Page 78 of Arranged Wolf's Nanny
Her father had woven his trap. Katie had been the bait. And Rick…Rick thought her complicit.
Hopelessness pressed heavy against her ribs.
But beneath it, something fierce flickered. A spark her father had never managed to snuff out.
She would not break. Not again.
Not ever.
Chapter 18 - Rick
Rick had not meant to drink.
He told himself the first measure of whiskey would blunt the rough edges of his temper, the second would smooth the scrape of memory, and the third…well, the third he poured because he could still see Rosalia’s eyes when she swore she would never hurt him. His office felt too small for his anger and too empty for his regret. A portrait of some dead ancestor watched from the wall as if he’d sat in this very chair and made the same mistake a lifetime ago.
The bottle sat heavy on the desk. So did the crumpled scrap he’d fished from the wastebin on his way in, the torn corner of Rosalia’s stationery. His name, and beneath it, the words blurred but still legible:he’s so clever.He should have burned it. Instead, he kept it. He hadn’t needed the reminder, but he kept it anyway, proof for the part of him that still wanted to believe her.
She had been gone when he finally returned to the hotel. No note. No explanation. Just a cab booked for Green Mountain territory.
So he had returned home with his daughter to Silvermist.
He pressed his forearms to the desk and breathed through his nose until the wolf quieted. The room held the muted scents of beeswax and paper and something floral that clung to the curtains. Some ghost of her perfume. He had chosen distance because distance was safe; distance meant he couldn’t be flanked. And yet there he was, alone with a bottle, already regretting that distance like a fool.
A whisper of sound at the door cut through the static.
Tiny knuckles, three soft taps, then silence.
Rick set the glass down, “Come.”
The door edged open. Eva’s face appeared, pale and owlish in the lamplight, curls a halo of shadow. She did not cross the threshold at first; she stood with one hand on the doorknob, the other bunching the hem of her nightdress, as if ready to bolt.
“Papa?”
His chair scraped as he stood. Whatever the whiskey had loosened in him slid aside. “Sweetheart,” his voice came out softer than he felt, “you should be sleeping.”
“I tried.” She slipped inside and shut the door carefully behind her, as if afraid of being loud. “I…I missed Rosalia.”
He swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Eva’s small mouth turned down. “You smell…wrong.” She squinted at him, earnest and unblinking. “Like when you’re trying not to be mad.”
It would have been so easy, once, to turn away. To tell her to go back to bed, to harden his face until she bounced off it like a wave off rock. Before Rosalia, he would have done it. Before the last weeks had worn grooves through him and shown him what it meant for a child to trust him with her fear at midnight.
“Come here,” he said instead, holding out a hand.
Eva crossed the room in a hurry, the too-long nightdress tangling around her ankles. She smelled like soap and warm linen and faintly of sleep. He lifted her with one arm and found the button at the back of the desk lamp with the other, turning the light down until the office softened to amber.
Eva’s fingers found the lapel of his jacket and held on. “Where is she?”
The truth lodged behind his teeth. He had left Rosalia with anger still hot enough to melt bone; she had left the suite long after, quiet as snowfall. He had not gone to look. Pride, temper, habit, call it what it was. And now his daughter stood in a doorway in a too-big nightdress, asking where the only other safe thing in her world had gone.
“She decided to go home,” he said carefully, “her real home.”
“Her real home?” Eva asked, her eyebrows drawing together. “I thought…I thoughtthiswas her real home.”
“She made her choice,” Rick said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice, “we must respect it.”
“But I miss her.”
