by Tami Lund
Finn smirked. “You’ll be the first to know,” he assured her.
Blue light glowed in the windows of her parents’ house, meaning they had not yet retired for the evening. Considering dusk approached by six p.m. at this time of year, it was hard on the Lightbearers, who were naturally inclined to sleep during the darkened hours.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Cecilia predicted as she twisted the doorknob and stepped inside.
Her mother was up off the sofa and pulling her into her arms before Cecilia could even take off her coat. “Cecilia,” she murmured as she pushed her to arms’ length. “Thank the lights. I was growing worried.”
“Why?” Cecilia asked as she finally managed to pull off her coat.
But Lacey’s gaze was on Finn, who’d stepped into the house behind her daughter. They were wide with fright and…undiluted hatred. He met her hostile gaze with an emotionless mask.
“You dare to bring Olivia’s pet shifter into my house?” Lacey said angrily, without taking her gaze off him.
Cecilia sighed. “He isn’t a pet shifter, Mother. And this isn’t Tanner. It’s pretty bad that you don’t even pay attention to what your niece’s mate looks like. This is Finn. You met him at Aunt Genevieve’s last party.”
“Do not refer to that man as Olivia’s mate in my presence. You know how I feel about it.”
“Yes, Mother,” Cecilia said with an exaggerated eye roll. “I’m aware of how you feel. Now excuse us. We just stopped by to let you know I’m fine and to pick up a few things.”
“Why?”
“Why am I fine?”
“It’s obvious that you’re fine,” Lacey said stiffly. “Why are you collecting your things?”
“Uncle Sander believes it would be best if I stayed”—she glanced at Finn—“someplace else for a little while.”
“Why?”
Finn thought her mother sounded like a three-year-old.
“There have been some…” Cecilia petered off, clearly unsure of how to explain to her mother that someone was trying to kill her. Finn decided to help her out.
“The king has reason to suspect Cecilia’s and his daughter’s lives are in danger. Until we have determined the threat has been eliminated, Cecilia is going to be under my protection.” His tone left no room for argument.
Which didn’t stop her mother. Cecilia wasn’t particularly proud of her heritage, but it was obvious to Finn that she inherited at least one trait from her mother. Curious how her tendency to argue with him at every turn was more endearing than annoying anymore.
That wasn’t the case with her mother’s tendency to argue, though.
“A shifter? Protecting her from what?” Mrs. Druthers demanded.
“We aren’t sure yet.”
“You think she’s in danger from her own kind,” Mrs. Druthers guessed.
Finn didn’t reply.
“How dare you? How dare you assume a fellow Lightbearer would ever, ever consider hurting my daughter? What right do you have to make such assumptions about us? She should be here, in her own home, with us. Lightbearers. Her own kind.”
“Mother…”
Mrs. Druthers sputtered and argued some more, her unveiled insults causing Finn to clench his fists and gnash his teeth in an effort to keep from lashing out at the idiotic, bullheaded, narrow-minded Lightbearer. Cecilia inched closer to him and placed her hand on his forearm. Magic flared, causing her hand and his arm to glow for a moment.
Her mother stared at the spot, mouth open, rendered momentarily speechless. Cecilia’s father, who had been sitting in a chair in the living room, probably pretending not to listen to the exchange, leaped from his chair and rushed to the small entryway. He kept his gaze trained on Cecilia’s hand, still clutching Finn’s arm, while he pulled his mate to him, putting distance between her and Finn and Cecilia.
“Get out,” he said, his tone low, his voice wavering slightly.
“I just need—” He cut off Cecilia’s protest.
“Get out. Now. Leave this cottage. Shifter lover,” he snarled.
Shifter lover. The man meant it as an insult, but Finn found it sardonically amusing. If only. Still, he knew the perceived insult injured Cecilia’s feelings, especially coming from her own parents. It was time to get her out of this situation.
“Let’s go,” he said shortly, and he let his menacing gaze sweep over each parent in turn before he guided Cecilia out the door and down the path, away from this aspect of her life. If he could, he would keep her away from that house, and that family, forever.
If he could.
* * * *
Lacey watched through the living room window as they walked away. Her mate stepped up to her side. She started to shrink away from him, but he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, holding her in place.
“You shouldn’t have deliberately provoked him like that,” she said. “We all know what shifters are capable of. It’s rumored that one even killed his own leader. Now he has our daughter.” Her voice hitched and she tried to blink away the tears, but they filled her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks.
“She is dead to us now.”
“No!”
“She has aligned herself with the shifters. You saw the sign, just as I did. She has given her magic to the enemy.”
“Gerard, please…”
“We tried, Lacey. So did Samuel. Even the Chosen One tried. She is lost to us.”
“Let me talk to her, try to reason with her. Please.”
Gerard shook his head.
“I cannot lose my daughter. She’s all I have left.”
“Cecilia has turned her back on her own kind. So has your brother, our king. They made their choices. Now, it’s up to the Chosen One to decide what will happen next.” He abruptly dropped his arm and walked away.
Lacey stayed there, standing at the window, as all traces of sunlight disappeared from the sky. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, and she couldn’t help but wonder, Were their choices so wrong?
Chapter 15
As soon as they stepped foot into his cottage, Finn immediately turned to Cecilia, craving that physical connection that he was now more than ever certain he would never tire of. He expected her to want the same thing, but she pushed him away and walked listlessly into the living room and ended up staring out the window at the falling snow outside.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, half-afraid she’d already grown bored with him. How could she? She was just as enthusiastic as he was—possibly more so, if that were truly possible. She couldn’t switch it off that quickly … could she?
“Tell me about your family, Finn,” she said, instead of telling him what he dreaded: that she had no interest in sleeping with him again.
“My family? Why?”
“I want to hear it. How did you feel after your visit? Do you miss your brother?”
“What’s this about, Cecilia?”
“Just tell me.”
“I’m not good with the personal talk,” he confessed. His family was his and his alone. He’d never shared many details with anyone before.
But then she looked up at him with eyes that were glassy from unshed tears, and he would have told her anything at all, including what she wanted to know about his family.
So he did, after he wrapped his arms around her and guided her to the couch. He was about to get up to start a fire, when she amused him by tossing a magical ball of light at the hearth, and instantly a merrily roaring fire was burning.
“That magic comes in handy,” he teased, and then he finally opened up and told her, about how good it felt to finally meet his nephews, how nice it was to hang out with his sister again, to get to know her mate.
“Ben’s good for her. And he practically worships the ground she walks on, which is good because Felicia can sometimes be a little high maintenance.”
“What about your brother?” she asked when he paused.
“Reid? What about him?”
“What�
�s he like? Is he like you?”
Finn considered his words before speaking. “In some ways, sure. But Reid’s always been less beholden to the idea of pack life. I think, if he wants to stay hidden, he’ll be able to. Quentin fucked with all of our minds, but he really fucked with Reid, and I’m sure he never really dealt with it.”
“What happened?”
He told her the story, as much as he knew anyway. How Reid had gotten caught having sex with a woman whom Quentin had claimed as one of his many lovers. He still had the scars from when Quentin had whipped him with a leather belt, until his back was a bloody mess of strips of skin. Emotionally, Reid was a mess, lashing out at the least provocation and generally cutting himself off from everyone else.
“Do you think he’ll ever go back?” she asked as she snuggled into his lap and stroked his neck with her fingers. He could feel the magic seeping from her hand into his skin. Something he normally associated with lust actually felt … relaxing.
“There isn’t a pack to go back to. Remember, Tanner disbanded the old one, sent everyone to new packs, except those who ran off on their own before he showed up and took charge of the situation after I—after Quentin’s death.” He hated talking about the fact that his pack master died at his hand, even though the bastard deserved it.
“You did what you had to,” Cecilia murmured, almost as if she could read his thoughts.
“I know,” he said quietly. “But it still eats at you. He wasn’t my first kill, it was just that he was my pack master, and we’re hardwired to be loyal, no matter how screwed up our leader might be.”
Cecilia shivered and snuggled closer. “Your world is so foreign to me.”
He stroked her hair. “Not anymore, I’m afraid, sweetheart. Even Lightbearers have the capacity to kill.”
They eventually made their way to the bedroom and made such sweet, gentle love that Finn was tempted to flip her onto her stomach and take her in the way of the shifters, in the oldest claiming known to the magical community. He wanted to, so badly that his hand clenched her waist for a moment, hard enough that he left an imprint in her skin. But then he blew out the breath he’d been holding and wrapped his arms around her and held her as they came together again and again, her legs wrapped tightly around his hips, his head buried in the crook of her neck, until she cried out and arched against him as her orgasm swamped her and sent him over the edge.
He knew, in that moment, that he would protect her with his life. Even from her own family.
* * * *
“Tell me about her parents,” Finn demanded. It was the morning following the visit with Cecilia’s mother, and he stood in the king’s library, accompanied by both the king and Tanner. The world outside the windows was a blanket of white, the sun shining brightly, making it look as if a thousand diamonds were scattered across the snow. Cecilia was upstairs with her aunt and cousin, discussing possible color schemes for the nursery that would be constructed soon for Olivia and Tanner’s first pup.
“My sister and her mate?” Sander asked, turning away from the window and giving Finn an inquiring look. “What do you want to know?”
“Why does she hate my kind so much?”
“Why do we all?” Sander replied. “Because before we went into hiding, your kind made it a practice to feast on the bones of my ancestors. The stories are there, written in our history books. Our younglings grow up learning to hate you. It will take a great deal of time to unlearn all of that history.”
“Why are you so accepting, but your sister isn’t?” Finn asked.
Sander’s gaze cut to Tanner, who sat behind the desk in the far corner, seemingly absently doodling on a pad of paper.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve been accepting, as much as I was forced to accept. My daughter fell in love with a shifter. If I hadn’t accepted him into my life, I would have lost my daughter. And my future grandbabes. I would never do that to my mate, nor would I, in truth, have any desire to never see my own child again.”
“It also helps that I managed to pull your kingdom back from the brink of bankruptcy in less than four months’ time,” Tanner drawled.
Sander frowned. “If that was the only reason I let you stay, I wouldn’t be a very good father, would I? And if that were the case, she would be mated to Dane right now, and Dane would be raising your pup, just like he is that other shifter’s pups.”
Tanner made a face. “I would never let that cupcake raise my child.”
“Why does your sister not feel the same way? Her mate kicked Cecilia to the curb, and she didn’t even protest. And that house, the evil was practically palpable there.” Finn turned toward the window, allowing the sun’s rays to cleanse his mind of the oily, slimy, uncomfortable feel of that place. Cecilia had inadvertently given him some of her magic, because otherwise standing in a ray of sunshine would have never done anything at all for him. Considering her stance on mating, he had to believe it was simply the act of sex that caused a Lightbearer to share her magic, not love, as Tanner claimed.
“Bit melodramatic, don’t you think, Finn?” Tanner asked with amusement in his voice. “Should I start calling you a cupcake as well?”
“Only if you want me to kick your ass,” Finn shot back. “And I’m not being melodramatic. You two should go down there and call on that household. Then you tell me I’m being overly melodramatic.”
“Lacey mated with Gerard Druthers forty summers ago,” Sander mused, his eyes focusing inward as he searched through his memories. “This was before Genevieve and I became mates, although I already had my eye on her at the time.” He smiled, like someone does when they see a sweet sentiment written on a card.
“What is Gerard Druthers like?”
Sander’s frown returned. “Very quiet, closed-off, exclusive, but in truth, that isn’t all that unusual among our kind. We are not normally as pack-like as you are. But he was even more so than usual, I guess. We didn’t see Lacey for nearly a year and a half after they mated. When we finally did, she was ripe with child, months from birthing her first babe. My nephew, Cedric.”
“Cecilia never mentioned a brother,” Finn said. Annoyance flared. Didn’t she trust him enough to mention her brother?
Sander’s frown deepened. “He died. It’s been well over ten years now. I recall learning of his death and trying to reach out to my sister and her mate, but they wanted nothing to do with me or my offers of help.”
“What about Cecilia?”
“To be honest, she and Cedric had never been close. She used to talk of how mean he was to her when she was a youngling. She claimed it was even his idea to lock her in the basement when she sneaked out of the coterie her first time, and told her parents she wanted to mate with a human. I assumed she was just being a fanciful child at the time. In truth, I barely knew Cedric. I probably hadn’t seen him in person in four or five years before his death.”
Finn relaxed. If what the king said was true, he could understand why Cecilia hadn’t ever mentioned her brother. “How did he die?”
Sander’s gaze darted from Tanner to Finn and then back to the scene outside the window. He cleared his throat. “There was very little proof, of course…”
“Shifters,” Tanner guessed, before Sander could go on.
“That was the conclusion, yes,” the king admitted glumly. “As I said, there was little proof, though. Some blood and mangled clothing, in the woods, just outside the wards. Although there hadn’t been an attack or even a sighting since we moved here, five hundred years ago, that was the natural conclusion. I didn’t want to panic my subjects, and Lacey and Gerard were extremely disinterested in talking about it at all, so I kept it quiet, swept it under the rug.” He sounded miserable, as if he’d done a great disservice all those years ago.
“You were doing what you thought was best,” Finn commented. If he had made the circumstances known, his and Tanner’s and the other shifters’ acceptance into the coterie would have been met with a great deal more resistance. Finn was personal
ly grateful for that, mostly because Cecilia was now sharing his bed and his life. He knew it was only temporary, he knew he would regret it when it was over, but for now, he was only grateful.
“What of the Druthers’ extended family? His parents? Siblings?” Finn asked, deciding it was time to shift the subject, to lessen the king’s guilt and pain for decisions he made that could no longer be changed. Finn well knew how that felt.
“I said they were an exclusive family, and I meant it. They only ever came around on the rare occasion I called a coterie-wide meeting. Never came to any of Gigi’s parties, even though she never failed to invite them. And after Cecilia was weaned, we never really saw her parents, either. They would drop her off for the weekend or weeks at a time, but they never stayed, and never invited Olivia to reciprocate.”
“No suspicious activity?” He’d heard of such things, in other packs, where the pack members weren’t afraid of their leader like those in his pack had been. Sander was not exactly an intimidating king. Was there a coup in process, perhaps, and Cecilia was their target, because she epitomized everything they hated—namely a full, open-armed acceptance of shifters? What would they do if they knew she was now sharing a bed with a shifter? He had no interest in finding out. Which meant they had to figure out who was behind the attacks, and soon, before there was another.
Sander frowned in concentration again. “Not necessarily suspicious, I would say,” he hedged. “But the cooks have made comments lately…”
“Comments?” Finn asked sharply. The cooks at the beach house? He’d become relatively friendly with the head chef, a shy, attractive blonde named Carley. She’d never remotely come across as anti-shifter.
“Carley is related to Cecilia’s father’s family, distantly. She complains occasionally about their narrow views. She’s always envied Cecilia her ability to slip in and out of the coterie, you know.”
No, Finn didn’t know that, but he wasn’t surprised. When he’d been in the kitchen, persuading her to give him leftovers so he wouldn’t have to cook for himself, Carley often spoke wistfully of leaving the coterie, but he hadn’t really thought much about it at the time.