Page List

Font Size:

My tattoo says it’s right.

Every time we touch I feel it’s right.

We’re connected.

Is it bad that she’s a witch and I’m a shifter?

That seems like something we can overcome.

But that sigil… it wasn’t just a symbol of our bond. It was a threat. A warning. A claim.

And yet, if I had the chance to do it all over again—to feel her magic arc through me, to hear her whisper my name with wonder—I wouldn’t hesitate.

I park the truck in front of the grocery store and go in.

Loading the grocery bags in the truck bed half an hour later, my mind still hasn’t stopped whirring. So many thoughts. And for once, many of them are good.

Last night felt like a turning point. A moment of fragile peace and shared truths that shifted something deep between us.

We’d stayed up late after the storm of our bodies settled. Talking. Her curled into my lap, her fingers brushing mine. There was a softness to her that didn’t match the tough, guarded agent she pretended to be. And in that vulnerable lull, we spoke about our families.

I told her about my real parents…what I remembered. Their joy. Their love. And then how the Bensons raised me.

She had lots of questions about how I learned to hunt and manage my wolf by myself. I shared what a gruesome time it was. Feral testosterone running through my veins. Emotions I didn’t understand…until I ate. Luckily, it was deer season, so no eyebrows were raised. And I had some memories from my parents and watching them hunt as a child.

It wasn’t always easy hiding the truth from the Bensons, particularly as a teenager, but I couldn’t have asked for more understanding…or patient…parents. Still, I suspect they were glad when I moved out at eighteen to become a firefighter. It gave me discipline, confidence and a job that made hiding who I was easier.

Sera absorbed my story, one I had never told in its entirety to anyone before. The admiration in her eyes made me fall a little deeper in love with her.

She told me about her parents—two witches with power and darkness in equal measure. How she’d seen them do things that would haunt most people. Not out of malice, but to protect their kind. Their magic. Their bloodline.

While she understood their motivation, it still broke something in her.

“Have you glued yourself back together?” I asked.

She shook her head. “There’s still too many secrets for that,” she voiced calmly, without apology.

I didn’t ask her to reveal her secrets. Many of them I knew already. She was a witch. That I had seen. She was working for some agency. Which one, I didn’t know. I could only hope that it was on the side of the law and that maybe she had turned to the law to try to unbreak herself. To protect. To serve. To clean up the messes her parents had left behind. That I could understand.

Sera asked me a strange question as we were falling off to sleep, the investigator never completely off duty. “Where did the first of the six fires start?”

“On the other side of the west woods, just past the circle,” I responded, on the verge of dozing off.

“Were there any bodies?”

“No. We got there too late.” I rolled over and was out.

I had no idea where she was going with that line of questioning. She hadn’t told me about the case she was working on or exactly who she was working for. She couldn’t. I understood that. Hell, I respected it.

But secrets cut both ways.

I didn’t tell her about the circumstances around my parent’s death. For now, that stays with me.

I pull into a turnout and park the truck, gripping the wheel as the crisp mountain air rushes in through the cracked window. My chest rises and falls with the cool breath of pine and memory, grounding me as the past claws its way forward. My fingers drum on the steering wheel as another memory forces itself forward.

Six months back, a friend of Captain Greene’s let me see the old evidence box from my parents’ case. It had been collecting dust in evidence storage, long after the fire that killed them was ruled a tragic accident. Except… it wasn’t an accident.

Their bodies were charred beyond recognition, but not before some DNA was salvaged—thanks to a sharp-eyed park ranger who caught the blaze earlier than expected.