Page 27 of My Hexed Honeymoon

If he wanted silence for his toss, he should’ve gone already.

I cast Natalia a side-long glance to see how she’s soaking it all in, and she has the most adorable half-smile on her face. I can’t believe she’s never had a s’more before tonight.

She catches me watching and shifts nervously. “What?”

“Just watching you take it all in.”

“I’m seriously digging this, and I one hundred percent mean that. It’s the kind of thing I’ve only ever read about in books.” She cranes her neck to get a better angle of Conall’s next toss. “Not my magical textbooks, of course. But the fictional kind I snuck under my covers at night, because…”

She screws up her face, affecting a stern, uber-grammatically correct tone. “Until you learn to cast spells and astral project, Natalia, you don’tdeserveto read for fun.”

Christ’s sake, her mom was a cunt.

“Anyway, go on,” she says, rubbing her hand up and down my upper arm like I might need soothing afterhertraumatic memory. “Tell me more about how it works.”

“You line up your shot, see?”

Conall lets the ax fly, end over end, to lodge so close to dead-center he’ll inevitably count it. While I might’ve never challenged him for the position of alpha before it became necessary to his happiness, it doesn’t mean I’m not competitive. Or that our battles hadn’t resulted in hits that landed way too hard.

“You want the tip to go in first,” I say.

Natalia does just a horrible job of hiding her growing smile behind her hand. “That’s the general consensus, yes.”

I nudge her side with my elbow, basking in her giggle. “Smartass.”

“It’s from reading all those books I wasn’t supposed to,” she replies, skipping a little closer to the throwing grounds and dragging me along with her.

“My turn!” Twenty-two-year-old Elias dislodges an ax from a stump and steps up to the usual line, demarcated by a row of flat white stones that glow in the moonlight. As our youngest member of the Lead Guard, he was enthusiastic in a way few of us older dudes were.

“You got this, babe!” Gabriel cheers from the sideline, even though everybody knows he doesn’t stand a real shot against Conall—not even from the closer line.

But Gabriel hollers for him like it’s the Olympics, and the two of them have been training all year.

A squishy sensation I’m not accustomed to overtakes my chest as I watch the couple give each other twitterpated grins and blow kisses back and forth. Recently official, although that hadn’t exactly come as a shock to anyone who knew either of them, it was almost a tragedy before Kerrigan saved Elias’s life.

Shit, now my throat’s growing too tight, too.

At the reminder of the silver flash bomb and sigil trap that seared off a layer of skin and left Elias unable to regenerate, conflicting emotions arise, and every single one of them involves the witch at my side.

As much as I longed to forget who she was and bask in the fun night, the safety of every person in the compound now lands squarely on my shoulders, and I didn’t want to get it wrong.

But I’d also seen how Andromeda treated Natalia—Talia. Personally, I thought Natalia suited her better. That’s a name that warned me I’d never be able to have such a gorgeous creature, this woman who was far too ethereal for even Earth herself.

Most disturbing of all, however, is how much I like the idea of calling her mine. Maybe even meaning it in the way Conall did when he’d brought the veterinarian in on one of our big pack meetings, letting gold roll over his eyes as he said, “You will give her the respect she deserves, or as I mentioned earlier, you’ll have me to contend with.”

The saying about it being so quiet you could hear a pin drop? That would’ve been loud in comparison to the silence that followed. Werewolves weren’t exactly known for being quiet, either. It’s one of the many reasons we lived fifteen miles outside an already tiny town, where we could have acres and acres of forest to roam.

Admittedly, I’d been right there with the rest of them during that pack meeting, insisting Conall shouldn’t bring in an outsider.

But I’d held Elias in my arms while he gasped and choked on his own blood.

It’d been eerily similar to the day Conall and I found the kid in the woods, severely malnourished and beaten within an inch of his life. Leaving him there to die for being gay, archaic in a way I thought we’d overcome.

Anger rises again, and the unfairness over how much pain he’s experienced from such a young age has me clenching my fists at my side. It gnawed at me that we’d never found the assholes and paid them back.

The self-sabotaging urge to demand Talia help me find the witch or witches responsible for the sigil trap bubbles up.

This is why I don’t get to kiss her breathless as my friends whistle and give us shit.

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