CHAPTER 19: WHAT HAS TURNED
991 Words
Aurora’s POV
My mother was at the door before the car had even stopped.
She must have been watching from the window. She came down the steps fast, and when she saw the state Lucas was in, the blood across his face and soaked into his shirt … her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, my god.” She looked between us, eyes wide. “What happened? Are you hurt? Either of you?”
“Don’t worry.” Lucas held up a hand, easy as anything, that grin already back in place. “None of it’s mine.”
“Lucas…”
“We were attacked on the way back,” he said. “Some goons. Followed us to the falls.” He wiped his wrist across his jaw, smearing the blood instead of clearing it. “I took care of it.”
Vincent had come out behind my mother. He was very still, the way he got when something serious was happening, and his voice when it came was flat and hard.
“Where.”
“You’ll find them by the waterfall.” Lucas met his father’s eyes. “All five of them. Alive. Mostly.”
Vincent’s jaw tightened. He pulled his phone out and turned away, already giving orders to someone, and I caught the words patrol and now and contained them before he moved out of range.
That was when Logan came out.
He took one look at the blood on his brother, then at me, then back at Lucas, and his whole body went rigid.
“Why didn’t you take her straight home?” It came out low. A snarl. “You had her out at the falls. Alone. With no one watching the perimeter.”
“Because she needed a space to breathe, Logan.” Lucas didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “Something you’d know about if you ever let her have one.”
“She isn’t safe out there.” Logan stepped down toward us, his eyes gone hard. “She doesn’t go anywhere. She stays at the house. All the time. Where we can watch her?”
Something in me snapped. “You don’t get to decide that.”
I stepped between them before I’d thought about it. Both of them turned to look at me, and I held Logan’s stare, my heart going, my wolf rising in my chest.
“Lucas took care of me.” My voice came out steady. “He protected me. He put five wolves on the ground without breaking a sweat to keep me safe, and you’re standing here yelling at him for it. You should be thanking him.”
Logan’s jaw worked. He said nothing.
“Your brother is right, Aurora,” my mother said gently.
“He’s not my brother.”
“She’s not my sister.”
Logan and I said it at the same time.
My mother’s eyes moved between the two of us. Lucas’s grin faltered, just slightly, something flickering behind it that I didn’t have time to read.
My mother pulled in a long breath.
“Look,” she said quietly. “Things have taken a turn for the worse. We need to be more careful now. All of us. This isn’t a game anymore.”
“What’s turned for the worse?”
It was Lucas who asked.
He said it lightly, still wiping blood off his hands, when I looked at him, I felt my stomach drop.
Because Lucas didn’t know.
He had no idea I was a Silver Wolf. He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know I was a danger to everything he loved.
And the thought hit me before I could stop it, cold and sharp.
If he found out … would he hate me too?
Logan already looked at me like I was a problem he couldn’t solve. If Lucas knew the truth, if he understood that I was the reason men were coming for Shadowpine, would that easy warmth of his finally go cold? Would I lose the one person here who made me feel like a girl instead of a weapon?
I didn’t want to find out.
“What’s turned for the worse?” Lucas said again, not lightly this time. He was looking at all of us now, his eyes moving from his father to my mother to me, and the grin was gone. “Somebody answer me.”
“Enough.” My mother’s voice cut across the yard, firm in a way I rarely heard from her. “Not here. Not like this, with everyone covered in blood and tempers running high.”
She looked at Lucas, then at Logan.
“Both of you, get cleaned up. You’re a mess.” Then she turned to me, and something in her face shifted, went softer and more frightened at the same time. “Aurora. Once you’ve washed up, come to the study. You and I need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Just come to the study.” She reached out and touched my arm, brief and cold-fingered. “Please.”
She turned and went back into the house before I could ask anything else.
I stood there in the dark with the two brothers on either side of me, both of them watching me now, both of them wanting something I didn’t know how to give.
Lucas with his blood-streaked face and his questions. Logan, with his cold eyes and the thing underneath them, never let anyone see.
“Go on,” I said to neither of them in particular, and walked past both of them into the house.
I climbed the stairs to wash off a night I hadn’t asked for, in a body I was still learning, on my way to a conversation my mother was clearly dreading.
Whatever she had to tell me, I already knew it wasn’t going to be good.
It never was.
- Writer
