“She is everything they said she would be.” Yara’s wet eyes shimmered with pride. “And so much more. My perfect girl.”
“But who is she?” Sebastian pressed. “Is she yours?”
“Look.” Yara sniffled and pointed at a spot on the invisible pup. “She bears the mark of Chann. It is as it has been foretold.”
“Foretold?” Sebastian glanced up at me. “Are you familiar with any prophecies?”
I laughed. “About a female? Bearing the mark of Chann? I don’t even know what that is, but it sounds like something we’d only let a very alpha male—what? Stop looking at me like that.”
Sebastian’s golden-brown eyes had locked onto my left shoulder. He glanced down at the phantom pup and then slowly back up. He jerked his chin at my shoulder. “What is that?”
“What is what?” I tugged the comforter over both shoulders, crossing my arms like a corpse to hold it in place.
He pointed at the left one anyway. “There. On your clavicle.”
I gulped, feeling strangely lightheaded all of a sudden. Or maybe not that strangely. I was recovering from a wound that could have been fatal if they hadn’t stopped the bleeding in time. I was probably just a little anemic still. It definitely didn’t have anything to do with the way his full lips made the word clavicle look and sound so elegantly salacious.
“Um…” I glanced down at my shoulder just to be sure there wasn’t a spider sitting there, even though I was pretty sure there weren’t any spiders in the city who could afford a stay at the Plaza Hotel. All I saw were the same four reddish-brown freckles that had always been there, two on either side of the center of my clavicle, each about half an inch apart. I touched a finger to them. “Are you talking about this?”
“Yes.” Sebastian said. “Has it always been there?”
My mouth fell open with an embarrassingly loud guffaw. “It’s just a birth… mark.” I sighed and shook my head, realizing how that sounded. “Kiana has them too. On her right shoulder. We’re mirror twins. They line up perfectly, or they did before she started covering them with make up every morning, which I now regret not doing.”
Sebastian looked down at the invisible pup his mother silently rocked as if he could see it too. He pointed to the same spot in the air that Yara had pointed to. “You don’t find it a little suspicious that she pointed right where your birthmark would be?”
I dug my fingers into the center of my forehead, which was starting to throb. “If I agree to being your long-lost sister, will you at least cool it on the fated mates thing?”
He laughed. Just a little. A sort of breathy rumble from deep in his chest that seemed to vibrate deep inside my stomach. Warmth crept up my neck and across my clavicles. Gods, it was getting hot under this comforter. With nothing else on. I focused my attention on the cold rain tapping at the windows flanking the bed.
“You are not my sister,” Sebastian said. “But I do think she’s having some sort of vision of when you were born. It can’t be a coincidence.”
I rolled my eyes. “That is a stretch, Sebastian. You can’t even prove she’s pointing at the pup’s left shoulder. For all you know, this—” I leaned forward and took my turn pointing at the spot. “—is her right foot.”
Sebastian frowned. “Elyse, that cannot possibly be the pup’s right foot.”
“Of course it can,” I huffed. “Sebastian.”
He visibly shivered when I said his name but tried to hide it by rolling his shoulders as if I were trying his patience. “Elyse. Look at the angle of Mother’s elbow. Clearly, the pup’s head is right here.” He mimed cupping a tiny skull just above the crook of Yara’s arm. “That makes where she pointed the left shoulder.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I jabbed a finger in the direction of Yara’s other bent elbow. “The head could just as easily be over there. You can’t see a damn thing.”
Sebastian slow-blinked, his expression perfectly blank. “Elyse. Have you ever held a pup before?”
“What?” The flush across my shoulders deepened to a blush. “Of course I have.”
That was not… entirely true. While I had always enjoyed playing with older pups who could move around by themselves, infants made me… anxious. They were like breakable little geysers. You never knew when some sort of liquid would shoot out of somewhere, but if it did, you were just supposed to keep holding on, and that was a lot to commit to, so I had really only ever held the mechanical pup they assigned me in Pack Ec.
“Okay,” Sebastian said slowly. “Then you should know that if she were holding the pup like that, the pup would be upside down, and that’s generally fr—”
“Frowned upon,” I cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, fine, I get it. But you’re still wrong. She can’t be talking about me because my mother never held me. Or my sister.”
He cocked his head. “Why not?”
“Because she died.” I glared at him. “Kiana was born, and the midwolf took her to show Father, and then I started coming, but I was upside down, so they ripped her open to get me out, and she bled to death faster than everything could heal. Okay?”
Sebastian blanched. “Oh.”
“Yeah. So.” I gestured at the unseen pup. “That ain’t me, and this ain’t the mark of Chann. Sorry to disappoint you again, but I’m perfectly average, perhaps even below.”