Page 40 of Brutal Alpha

When I looked back at her, she’d turned pale, and I felt a little thrill of satisfaction.

“Did I not mention I was from Lapine?” I said. She shook her head, swallowing thickly.

“You didn’t, no.”

Silence enveloped us. I expected her to have questions—explanations, excuses, anything—but she only stood beside me, her lips shut tight.

“Do you want to know how she’s doing?” I prompted.

“Not really.”

“Wow, okay.”

Despite all I knew about her past, I’d never imagined that Eve was heartless. She seemed warm and kind and—well, motherly, though I supposed I was hardly the best judge of that.

“I’ll be back at the same time tomorrow,” Eve said, and the change of subject was so sudden it could have given me whiplash. “Now that you’re managing corporeal, we can try picking something up.”

I stared at her in disbelief. That couldn’t be all she had to say on the subject. We couldn’t just be done with that conversation.

“That’s it?” I asked, incredulous.

“Sometimes, when you love someone, it’s easier to keep them at a distance,” was all the explanation Eve gave. “When the world has been unkind to you, it feels safer to push away the people we care for, because then they can’t hurt us.”

I didn’t like how familiar that logic sounded. But Eve and I weren’t the same: I was guarding my heart from a man who had trampled over it repeatedly, while she had punished a child for being conceived.

“What if they love you just as much as you love them?” I countered. It might not be true for me, but Alyssa was sweet, kind, and strong. Any mother would be proud of her.

Eve only shrugged.

“That’s a risk, and you’ll have to decide whether to take it. I didn’t, and I regret it.”

She didn’t wait for my response to that; simply turned her back and walked away. Eve might be the only woman on Ensign who could walk through town alone without issue, and she did it as though that privilege was simply her right. In another world,I would have admired her deeply. In this one, I tried to put her from my thoughts as I went to join Ethan in the kitchen. Despite my best efforts to pretend otherwise, I was absolutely starving.

I was still trying to keep Ethan at arm’s length; the less time I spent with him, the less I spoke to him, the less likely I was to let something slip. That afternoon, though, his enthusiasm was infectious, and I munched on the veggies he’d cut up for me while he grilled me about the morning’s breakthrough. When I explained what this could mean, the possibilities for corporeal shadow, Ethan leaned back against Xander’s counter, whistling through his teeth.

“Forget Xander,” he said. “You’re the scariest motherfucker on the Nightfire islands now.”

He was genuinely excited for me; I should have basked in his admiration, but instead, it chafed at an old wound.

“Not just a burden anymore, huh?” I said, because fuck it.

“What?”

“You don’t remember?” I didn’t see why he would. Throughout my life, I’d often found that hurtful words stayed with the one who was hurt far longer than with the one who did the hurting. “After Dad died, when you guys all came over to Lapine—I asked you if there was anything I could do to support Caleb. You told me I was a burden to him, and the best way to help was to stay out of the way.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of me crunching on a carrot stick. I was trying, and probably failing, to seem cool about it all, to act like it was just a funny story and not a foundational part of who I was today. Ethan clearly wasn’t buying it, because when I mustered the courage to make eye contact again, he looked devastated.

“That sounds like something I would say,” he admitted. Then, “I’m sorry.”

There wasn’t much else he could say, I supposed. For years, I’d fantasized about having him on his knees, begging for my forgiveness for underestimating me. It was so far removed from the reality in which I found myself that I almost laughed. Then Ethan spoke up again.

“Is that why you stopped…” he trailed off, as if regretting the sentence he’d begun.

“Stopped what?” I pressed, and almost immediately regretted it.

“When I carried you over the bridge,” Ethan continued reluctantly, “after the fight with Arbor, you were pretty out of it, and you said—you said you had a crush on me when you were younger.”

There was nothing to be done but cover my face entirely. I simply could not look at him, nor could I bear to have him look at me. I felt like I was twelve again, and I’d just walked into a tree I hadn’t seen on my blind side.

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