“Thanks for patching me up this morning,” the words escaped in a rush before Katherine could second guess them. “And for containing mom for a while too. I… I really appreciate it.”
Her father’s frown transformed into a gentle smile. “You’re welcome, Kit. I’m your dad. I’d do anything for you.”
The platitude, as commonplace as it was, rang true.
It gave Katherine pause. “…Anything?” she asked softly.
“Of course.”
The microwave beeped obnoxiously, indicating that the beef stew inside had sufficiently warmed, but Katherine ignored it, playing nervously with her fingers instead. She’d been worrying herself all day about how she could possibly leave Middletown – leave her parents. Ever since she’d come to the conclusion that not only did she have to leave for the good of everyone, she wanted to leave, it was all she could think about. She dearly missed her pack and running wild with them through the towering evergreens of Haven Falls.
Katherine knew intellectually that running away would be the easiest way to accomplish that. But she couldn’t bring herself to just up and leave – disappearing from her parents lives without a word again. It made her sick just thinking about it.
If only she could just…
“Dad, I want to go back to Canada with Bastian,” she forced the words out of her mouth before she lost her sudden nerve. She stared at where her fingers gripped the countertop, bracing herself for his response.
Silence, though, was all that met her bold declaration.
She braved a glance at the man, who, despite his suddenly stiff posture, was gazing unseeingly past her.
“Dad,” she hesitated, “did you hear me?”
His eyes focused on her face at the question. “Honestly, I’m pretending not to have,” he disclosed, his mouth settling in a hard, straight line. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Maybe,” she admitted quietly.
“Why would you even think I’d allow you to do something like that? Are… are you pregnant?” he demanded.
Katherine’s mouth literally dropped open at the question. “What? No!” she immediately denied.
“Then what, Katherine? He’s not bribing you or… or manipulating you somehow, is he?”
An angry flush licked at her cheeks at the suggestion. It was too close to what her mother had implied earlier. “Dad, Bastian would never do something like that! He loves me! And I… I love him.”
Katherine didn’t know who was more shocked by the confession, her father or herself. She hadn’t been able to force the “l-word” past her lips – at least as it pertained to Bastian – since the very first time the man had told her he loved her months ago.
Her father got over his shock quickly. “Love?” he scoffed, disbelief saturating his voice. “Is that what this is about? Katherine, you’re seventeen! What do you know about love?”
Katherine bristled at his tone. “What? So just because I’m young I don’t know what love is? My heart flutters every time I even think about Bastian, dad! It thumps so hard in my chest that I’m half afraid it’s going to burst every time I’m actually with him. I know my own feelings! Don’t belittle them or me just because of my age.”
“I’m sorry, Kit,” he didn’t sound sorry, “You’ll have to forgive me seeing as I’m trying to process the fact that my seventeen year old daughter wants to up and leave the country.”
“Seventeen is close enough to eighteen,” Katherine protested. “What difference does one year make really?”
Her father continued to stare incredulously at her. “You’re talking like someone who’s already made up her mind.”
Katherine took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Well, maybe I have.”
Her father threw his hands up in the air in exasperation, his untied robe flapping comically along with them. “Katherine, what you’re suggesting is illegal,” he exclaimed, clearly trying to appeal to her good sense. “Fact of the matter is that you’re not eighteen yet and if you really ran away, I’d call the police and have you dragged back here within hours.”
Katherine played with the ends of her hair. “Only if they found me,” she pointed out quietly, not quite meeting his eyes.
But Katherine didn’t have to see the man to feel the tension suddenly radiating from him. “They would,” he promised, his voice hardening in anger. “And when they did, I assure you that I’d have your Bastian arrested and thrown in jail for unlawfully harboring a minor.”
Katherine knew that Bastian would never allow them to be caught by the police if she did run away, but the fact that her father was threatening Bastian – even just legally – had her hackles raised. She swallowed down a growl rumbling in her throat with some difficulty and took a deep breath to calm herself. “Well, running away – or moving out as I prefer to call it – wouldn’t be illegal if at least one of my parents gave me permission to do so,” she rationalized.
Her father stiffened further. “Don’t ask that of me, Katherine.”
“Dad, please!” Katherine begged, throwing all pretenses of being unaffected by his blatant refusal to the wind. “I swear that I’ll call and visit all of the time! It won’t be like the last time I disappeared. I’ll know that you’re okay, and you’ll know that I’m okay.”
Her father crossed his arms over his chest – probably in an attempt to stop himself from literally trying to shake some sense into his daughter. “Katherine, I just got you back. And now you’re asking me to give you up? Because you want to be with some guy that I know absolutely nothing about except that he housed a missing teenager for months on end with nary a call to the police?”
Katherine’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds crazy,” she admitted softly.
“Yes, it does,” he agreed, a touch of hope in his voice. He probably thought that his daughter was finally beginning to see reason.
But Katherine was quick to burst that bubble. “But it’s not even half as crazy as the truth.”
Peeking up at him to see his reaction to her words, she immediately spotted his frown. “Truth?” her dad demanded sternly. “What are you talking about, Katherine? I thought you said that there wasn’t anything else you needed to tell your mom and me?”
“Well, I lied,” Katherine exploded, running both of her agitated hands through her disheveled hair. “I’m been lying to you, dad, ever since I’ve gotten back, and you haven’t even realized it!”
She was pleasantly surprised when relief filled her after the confession had escaped, rather than the regret she’d been half-expecting to assault her. It felt good to finally speak the truth.
“Lying to me about what?” her father demanded.
Katherine eyed her father in contemplation. “If I tell you… the truth… you can’t tell anyone. Not ever. Not even mom.”
His brow crinkled in disapproval. “Katherine-”
“No,” Katherine snapped. “Those are my terms or you can forget about me telling you anything.”
Her father stared into her eyes for a long time. What he was searching for, Katherine couldn’t say. He must have found whatever it was, though, because the next time he opened his mouth it wasn’t to protest the fact that what she had to say needed to remain a secret. “Tell me,” he requested softly. “Please.”
Was she really going to do this? It could go so wrong-
“I’m a werewolf.”
…Apparently she was.
For a long moment, Katherine’s father just stared at her, not so much as blinking at the revelation, and the small brunette couldn’t stop herself from nervously filling the awkward silence that hovered threateningly over them. “Dad, please, I know it sounds insane, but do you remember how I was bitten by that animal –that wolf – a few weeks before I disappeared? Well, it wasn’t just a wolf, it was a werewolf. And those men that broke into our house? Didn’t you hear them call me all those strange names? A monster? A creature? Well, they were calling me those na
mes and after me in the first place because they were werewolf hunters and I was, well, a werewolf – though, admittedly I didn’t know it at the time,” Katherine was horrified by her earnest rambling, but couldn’t quite seem to stop herself from prattling on. “I want to go back to Canada because there’s a whole community of werewolves living there. I’ll be safe there, and you’ll be safe if I’m there. Bastian will take care of me. He… he’s a werewolf too.”
She didn’t mention, of course, that he was the wolf who’d bitten her in the first place.
Her father had remained eerily quiet throughout her winded explanation and apparently still couldn’t quite bring himself to speak now that she had finished.
“Please say something,” she asked, voice ridiculously small.
“I… I recognized Bastian when I saw him in the kitchen this morning,” he finally said, his eyebrows pinching together in a perturbed frown.
“You did?” It was Katherine’s turn to be surprised. The confession shone a new light on the way her father had been continuously eying the man.
“I wasn’t sure at first… but, yes. I’ve never told anyone, but after telling you to run all those months ago – back in October – I floated in and out of consciousness until the ambulance arrived. I saw him in the house after you’d left – Bastian. He was fighting one of the men who’d broken in, and I watched him,” he swallowed loudly, “I watched him turn into a massive wolf and rip the other man to pieces with his teeth.” He took a deep breath. “I thought I’d somehow hallucinated the scene, imagined it even, so I never said anything when I woke up in the hospital days later. And I tried to force it from my mind as I recovered. I was mostly successful because your mother and I were so preoccupied with our search for you, but the image of that man warping into a wolf always lurked in the back of my head.”
Katherine was staring wide-eyed at her father by the time he’d finished his story. “You didn’t imagine it,” she pushed the words past dry lips. “Like I said, Bastian is a werewolf too. He not only saved me from Chad this morning, but from those men who broke into our house in October.”
Her father eyed her thoughtfully. “I take it you don’t have amnesia then?”
Katherine slowly shook her head. “No. But I really did think you and mom were dead. I came back as soon as I found out that you were actually alive. I… I missed you so much.”
“We missed you too,” he responded automatically, but Katherine could tell he was still overwhelmed with the information she’d just unloaded onto him. “So… you can turn into a wolf too?” he asked hesitantly.
Katherine dug her teeth into her bottom lip, hoping the man wasn’t going to ask her to prove it to him. “Yes,” she hedged, “but I still don’t have very good control of that… part of myself. I might hurt you, or do worse, in that form.”
Benjamin nodded in understanding despite the dazed look still present in his eyes. Katherine was quietly shocked that he was believing her so readily. She hadn’t even believed it when the pack had told her that she was a werewolf. She supposed he had the benefit of seeing Bastian transform once before, but still. It nearly made her regret the fact that she hadn’t told her parents – or her dad, at least – what she’d become the moment she’d returned.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Katherine apologized, speaking her thoughts aloud. “I was afraid that if I told you I was a w-werewolf,” she stumbled slightly over the word, “that you’d lock me up in some asylum. I wouldn’t have blamed you either. I know it sounds crazy.”
Her father snorted. “I still have half a mind to procure us both a one way ticket to a nearby loony bin.”
Katherine ignored that remark. “So do you see why I have to leave Middletown?” she asked earnestly. “It isn’t safe for you or mom or Sam for me to be here. I… I don’t belong here anymore.”
“Katherine,” her father protested, “you’re my child. I don’t care if you do turn into a monster once a month – most woman do anyway.” His half-hearted attempt to lighten the somber mood didn’t work in the slightest. He sighed. “I can’t just let you go.”
“You have to, dad. And it goes without saying that you can’t tell anyone why,” she reminded him.
“We can’t come with you then?” he asked, the slightest hint of desperation present in his voice.
Technically, she supposed they could. But Katherine knew without a doubt that her mother and Sam, at least, would never be happy at Haven Falls. She couldn’t ask that of them. Their lives were here. Hers was not. “No, that’s not allowed. I’m sorry.”
She really was.
Her father looked incredibly defeated as he groaned, letting his head hang dejectedly from his neck. “Your mother’s going to kill me,”
“Does… does that mean I can go?” Katherine asked hesitantly.
Her father lifted his head and squarely met her eyes. “You’ll call every day?”
“Every chance I get,” she agreed. He didn’t seem to catch on to the fact that she didn’t actually promise she’d call every day. That, unfortunately, was an impossibility.
“And visit all the time.”
“Of course.”
Her father sighed. “Alright, yes, you… you have my permission to go.”
Surprised elation overwhelming her for a second, Katherine nearly knocked her father over as her arms eagerly wrapped themselves around him in a tight hug. “Thank you so much!”
“On one condition.”
Her elation shriveled up into a condensed lump of dread, which settled into her stomach like a rock. “What condition?” she asked, imagination running wild.
“I need to talk to Bastian. Alone.”
…That wasn’t so bad. “Okay, tomorrow I’ll-”
“No,” her father immediately disagreed, putting a hand up in the air to cut her off. “Now. I know he’s upstairs. I’m not as entirely oblivious as I seem.”
Katherine’s heart dropped into her stomach alongside the lump.
“Okay,” she hesitantly agreed, seeing no point in trying to deny it. “Wait here.”
“Don’t forget your food,” her father gently reminded her, grabbing the bowl of lukewarm stew from the microwave and handing it to her. Fishing a spoon from a drawer, he forked that over as well. “Make sure you eat this upstairs though. Like I said, I want to talk to Bastian alone.”
Katherine fought the urge to protest, merely nodding instead. She left the room and dashed up the stairs as quickly as she could without the stew’s broth spilling over the edges of her bowl. She jostled the knob with her elbow and used her hip to open the door to her room.
Bastian was sitting up in her bed, looking a bit put out that she’d left him there alone. “My dad knows you’re here,” she blurt out before he had the chance to say anything. “He wants to talk to you.”
A single raised eyebrow was the only evidence of the man’s surprise. He certainly didn’t look as panicked as she felt. “Okay,” Bastian agreed, sleep still sticking to his voice, but he got up and pulled on the shirt he’d abandoned in a heap on the floor before he’d fallen asleep.
Just “okay”? She felt a bit let down by the reaction, or lack thereof.
“He’s waiting for you in the kitchen,” Katherine forced out when he looked at her for direction.
He nodded, pressed a light kiss to her uninjured temple, and left the room, quietly closing the door behind him.
He didn’t return for nearly an hour. Katherine had gobbled up the stew in about five minutes and had spent the remainder of that hour staring at her bedroom door, waiting for Bastian to come back through it.
When he finally did, his shoulders were stiff and he was wearing a displeased frown. After shutting the door behind himself, he turned to face her. Brilliant blue eyes met searching emerald orbs. “You told him,” he accused.
Despite having expected that reaction, Katherine winced. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she half-heartedly defended herself. “I couldn’t just leav
e without telling my parents something.”
“So you had to tell them the truth?” he demanded, stalking towards her. “That you – that we – are werewolves? Do you have any idea how incredibly dangerous that was?”
“He’d already seen you transform back in October,” Katherine argued. “I… I just confirmed our existence for him.”
Bastian scowled at her. “He never believed what he saw was real until you told him otherwise,” he disagreed.
Katherine knew he was right and picked nervously at a loose thread on one of her shirt sleeves. “I’m sorry,” she apologized quietly.
Katherine watched as the anger nearly immediately deflated from Bastian’s face. She suspected he might have been harder on her if her own face didn’t look quite so much like it’d been used as a punching bag at a professional boxer’s home gym.
“Come here,” he murmured softly, easily pulling her into a hug. “It’s okay. I believed him when he told me he wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Katherine buried her face into the welcoming softness of his shirt. “Thank you,” she said just as softly. After a moment, she pulled away just enough so that Bastian’s hands could remain wrapped around her waist. “What else did you two talk about?” she asked.
Bastian’s mouth inched up into a smirk as he stared down at her. “He just wanted to make sure I’d take proper care of you. And to remind me that if I somehow failed, bullets work just as well on animals as people.”
Katherine gasped in horror. “He didn’t!”
“He did,” Bastian confirmed, but didn’t seem upset in the least.
“I’m so sorry!”
“It’s okay,” he assured her, “because he also gave me his blessing.”
Katherine stiffened. “What?” she deadpanned.
Bastian was sporting a full-fledged grin by then. “To claim you as my mate. Or marry you, as I explained it to him. But only with your consent and in your own time, of course.”
Katherine knew her face had turned redder than the fire hydrant on the neighbor’s front lawn and once again hid her face in his shirt. “I can’t believe you!” she hissed.
Shy (Once Bitten, Twice Shy, #2) Page 19