Page 93 of Marked By the Pack
“Let me go.”
“Never.” He pulled me closer and let me rest my head against his chest. Like Callum had when he’d come to rescue me earlier tonight. But unlike Callum, Otto’s skin didn’t make me shiver. Otto felt warm. And safe. And it just made me cry harder. How could I feel sosafe and comforted when I knew what he was? What he was capable of doing?
He started walking, and I didn’t even care where we were going.
I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want to have to say goodbye. I closed my eyes tighter and clung to him. And suddenly I realized how tired I was. I’d grown used to falling asleep in his arms. The familiar scent of a wood-burning fire on his skin soothed me.
“Zoey,” he said gently as he laid me down, rousing me from my sleepy daze.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the stars.
“This is where I come when I need to calm down. It’s hard for anything to bother you with this view.”
I turned to him, but he wasn’t staring up at the stars. He was staring at me.
I looked out at the street. We were on top of the bank, and I had no idea it looked like this. There was patio furniture and a grill. We were sitting on a blanket in the middle of all of it. And the view truly was amazing. I felt like if I reached out I could touch the stars. It made me feel so small staring up at them. At the unknown.
I turned my gaze back to Otto.
His hazel eyes were fixed on me.
I wiped away my remaining tears. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I just want to know what you’re thinking.”
I pressed my lips together.That you’re a monster. But also…not.
“Maybe I should start,” he said. “I wanted to tell you. And I never meant to deceive you. But I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want any of it.”
I nodded.
“And I’m sorry about when you first got to the bank. I wanted to talk to Bennett myself. I had no idea you’d already spoken to him. I was going to tell him tonight. He’d called for a meeting and…I probably should have put it together that it was about you. I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t happy to see you. I’m always happy when you’re around.”
Gah, why do I keep feeling like crying?I blinked faster so my tears wouldn’t start again. I had been hurt when he’d told me to leave the bank. But I’d pieced all that together while I was curled in a ball in his vault. It was just a misunderstanding.
“Despite what everyone else thinks, I would never hurt you, Zoey. I meant what I said earlier.”
“You can’t promise you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“I’m in control,” he said. “I swear I am.”
“So…you know what you’re doing when you shift into a werecat?” Because it didn’t seem that way.
“No. If I shift, I’m not…me. And I don’t remember what happens when I’m in my other form.”
I swallowed hard. That wasn’t encouraging at all. “How did this all happen? Were you guys born this way? Or…”
“No.” He sighed. “We were all friends growing up. We lived on the same street. We spent our summers riding our bikes and swimming and hitting on girls. It was all so simple back then.”
“So…what happened?”
“In college we went on spring break to Egypt. There was this tomb with all these warnings not to touch anything. We were drunk. We didn’t thinkanything would actually happen. Ace dared me to pick up one of the artifacts. I was just fooling around.”
Yeah, that sounded like the two of them together.
“The next thing any of us remembered was being back in our hotel room. And the artifact was just sitting there on the top of Titan’s suitcase. We tried to put it back a million times, but it kept showing back up at the hotel. It wasn’t even until we got back home that we realized what it had done to us.”
“The curse you mentioned.”
