Rebel Reborn

Chapter Four: A Present to Unwrap

Rebel

“Help me get out of this hideous wedding dress,” I said.

Tamara scrambled to obey, her fingers finding the tiny hooks at the back of my neck with practiced efficiency. I heard the zip travel down my spine and felt the bodice loosen, and I peeled it away from my body with considerable relief.

Underneath, the original Lily had gone to considerable trouble.

A white bustier, boned and structured, pushed everything up and together with architectural precision. White lace panties. White garter belts holding up white silk stockings. It was the full ensemble of a young woman who had planned, with great care and some optimism, to be a very sexy present for someone to unwrap on their wedding night.

Adrian had really missed out.

Tamara helped me to my feet so she could work the dress over my hips, and I balanced with my hands on her shoulders while she gathered the silk and tugged. I stepped free of it and kicked the whole confection aside.

That was when I realized we had never shut the door.

Tristan stood silhouetted in the doorway.

He wasn’t moving. He seemed, in fact, to be physically incapable of movement. He was a tall statue of a man with his hand still raised toward the door frame, caught mid-step, his eyes caught and captured by Lily’s provocative undergarments.

I did not rush to cover myself. I stood in the white lace and the garter belts and let him look. I watched him look, and I filed away everything I saw in his face in the three seconds before he caught himself and turned abruptly away. His shoulders were rigid. The back of his neck had gone red.

There was no hostility in what I’d seen.

There was nothing brotherly about it either.

Interesting.

Tamara was already moving, producing a silk robe from the wardrobe and holding it open. I slid my arms in and cinched the waist loosely — not tightly, just enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of decency.

“You can turn around now,” I said. “I’m covered.”

Tristan turned. He had reassembled his expression into something carefully neutral, but the color hadn’t entirely left his neck. His jaw was set and tense. He was clearly exercising significant self-control.

Tristan stepped back into the room and approached the bed, looking down at me with his hands at his sides.

I gazed back at him without any of Lily’s old hostility. Just curiosity. Just assessment.

He held out a small jar. Dark glass, no label. “I brought a salve,” he said, his voice coming out slightly lower than usual. “For your neck.”

I reached for it and then stopped. Held his gaze instead.

“Apply it for me,” I said. “Brother.”

The word landed with deliberate weight. I watched it move through him — the flicker behind his eyes, the almost imperceptible tension in his throat. He unscrewed the jar without answering, scooped out a measure of the pale cream with two fingers, and sat on the edge of the bed beside me. His weight made the mattress dip, and the sides of our thighs pressed together.

His first touch made me hiss. The salve was cool and the bruising was deep, the skin raw and burned from the friction of the rope. The relief and the pain arrived simultaneously. But there was something else in it too — his fingers were careful, gentler than I expected from a man as young as he was. They moved slowly across the contusions and abraded skin with an attention that had nothing to do with the task and everything to do with the fact that he was touching her. Touching Lily.

Something that had never been permitted before.

I watched his face while he worked.

The neutral mask was holding, but only just. His eyes were focused on my neck with an intensity that wasn’t entirely clinical. There was a line between his brows that spoke of concentration, or of something he was trying very hard not to feel.

How long, I wondered, had this been sitting underneath everything?

I searched the host’s memories for anything that would answer that question and found nothing but coldness — Lily’s habitual disdain, her dismissals, the years of following Lily’s mother and Stephen and treating Tristan as furniture. She had never looked at him long enough to see what I was seeing now.

Ah, Lily. I thought, not for the first time. You really had no eyes at all.

His warm fingers lingered. A beat too long, then two. I felt the exact moment he became aware of it because his hand stilled against my skin and his breathing changed.

I moved faster than he expected. My fingers closed around his wrist before he could pull away.

“Thank you,” I said softly. “Brother.”

I felt his pulse jump under my fingertips.

He looked down at my hand on his wrist and then up at my face, and something moved through his expression that he couldn’t suppress — heat, and confusion, and underneath both of those things a raw wanting that had clearly been caged for a very long time.

Then he pulled his hand away. Not roughly. Just with finality.

“Why are you talking like that?” His voice had gone flat. “Don’t be weird.”

He turned and left the room without waiting for a response.

I listened to his footsteps retreat down the hall and then sat with the jar of salve in my hands and the ghost of his touch still warm against my bruised skin.

Tamara was watching me with her eyes very wide and her lips pressed together.

“Miss Lily,” she said carefully. “Are you okay? You are really acting… different.”

I set the jar on the bedside table.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I suppose I am.”

I didn’t explain. There was no explanation that would have made sense to her yet — not the transmigration, not the quantum accident of two souls vacating their bodies at the same instant. I didn’t fully understand it myself.

What I understood was this: I was alive, in whatever way this counted as living. I was in a body that was not mine, in a family that was a stranger’s, with a bruised neck and a head full of someone else’s fractured memories. An unfamiliar wolf spirit coiled in the corner of my consciousness like a wounded animal, watching me with suspicious yellow eyes.

And Tristan Bradford, the bastard son of an indifferent Alpha, had hands like a musician and eyes full of a wanting he’d never once allowed himself to show the girl who wore this face before me.

I would need to think carefully about what to do with that.