MATED TO MY TWIN STEPBROTHERS

CHAPTER 8: SHE LOOKED LIKE

Aurora’s POV

My head felt so heavy, I was not even sure it still belonged to me.

Where am I?

I opened my eyes slowly, but the room I had expected was not there. There was no ceiling. No walls. No light came from anywhere I could see.

There was only darkness in every direction, soft and endless, stretching out so far that I could not tell where I ended and the dark began.

I took a step forward.

I could not feel the ground under my feet, but my body moved anyway. I pressed one hand against my chest, just to make sure my heart was still beating, and the sound of it was the only thing in the whole world.

“Hello?” My voice echoed back to me from somewhere far away. “Is anyone there?”

Nothing answered.

I took another step, and another, and I was about to lose my mind completely when I saw something glowing faintly just ahead of me in the dark.

A wolf.

She was massive, even from this distance, white as fresh snow and almost glowing against the black, and the moment I saw her I knew her in my bones. She was mine. She had always been mine.

She was the part of me that had been locked away for nineteen years, the part of me my mother had buried under a daily handful of poison, and I knew her the way I knew my own face in a mirror.

She was lying down.

That was what made my chest hurt the most. She was not standing tall, the way I had pictured her every time I had dreamed about her.

She was lying on her side, her head resting on her paws, and even from far away, I could see how her ribs were rising and falling too fast.

She looked so weak that something in me physically ached.

I walked toward her slowly, not wanting to scare her, even though some part of me knew she could not be scared of me.

When I got close enough, I knelt beside her and reached out one shaking hand, and the moment my fingertips touched her fur, my whole body jolted.

My eyes snapped open.

I was staring at the ceiling.

My ceiling. The one in my bedroom at the Pierce house. I was lying in my own bed, under my own covers, and there was sunlight coming through the window in long golden bars across the floor.

I lay there for a long moment, just breathing.

So that was what it meant to meet your own wolf.

That was the very first time I had seen her, properly seen her, after twenty-one years of feeling her move around inside me like something I could not quite reach.

And the first thing I saw was that she was tired. That she had spent everything she had on something that morning, and now she had crawled into the back of my chest to sleep it off.

A tear slid out of the corner of my eye and ran down into my hair.

I wiped it away angrily.

I had been crying so much in the last few days, it was sickening. I turned my head to the side, and that was when I noticed him.

Lucas was sitting in the chair beside my bed.

His head was resting against the back of the chair, his eyes closed, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. He looked like he had been sitting there for a while.

How long had he been watching me sleep?

My face went bright pink before I could stop it. I pulled the blanket a little higher up my chest, even though I was fully dressed under it, and I tried to look anywhere except at him.

But the second I moved, his eyes opened.

He looked at me, and my heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was sure he could hear it from where he was sitting.

“Hey.” His voice was soft and a little hoarse from sleep. “Are you okay, Aurora?”

He leaned forward without waiting for an answer and pressed his cheek lightly against the side of my face. He was warm.

I could feel the rough scratch of his stubble against my skin, and I had to close my eyes for a second so I would not do something stupid like turn my head toward him.

“Yes,” I managed. “I am okay. I think.”

“You scared me.”

“What happened?”

“You passed out.” He pulled back just far enough to look at me properly, and his grey eyes were searching my face like he was checking it for damage. “I think it was the stress, honestly.”

I swallowed.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said softly, and then he reached out and took my hand. His thumb ran a slow circle over my knuckles, and he looked at me in that way he had, the way that made the rest of the room go a little blurry around him.

“Really. I’m glad.”

I did not know what to say to that.

“I told the maids to make you something to eat,” he went on, still holding my hand.

“Something easy on the stomach. Come down to the kitchen when you can, okay? Don’t make me come back up here and carry you again.”

“Lucas.”

“I’m only half joking.”

He squeezed my hand once, gave me a small, lopsided smile that was nothing like the cocky grin he wore in public, and then he stood up and walked out of my room.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I groaned and flopped back against my pillows.

What was I doing?

The moment I was alone, my mind went straight back to that earthquake.

Was that really me?.

I shook my head against the pillow.

No. Absolutely not. Silver Wolf or no Silver Wolf, there was no way I could possess that kind of power.

If I did, then every single one of my enemies in this town was already in a great deal of trouble, beginning with Bianca and her stupid little hair flip and her stupid little smile.

A laugh slipped out of me at the thought. The first real one in days.

Then my stomach growled so loudly that the sound echoed in the quiet room, and I had no choice but to sit up.

I needed to eat something before I started a war with anyone.