CHAPTER 9: APPETITE
1482 Words
Aurora’s POV
When I finally made it downstairs, the dining room looked like someone was trying to apologize to me with food.
The long table was set with everything I liked. There was a basket of warm bread in the middle, butter softening on a little plate beside it.
Two kinds of soup, one creamy and one tomato. A platter of roasted chicken that still had steam curling off the skin. Eggs done three different ways.
Fresh fruit cut into careful pieces. A small jar of honey. Even a pot of the tea my mother used to make me back home, the one with the cinnamon.
I stood in the doorway for a moment and just stared at all of it.
Lucas looked up from where he was sitting at the table, and his whole face brightened the second he saw me.
“Oh thank god, you are alive.” He pushed his chair back. “I was about to start eating without you, and then I would have had to feel guilty about it, and honestly I do not have the bandwidth.”
I tried not to smile. I failed.
“What is all of this, Lucas.”
“I had no idea what you were going to want, so I asked them for everything. And by everything, I mean everything. There is honey. I do not even know why there is honey. Do you eat honey?”
“Sometimes.”
“Great. Now I am a hero. Sit.”
I sat down in the chair beside him before I could second-guess any of it. He was not wrong, anyway. I was starving.
“Lucas. I can serve my own food.”
He had already torn off a piece of bread and was buttering it like it had personally insulted him.
“Hush. You passed out in my arms yesterday. I am traumatized. Let me do this.”
“You are not traumatized.”
“I am extremely traumatized. I had to carry you up the stairs and everything. Do you know how heavy a girl is when she is unconscious? It is a whole different thing.”
“Are you calling me heavy?”
He looked up, scandalized. “Did I say that? Did those words come out of my mouth? Because I do not remember saying that.”
“You implied it.”
“Slander. I would never. You are a delicate flower.” He set the bread on my plate. “A delicate flower who made me question my workout routine.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
He grinned at me like the sound was a prize he had been working toward.
My mother came in then, carrying another tray. She set down a small pitcher of orange juice, hesitated, and then put one hand lightly on the back of my chair as she passed.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Better.”
She nodded, the careful nod, the one that said I am trying not to push you. Then she left again to bring more from the kitchen.
I watched her go.
It was strange. The Pierce house was huge, big enough to need a whole staff just to keep it running, and yet I rarely saw in any of them. For an Alpha family this powerful,
I had expected the place to be full of people. Maids in every hallway. Beta wolves coming and going on pack business. It was not. It was almost empty most of the time, like Vincent preferred a quieter house than other Alphas would.
Even the maid I liked best, the chatterbox who always made my bed too tight, was nowhere to be seen this morning.
I made a mental note to ask about her later.
I picked up my spoon and started on the soup. It was good. It was very good. The first proper meal I had eaten in two days, and my body responded immediately.
“You know,” Lucas said, watching me eat with too much pleasure on his face, “if you had told me yesterday that the way to make you smile was a bowl of soup, I could have saved myself a lot of effort.”
“What effort.”
“Flirting. Just a soup, Aurora. That is all it took. I am offended.”
“You almost got punched by your brother because you cornered me against a wall.”
“And it was worth every second.”
He said it so easily. So lightly. But his eyes flicked up to mine and stayed there for a second too long, and I had to look down at my soup before my face gave me away completely.
He reached over and brushed his thumb against the corner of my mouth.
“Soup,” he said quietly.
That was it. One word. And my stomach did a small foolish thing that I was going to pretend later had never happened.
I was about to say something, something to put us back on safe ground, when my wolf shot upright inside my chest.
She had been out cold all morning. Curled up. Dead to the world. But now she was on her feet, ears up, listening.
I turned toward the door, coughing immediately.
The bread went down the wrong way and I had to grab the napkin and press it against my mouth, because Logan was walking in without a shirt, and beads of sweat that called out to me.
He had just come from a run so his hair was damp, there was sweat on his chest, and his sweatpants sat low enough that I lost a piece of my soul.
His abs went down into a V I was not supposed to be looking at but I was, I was looking, my eyes had a whole separate agenda from the rest of me.
And then my eyes went to the beautiful black lines running down his ribs and curling up over his shoulder like they had grown into him. It was the tattoo of wings. Almost like the freedom sign of my favourite anime attack on titans.
My wolf made a sound I had never heard her make in my life.
Lucas’s spoon clinked against his bowl.
“Bro. Can you stop walking around without a shirt?”
If not for the goddess my wolf would have ripped out his throat for asking Lucas to do such a sinful thing. To stop blessing us with his abs.
Logan didn’t answer him. He was still looking at me. His jaw was working like he was holding something down, and the corner of his mouth moved like he was about to smile but he stopped himself.
I swallowed. It was like he made a promise with his eyes.
“Aurora.” He called my name. Causing the butterflies that were in my stomach earlier to fall and die from heart attack.
“Logan.” Lucas’s voice was different now. Sharper around the edges. “Shirt. Please.”
“In a minute.”
“Now would be great.”
“You sound a little stressed there, brother.”
“I am not stressed.”
“You sure? You look stressed.”
“I am eating breakfast with our sister.”
Logan tilted his head. “She is not our sister.”
The whole room went quiet.
He said it lightly. Like he was bored. Like it was nothing. But the air in the dining room had changed and we all felt it. Lucas’s hand stopped moving on the bread. My mom, who had just walked back in with another tray, stopped in the doorway.
Logan didn’t even look at any of us. He was already walking past me toward the coffee like he hadn’t just said the most dangerous sentence anyone had said in this house since I got here.
He poured himself a cup. He turned around. He leaned back against the side table with his ankles crossed, lifted the coffee to his mouth, and watched me over the rim.
I forgot how to use a spoon.
“Eat, Aurora.”
It was so quiet I almost missed it. He said it like a private thing. Like Lucas was not even in the room.
“You’re going to need it.”
Then he took his coffee and walked out, and the air came back into the room only after he was gone, and Lucas was staring at me, and I could not look up from my plate because my face was on fire and my wolf was purring and the bread had turned to dust in my mouth.
Lucas set his spoon down very carefully.
“Aurora.”
“Don’t.”
“Aurora.”
“Lucas, please don’t.”
He didn’t say anything else.
But he didn’t go back to eating either.
- Writer
