine had just said. That he would simply disappear, and with him any impossible decisions she would have to make. But she knew he deserved something in return for his heartfelt confession: an explanation of why she’d done the things she’d done. And a kind rejection, at the very least.

“I can’t go back to you,” she said, not having to feign the sadness in her voice. Her heart broke to see Brine’s hopeful expression crumble, a stone mask taking its place, but she had to continue. “I won’t be like my mother, locked away and complicit while you commit criminal acts for the Dark Court. Living like that literally killed her. It almost killed me. That’s not the life I want for myself or for my child. I can only hope you understand this, Brine. Let me go.”

“I can’t,” he rasped.

“Don’t make me hate you,” she whispered, tears burning her eyes. “You know what Arwen was like. Don’t steal my freedom. Please if you care for me at all, let me go.”

Brine said and did nothing for a long moment. It stretched so long, in fact, that Scarlet was beginning to think he was incapable of formulating a response, and that the correct thing for Scarlet to do was to simply turn around and leave. But then he whistled, and the door opened from the other side. Scarlet leaped out of the way, a cry of shock on her lips, at the mismatched group of people who emerged to fill the cramped space of the berth.

Scarlet recognized them all.

There was the tall, broad, domineering dragon shifter, and the fox shifter, and the cat-eyed man who’d come into her shop and forced her to flee her new home in the Callmai. But then there was the Lady Marianne—really named Robyn—and the periwinkle-haired woman who had sneaked into Betraz Manor to gift Scarlet the dress she had worn the night she became Brine’s bride.

Scarlet backed away from them carefully. “What’s going on?” she asked, suspicious and wary. Her hand tightened on the knife she still held in her hand, for all the use it would do against so many people.

Brine waved a hand around at his group of friends. “Scarlet, please meet my pack.”

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