Page 71 of Haze

Thalia pokes her head out from the ballroom off the side of the living room, adjacent to where I walked in. Her eyes go large, and she runs over. Once she’s close, she slides in her socks across the floor. The impact of her body as she slides in to hug me almost tips me and my stool over. Cade comes from nowhere and prevents our tumble to the floor.

“Should have stuck to my guns about the fucking stools,” Cade grumbles.

“Thank you for not dying,” Thalia whispers as she squeezes me. “I couldn’t stand the idea of losing you.”

My back cracks like I’m at a chiropractor. She’s forgetting her own strength again. Stepping back, she sits down on the stool next to me. It wobbles, and she steadies herself.

Thalia draws a deep breath with tears in her eyes before she shakes her head, brushing it away, and dives into the juicy details of pack life. “Okay, so Revecca and her henchmen aren’t here right now. Apparently she wants to make us some fancy Romanian dish for dinner. I’m worried it’s poisoned. However, that goes against wanting to take Cade back to Romania. But Lena, ugh, she’s awful. I don’t have words. They let her run a country. She’s a queen, and I can’t even imagine.”

“It’s good to see you too.” I smile. I don’t have enough energy to get it to meet my eyes, but I hope she understands I mean it.

Cade kisses the top of my head before standing behind Thalia and wrapping his arms around her. Soon we’re all watching Deacon dance around the kitchen, taking the long way to get places.

Interrupting the silence, Cade speaks. “I mean, in Revecca’s sole defense, they also let me run a small country. So, I’m starting to believe the requirements to do so are really low.”

“From the little I got to see, she’s certainly intense,” I agree, thinking back to the powerful showdown between Cade and Revecca.

Deacon looks at the three of us and sighs. “Could you tell me how many of these fuckers are real?”

“Deacon, it’s the five of us,” Dinah answers him, walking through the entryway and straight into the kitchen with a duffle bag strung over her shoulder. She sets it down on the floor next to the counter.

Had she been living at the animal science building this entire time? Guilt hits hard. I sink into myself, feeling more of the shame from before.

“Ugh. I’m too sober again. Note to self, tequila still doesn’t work.” Deacon tries shooing the ancestors he must see in the kitchen with his hand.

“Dinah! It’s so good to see you. I didn’t know you were coming back.” Thalia beams, confirming my suspicion that Dinah hadn’t gone far from the lab the entire time I was sick.

“Yeah, I’ve a flight late tomorrow. The only option available today was in the back of the plane in a window seat. I’m not getting trapped next to a human and risking they’re afraid of flying.” Dinah scrunches her nose. “Ew. And I talked to Judah. He’s all up in arms that I’ve left him on his own to make decisions. All the more reason to leave him sweating it one more day.”

“Weird, almost like he’s been allowed to run a small country too.” The quip writes itself.

The four of us break into a chorus of laughter. When Deacon explains it to Dinah, she joins us.

Ten minutes later, we’re all sitting with eggs in a hole, and mine has a sriracha smiley face on it because Deacon’s probably the most observant person I know. I started putting sriracha on my eggs a year ago. He doesn’t miss anything.

“So, what are we doing to get rid of her?” I lean, looking past Thalia sitting between us, to eye Cade.

He raises his fork. “For Revecca, since she’s not being forthcoming about what she really wants, aside from her asinine demands that I move to Romania, I see two options. One, we wait. Surely she’ll get bored of us being so ordinary. Or two, we make it a hostile work environment.”

“We can do hostility.” Deacon looks around the kitchen. “We can totally do hostility.”

“Why does this sound like sleep deprivation?” Cade groans, stabbing his egg.

“What? Is that off the table? I have other ideas.” Deacon shrugs.

Dinah laughs hard from the other side of the island, where she opted to sit on the countertop and face us.

With a very thick southern drawl that she’s crafted from her best friend Wyatt, she shakes her head and says, “Oh, lawd have mercy. Get me back on a plane before you start that nonsense.”

Thalia reaches over and rests her hand on Cade’s bicep. My guess is she’s feeling stress through their bond. Before she was turned, Cade and Thalia seemed stuck within their own orbit. Their effortless synchronization has been made evident as I’ve watched their bond grow.

I want that. Where I had felt Finn nestled in my heart when we spent my heat together, there’s a cold vacancy. No, no, it’s better this way. I lean into the cold empty space. I’ll learn to live here, in this solitude.

The sooner the bond breaks, the sooner we can move on. My wolf, still retreated, is the proof I need on the subject. But when was the last time they gave me a sedative? I feel really awake. Shouldn’t the whiney bitch be coming back now?

“Lena?” Dinah calls.

I look at her. “Sorry, what?”

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