Page 9 of Brutal Alpha

“Shit, I’ll move—”

“Don’t!” My arm shot out to stop him from rising, and he sank back slowly onto the log. I kept my head determinedly forward, refusing to turn my head the ninety degrees that would be required to see him out of my good eye.

“Alright, talk me through it,” Ethan said softly. “What do you see?”

Wow. Okay. He was taking me seriously.

“I can see—not you, not fully, but like… your shadow?” I tried to explain. How did you tell someone you could see their shadow just floating in space, not seemingly attached to anything? Ethan clearly didn’t quite understand either, because he prompted,

“Describe it to me.”

“I don’t know, it’s your shadow!” I said. “It’s you, but all flat and black. It’s stretching out behind you and like to the left? It’s long.”

For a while, Ethan said nothing. Then his shadow moved.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked. There was a note of teasing in his voice, but I could clearly see the dark shape of his hand out of my blind eye.

“Dickhead. Three.”

The shadow shifted.

“And now?”

“Two.”

He didn’t move.

“And now?”

“Still two! Stop trying to trick me.”

The hand went down, and Ethan let out a long breath.

“Well, shit,” he said. “Have you ever—has this happened before?”

I shook my head.

“Never.”

There were so many thoughts racing through my head that I couldn’t catch one, couldn’t make sense of the absolute insanity that this night had become.

“What were you doing just now?” Ethan asked, breaking the wild spiral of my thoughts. “Before you saw me?”

Right. Start from the beginning. That was a good idea.

“I was just—I was looking at the fire and the shadows the flames made, and I thought… what if I could move them?” I told him. When I turned to face him properly for the first time, he was looking at me intently, and I continued, “I wanted to make them dance—the shadows. I was thinking of this song, and I was imagining the shadows dancing to the tune.”

I’d thought he would laugh at the childishness of it all, but he only continued to stare at me, utterly concentrated.

“And how did that go?” he asked.

“I made them dance.”

“You made them dance?” he parroted.

“Yeah.”

There was silence again. His strong brows furrowed together, his mouth twisted, and my heart sank.

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