Page 21 of The Forbidden Wolf

“Okay,” she said at last. “I’ll see you Friday.”

“Okay.” My hand gripped the phone, knowing whatever she said next would be the last thing I’d ever hear her say. “Goodnight, Charlie.”

“Goodnight, Elyse.” Her voice hitched. “Elyse, wait.”

I fought the lump wedged in my throat. “Yeah?”

“That was a very good and incredibly detailed metaphor you just made up on the spot. You really ought to write it down. While the market’s hot.”

“Oh.” I chuckled weakly. “Thanks.”

Charlie laughed lightly. “And just for the record, if you were to write me into a story like that, I wouldn’t be the kind of character who loved your character any less for showing me her whole self.”

That damn lump broke loose in a whimper, but Charlie didn’t hear. The line had already gone dead. I lowered the phone and stared at the tailor’s home screen wallpaper. Not a picture of her partner or her kids or even her dog. Just a tiny version of the poster I’d seen in the subway terminal, minus all the graffiti. I started to power the stolen device off, but then I noticed something I hadn’t before—a tawny rope-like tail lashing away from Jayla’s future husband’s left hip.

She’s in love with a cat?!?!

What have I been telling you? Stories rot the brain.

I rolled my eyes, tamping down my own disgust because I refused to be like her. Maybe stories did rot brains, but I need look no further than my own sister to know that a lack thereof rotted hearts.

Powering off the phone, I pushed off the couch and trudged over to the elevator shack. Wooden planters lined each side of the small square structure, and I trailed my fingertips along my budding white hyacinths. Only the Alpha and Beta families were allowed up here, and since Damian had no family, and my father and sister had lost interest, it basically belonged to me. Which is why it felt like the safest place to keep my stash, since I never knew when Kiana might barge into my room and destroy something I loved.

I knelt in front of the planter behind the shed and pulled back one of the weather-beaten boards. I had created my own little safe of sorts by placing a plastic bin on its side within the planter before covering it with dirt. I pulled out the cookie tin I kept inside the cubbyhole and pried off the lid. I wouldn’t be able to return the phone until Monday at the earliest, so I placed the device on top of a nest of torn bits of paper—all that remained of the tattered copy of Little Women I’d bought for twenty-five cents from a street vendor when I was fifteen. A willful act of disobedience, and not the simple mistake of picking up something lost on the beach like I’d convinced Father.

I had told Charlie that story not long after we met, leaving out all the shifter bits back then. On our sixteenth birthday, I had slipped out of the celebration early because it was not an occasion I’d ever felt like celebrating and certainly not in front of the entire pack. Kiana was their beloved future alpha; I was just the girl who killed Kiana’s mother. And so I went back to my room and snuggled under the sheets to read. Only I fell asleep. And when Kiana stormed in and found me with a raggedy old book on my chest, her wolf chewed it to pieces before I even knew what was happening. I thought she might chew me to pieces.

I picked up the stack of loose DVDs my friends had given me before I finally had to come clean about not having a DVD player. Or a television. The movie on top was the 1994 version of Little Women—a gift from Charlie after hearing my sixteenth birthday horror story. Once she found out I couldn’t watch it at home, she had tried and tried to get the Last Century Cinema to play it, but management wasn’t interested.

And now I’d run out of chances.

Chapter Nine

Contrary to popular belief, everything did not look better in the light of day.

In Manhattan, most things looked worse… much worse.

I pressed my face against our white limousine’s tinted window as we idled alongside the Last Century Cinema, caught by the same eternal traffic light that had stopped the bus that Evan and Jayla had pelted with popcorn. Forty-odd hours later and there were still a few dirty white kernels crushed among the old black spots of gum dotting the sidewalk. At night, they faded into the shadows, but at four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun bounced viciously off the pavement, illuminating every flaw. It also brought out every single mystery streak coating the theater’s glass double doors, and I made a mental note to tell Evan to tell The Snack to stop flirting with customers and do his damn job.

“Ugh.” Kiana leaned across our seat to peer out the window. “What is that place?”

Damian glanced up from his copy of The New York Times. “I believe it’s a theater of pornography, dear.”

Father grunted his disapproval of such talk but not loud enough to cover up my own involuntary scoff. All three of them stared at me—Father with mild curiosity, Kiana with moderate rage, and Damian with extreme insolence. My hackles rose; I really didn’t like throwing my rank around with anyone else, but the liberties he took when speaking to me made my wolf feel severely bite-y.

“They play classic films.” I pointed at the faded poster for tonight’s showing of Beloved Enemy hanging in the dingy frame beside the doors. On Sundays, they played black and white pictures from the 1920s or 1930s, none of which I’d ever been able to see, but all of which, I felt reasonably certain, contained zero nudity.

“Same thing.” Damian lifted the folded paper in front of his face. “If humans aren’t baring their breasts for the camera, they’re baring their souls. Both are equally unseemly.”

“You speak as if only females appear in movies,” I said, making my eyes big and my voice small. “Is that true? Are the males not allowed?”

Father looked out the opposite window, his cheeks tinged pink. Kiana jabbed me with her elbow as if we were still little girls. Damian’s cheeks pulled inward, making his steely gray eyes look even more flat and cold.

“Now, Elyse, I’m sure you’ve gleaned from ambient advertising that human males appear in movies as well. But as is true across all species, human males tend to comport themselves with far more dignity than their females, rarely if ever allowing their, shall we say, delicate areas to be filmed.”

I blinked at him. “But if the males are so modest, then why do they allow their females to carry on so? Surely they could just point the camera in another direction? Or… is it that the films are always overseen by females? And they all enjoy looking at each other’s—”

“Elyse!” Father coughed into his fist. “That’s enough.”

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