Page 5 of Nora's Kraken

Apparently done insulting me for the day, he stands and gestures toward the door. An unmistakable ‘get the hell out of here’.

I stand as well. “You’ll let me know as soon as you’ve spoken to her?”

At that, the rest of the authority and hard resolve on his face melts into understanding and a deep sense of loyalty, of friendship.

“I will. And because I haven’t told you yet, congratulations. I know this isn’t the way you would have preferred things to happen, but I speak for myself and the rest of the monsters who count you as family when I wish you nothing but good fortune with this blessing.”

Family. Gods above, the creatures I’ve kept company with these last three hundred years will have a field day with this. One in particular who I know will be frothing at the fangs to learn I’ve finally been captured in a female’s net.

I grit my teeth. “Have you told Casimir?”

Blair lets out a low chuckle, the sound of it tinged with smoke and char, and gestures again toward the door. “No. Though I imagine he’ll be just as thrilled for you as I am. Now, if you don’t mind.”

Dismissed, I give him a curt parting nod. Leaving the Bureau a couple minutes later, I breathe the mid-afternoon air deep.

There. Just there. The faintest hint of her on the breeze. It’s barely discernible, maybe not even enough to track, but I close my eyes and cling to every tiny piece of her I can.

Lenora smells unexpectedly like the sea.

Crisp and clean, the slight saltiness is mixed with something else, something floral and earthy that makes me think of remote isles and densely packed forests. It’s underpinned with a note of sour fear, and I frown, wishing like anything that it wasn’t.

Lingering on her scent was a mistake.

All of that essence makes me want to break into a run, to follow the strands until I find her, speak to her, make her understand.

How would she react to that? Poorly, I imagine, but there was a moment between us in the lobby… It was over before it really began, but when our eyes met, I could see it for a bare second. Warmth, curiosity, the widening of her eyes and the parting of her lips as she studied my face. So small, so fleeting, but… there.

It’s enough. It has to be enough.

For now.

With colossal effort, I turn away, push down the instinct that’s still howling in me, and silently vow to let my treasure come to me in her own time.

3

Nora

After the disaster at the Bureau, I do a pretty admirable job of keeping it together during my Saturday, Sunday, and Monday shifts at Tandbroz.

It’s hard not to be jumpy, hard not to expect that every time I round a corner downtown or every time the shop door opens when I’m workinghe’llbe there, but three days of hectic back-to-back shifts and some time and distance from everything calm me down a little.

It’s in the quiet moments, when I’m on the bus headed home, or alone in my apartment winding down for the evening, that the force of everything that happened on Friday hits me all over again.

Some kraken out there thinks I’m his mate.

It’s absurd. Truly. What on Earth are the odds? He just happened to pick me out in all of Seattle, a metro of over three million people? It was only a coincidence he saw me at Second Cup?

He had the Bureau track me down, and I’m just supposed to be cool with it?

I try to hold on to all those reasons for acting the way I did, to justify the fact that I ran instead of hearing him out, that I protected myself over staying and finding out what he wanted to tell me.

Still, the more time that passes, the more the doubts creep in, and it’s hard to stop myself from playing and replaying that scene at the Bureau.

I can’t get Elias’s face out of my mind.

Those blue, blue eyes, the scar on his cheek, the messy tousle of black hair, the way he looked at me when he first saw me…

I have to stop myself every time the thoughts go further than that—every time they veer toward doubt and regret and the inkling that maybe I jumped to conclusions before I should have.

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