“I didn’t.” She hoped her immediate answer would be enough to reassure him. Of the few times he’d made it into the news for negative press was from a woman who’d sold intimate photos of her and him together to the tabloids in an attempt to fashion that into a potential reality gig. After that, his public appearances with women in his company who weren’t related were few and far between. As if she didn’t feel bad enough, the guilt of feeling like she’d brought back all that trauma for him was sharp in her chest. “The reasons I picked you up had nothing to do with the job and everything to do with me, personally.”
“So then tell me why. I deserve to know.”
“You remember…” she sighed as she gathered her wits, doing her best to quell the butterflies in her stomach and not give in to the urge to floor the accelerator so this was over faster. “Back in high school....”
“This goes back to high school?”
“Eh, kind of. Your brother—”
“You were into my brother?” He exhaled a pouty growl, crossing his arms. “Of course you were. Every girl wanted Brendan. He was—”
The car jerked as she tapped the brakes in annoyance. “Not the subject of this conversation. May I continue?” He gestured for her to carry on and she stretched her neck, shifting in the seat to get more comfortable. “Your brother was dating my sister. We spent a lot of time together around that time, just because she dragged me with her so she could see him. Remember?”
“Right?” The way he drew the word out told her he had no idea where she was going with this, which, while disheartening, wasn’t unexpected.
“Reading comics, talking, drawing…”
“I remember.”
“Teenaged me had a massive, truly epic crush on teenage you.” It was a great deal heavier than a crush, but this was not the time or place for that. The undying heart eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl were nothing to scoff at.
“What? No. Me? Really? Why…?” His mouth worked as he attempted to cram in a few more questions, finally settling on, “Why didn’t you say anything? Do anything?”
“And what would you have said exactly? Done? My sisters were the amazing ones, and I was just the mousy little tagalong who barely had any feathers and couldn’t even fly.” The bile that rose in the back of her throat took a minute to settle back down before she could continue. This was the past, the distant past that she’d overcome a long damn time ago, or so she’d thought. Didn’t matter that she was a decorated veteran or could kill a man fifteen ways with a hair comb and a grudge, nope. Here she would always be the shadow, the departed, the discarded. This, right here, was why you could never go home again.
At this point she owed it to both of them to finish, just to have this last secret between them laid to rest. “I got with you for me. Because I wanted to. Because I could. The job afforded me the opportunity and I’m the terrible human being who took it. Was I paid for the job? Yes. Was I paid to sleep with you? No.” She couldn’t even look at him now, her whole body was burning from the inside out, the shame of her lack of professionalism was so heavy and real. She wouldn’t blame him for bolting the moment she stopped the car. Why would he possibly trust she could keep him safe when he couldn’t even trust her to control herself around him? “Being a hooker would be preferable to being an adult nursing a seventeen-year-old crush. On someone I’m paid to protect, for fuck’s sake. It’s unseemly.”
“Unseemly is not the word I’d use,” he muttered to the window glass as he shrank back into the passenger seat.
Mortification at critical mass, Cora thumbed the volume button for the radio on the steering wheel. “You’ll pardon me if I’m not interested in your semantic opinions right now.” When he reached for the radio knob to turn it down again, she smacked his hand, her eyes never leaving the road. “Leave it alone. We’re done talking. You wanted to know, now you do. That conversation is closed.”
Chapter Nine
FINN
As answers went, it was definitely not what he’d expected from Cora. In a million years, he would have never imagined her motivated by anything other than an acquisitive desire for whatever it was that got her up in the morning. Her deeply personal response to him was paradoxically exactly what he wanted to know and yet didn’t answer anything really. It definitely wasn’t the pound of flesh he’d anticipated.
The bitch of it was he had more questions. Why did she still want him after all this time? Did she regret it? Would she do it again? Please? Gods, he was terrible. He knew he shouldn’t want her still, and yet… fuck.
Honestly, it would have been easier to abandon his attraction to her if it had just been an act of mercenary drive or expediency. Instead it was the vulnerabilities of a frail, if incredibly dangerous, shifter woman who sometimes made mistakes too. The humanity of it was what drew him in. She wasn’t some bulletproof paragon of righteousness or justice or unflinching secret agent coolness. She was… sweet, in her own way. Loyal, brave, a transplant to a world he could scarcely understand. Maybe a little nuts. And mute, apparently, because the entire rest of the car ride back to the palace was solely filled with nineties music and nary a peep from the driver’s seat.
When she pulled the car into the spot where they’d left outside the drainage culvert, she pulled out her cell phone and fired off a few messages. The silence was so pressing it may as well have been an additional passenger.
“When we get to the library, you’ll go first and I’ll follow a few minutes later,” she murmured, still not looking at him.
“Won’t people see us?”
“Eh.” Cora rolled a shoulder as a show of indifference as she got out of the car and headed toward the secret entryway. “At worst, people will assume we had a torrid assignation among the volumes.”
Finn’s sudden bark of laughter filled the tunnel and a tightness he’d had in his chest suddenly loosened. “What, are we in a Brontë novel? Did I miss something?”
Her sly grin gave her away. “Well… I was shooting for Jane Austen, but we make do with what we have.”
“Fair.” The walk back up to the house was conducted at a good clip, but in deference to her heels. A longer stride was not kind to someone on stilts, and he would never begrudge her the sexy footwear he secretly loved on her. It was part of her charm.
Hand on the release for the secret passage back into the library, Finn turned to face Cora. The light of her cell phone flashlight diffused off the stone around them wreathing her in shadows. There were so many things he wanted to say, to ask, but the biggest one he needed in that moment was, “Are we good?”
His heart clenched for a moment as her whole body heaved with a sigh. “I dunno. Are we?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I appreciate you telling me the truth.”
Instead of acknowledging him, she gestured toward the door. “Go on, get. Before someone finds us here.”
Tempted as he was to argue with her, he did as she told him and was back in the library with no one any the wiser. It was a blue bloody miracle the whole palace wasn’t up in arms at his disappearing act. The fact Cora could affect such a flawless escape from the guards should have been point of concern, but mostly he was grateful that she was working on his side instead of for his enemies. She was not one he’d want to tangle with if he could help it.
Strolling around the room, he wandered over to the writing desk he used to use as a kid doing homework. Afternoons spent with Cora on one side of the desk and him on the other, working, telling stories, her drawing pictures to make him laugh. It was hard to reconcile the memory of the sweet smile and braids with the stone fox she was currently.
The main doors bursting open like someone had a federal warrant startled him out of his musings. “Aunt Gwen?”
“Finnegan, I have been looking everywhere for you!”
Gwendolyn Theodora Laurent, Dowager Duchess of Wolfingham (which included the Greater British Isles and Brittany, France, the ancestral homelands), was his father’s sister a
nd a major mother figure in Finn’s life after the passing of his mother. If his mom had been disdainful of his very existence, prone to doting on Brendan, and otherwise lacking social niceties unless in the presence of company and foreign dignitaries. She was the Wicked Witch of the West in a crepe-de-chine Givenchy suit, though he would never in his life have the balls to say that out loud.
“Is something wrong?” He cast a nervous glance over at the shelf in front of the secret passage and hoped like hell that Cora could hear through it.
“Well, of course there is.” She drew both the doors closed and leaned back against them like she intended to block his exit. “I stopped by your room and you weren’t there. I’m told you’ve been sneaking out, is that true? Is it the influence of that Corvid?”
He blinked. There was so much to unpack there, the mind fairly boggled. “I left a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up on my room, Auntie. I left it on the door for a reason.”
The older woman scoffed and casually strode to the writing desk he’d been admiring, taking a seat and looking like the most chic librarian in the history of ever as she crossed her legs. “That’s for the staff, darling. Certainly not family. Do I look like staff to you?”
The way she said the word made him think of her as a ‘staph’ infection. His lips twitched but he kept his commentary to himself. “Of course not,” he soothed. A lifetime of practice allowed him to slip into the role of placator-in-chief. It was always easier to deal with Aunt Gwen when she believed she was getting her way. The alternative was too loud and terrible to even consider. “I’m sorry that you’ve been looking for me. What can I do for you?”
“A little birdie told me you’ve been sneaking out without your retinue.” She shook her head, mouth drawn into a tight moue of disappointment. “Aren’t you a bit old for that?”
Of course Brendan sold him out. He was the favorite, after all. It was practically his duty. “It’s nowhere near as bad as you’ve heard.” What was intriguing, though, was the lack of information she was going on about. One would think she’d lead with the drive-by. It’s not like Brendan didn’t know unless that’s information he doesn’t want getting out. Curious...
“Your brother also tells me that you’ve been keeping company in secret with a woman well below your station. A Corvid.” That one word almost glistened in the air between them dripping with contempt. “Have you introduced this,” she paused like she had to think about it, “woman to your father yet?”
This time he smiled fondly, thinking back to the lunch the previous day, likely one of his father’s last good days. “I have actually. He found her lovely.”
“I… see.” That news was met with The Eyebrow™, the indication of an incoming lecture regarding social standing, comportment, and whatever other princely duties or functions she felt he was not fulfilling to her exacting specifications. He was already exhausted from it and she hadn’t even spoken yet. “I need you to understand, Finnegan—Finn,” she peered at him with a serious expression in her slightly faded blue eyes, “you are the Lupine prince. We have a rich history dating back millennia.”
“I’m aware, Auntie.”
“Then you should also know that Corvids, while they have a debatable place at court, have absolutely no place at all in the royal wing of the palace. They are not now, nor have they ever been, marriage material. As such…” she trailed off, looking at him expectantly like she wanted him to finish the thought. When he stood before her, stone silent, she rolled her eyes and shoved to her feet, a surprisingly inelegant gesture from the woman before she stomped over and took both his hands. “You know you can’t just keep company with an unmarried woman in the royal wing. It’s tawdry, undignified. Certainly not befitting a prince of the house Lupine. You may not be the crown prince,” he would have laughed at the smooth way she worked in the dig if he weren’t so disgusted, “but once Brendan has ascended to the throne you will be and there will be expectations.”
“Expectations,” he repeated, rage in his veins stripping him of vocabulary beyond parroting.
“Surely, you understand, Finnegan. I know you think she’s a fine girl, but she’s not for you. Think of the children. We cannot have the potential bloodline of the throne contaminated so. Your brother understood this, I’m sure, in time, you will as well.”
The sour taste in his mouth matched his disposition and while before he’d hoped Cora could hear into the room, it was long past the time when he truly hoped she could not. Dropping his aunt’s hands as casually as possible, he took a deep breath, counting to ten, then twenty in his head before opening his mouth to allow the words boiling within him to flow out.
“I understand,” he began, staring at her and making no bones about shifting both his eyes and his voice, “that you have a preference for the old ways.”
“Finn, you must—”
“Oh no,” he snarled, leaving her to close her mouth so quickly her teeth clicked, “you’re done speaking. You said what you wanted to say and now you will hear what I have to say.” He sat silently for a moment but for the seams of his suit shredding as he began his shift, challenging her to defy his order before continuing. “We have long passed the point where such antiquated rules are enforceable, nor are they even advisable. I’m not going to live like a relic because some old fossil,” he couldn’t even appreciate the way she flinched at his wording, he was beyond incensed, “has a problem with me seeing or marrying a Corvid. Cora is an incredible woman of character and principle, two things I’m not sure you’ve ever possessed honestly, and I will not—”
“I beg your pardon!”
“I’m not finished,” he roared, loud enough that the din outside in the hallway fell away to the kind of quiet associated with a sepulcher. “I will not have her subjected to your base and frankly terrible inclinations and behavior. We are done here. Remove yourself from my presence, Duchess. We will not speak again. On this, or any other topic.”
Pale now, his aunt reached for his hand, stopped short when he growled low in his chest. “Finn,” she entreated softly, submissive whine coloring her tone. “My prince, you don’t mean—”
“Leave me.” He gestured to the doors, silver fur shimmering over his skin as he did everything possible to maintain his human form before he ripped her throat out. “Now!”
The quiet click of the door let him exhale, his hands shaking in fists at his sides as he counted the boxes on the coffered ceiling. Rage, waves of nauseating intense heat, the scent of blood and his aunt’s terror in his nose, all of it welling up in him and leaving him helpless to fight it. His wolf burst forth, rending his suit to irreparable shreds of worsted wool.
When the door to the secret passage whispered open, he faced her not as the man she knew, but as the eight-foot-tall wolf he was. On his hind legs, in full silver fur, gold eyes, he watched her silently emerge into the room, head held high, jaw set and dark eyes diamond hard. He’d have believed she missed the terrible things his aunt had said if not for the brittle smile on her full lips as she passed him. Her hand slipped down his arm, a caress of his fur that swamped him with emotions.
He wanted… to hold her, to apologize, to forcibly call back every hateful word that woman had uttered in her direction and shield Cora from them. The feeling of helplessness felt worse than rage, and he knew there was no shifting back for him any time soon.
Cora’s scent lingered at the door, wafting past him when she opened it. “Finn.” He faced her, the glossy sheen of obsidian feathers visible on her skin, bright yellow eyes on full display. “Thank you.”
Finn dipped his head, not trusting his words and very much desirous of physical contact she clearly did not want. He swallowed hard as she slipped the door silently shut behind her. That would be the last damn time she would experience such a thing. He’d make damn sure of it.
* * *
CORA
That she found herself in front of the Guard house directly outside of the palace after leaving Finn’s company wasn’t a surpr
ise. She needed… familiar? ...structure? Something. Anything to clear the echoing words of him and his aunt’s argument over her.
When she first heard the voice, Cora had been wary just because of their clandestine mission, but the more she’d heard, the more she really wanted to pop the old lady in the mouth. And then Finn stepped in.
All eight furry, growling feet of him. In what was left of an Armani suit.
Never in her whole life had anyone stood up for her like that. Not even when she’d been married. He’d dressed down the duchess without a second thought, lifting Cora up with his words like it was nothing at all. Maybe he did it because he knew she was listening, but he still did it and she appreciated it.
Maybe a little too much.
It was easy to imagine more when Finn did things like that. That inherent kindness again making her soft on him when she truly should be all edges and fight as she defended him.
Walking into the Guard house was like any other Guard house in the realm, showing her approved-for-public ID card which showed her honorably discharged status to the two fresh-faced young men by the door.
The startled blinks and murmured, “Commander,” as they both pulled up straighter, was something that never got old, though there was no sport in impressing the youngsters. A fingerprint scan and a smile and she was in. There was no point in staying away from them since she was no longer entirely in hiding, plus she had business with Xander and Devon.
She found the two Day Watch Commanders back in Xander’s office, a room with one window occupied by a massive, and clearly well-tended, African violet and decorated in coordinating muted purple and cream hues to match. He was clearly an interesting dude.
They both got to their feet when she came into the room.
“Ma’am.” Xander cocked his head to the side as he watched her, eyes clearly taking in every single millimeter of her person as they flashed bronze for a moment before returning to their normal blue. He wasn’t welcoming but he wasn’t exactly foreboding either.
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