Page 71 of Cast in Shadow
“Watch it. Adult or no, we still use our manners around this table.”
“There’s no way you don’t know. Hell, even Dennis saw it, and he’s oblivious to that kind of stuff.”
I pushed my bowl away, leaned back, and folded my hands in my lap. “It doesn’t matter. What we were is in the past. All that matters right now is taking this witch down before all hell breaks loose.”
She offered me a sad smile. “Oh, Senna. You’ve got it bad for him, don’t you?”
Seriously, how could she see so much?
“Like I said, it’s in the past.”
“But it’s not. This is now, and there’s obviously something between you two.” Her expression turned teasing. “I mean, really, when was the last time someone made you feel the way he does? A decade? Half a century?”
I knew she was trying to be funny, but she had no idea howclose to home she was hitting with her questions. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back against the chair. “In a hundred and thirty years? No one has ever come close.”
Her responding silence had me swallowing hard. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, and now that the truth was out in the world, I felt dangerously exposed.
Wooden legs scraped against tile and the next thing I knew, she was behind me, wrapping me in a hug. “I’m sorry.”
I reached up and squeezed her arm. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed.”
Letting out a heavy sigh, I twisted my head to look at her. “Sometimes I need a good shove to straighten me out.” Her sweet smile was infectious. “Do you want to crash here with me again? We can have another movie night.”
Shay peeled away, shaking her head. “Nah. Two nights of hiding under your skirt is more than enough. It’s time for me to pull up my big girl panties and sleep in my own room.”
“You sure?”
She snagged the bowls off the table and walked them over to the sink. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
“The door’s always open if you change your mind,” I offered. Whether I was there or not, if she needed to use my suite as a safe space, it would always be there for her.
She smiled. “I know.”
26
Hours later, after multiple failed attempts to sleep, I found myself standing in front of Emerson’s cottage in the rain. There was no question of how I got there. I was the one who threw on my favorite pair of jeans and a t-shirt so threadbare it was a miracle it was still in one piece and drove across town in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t my sexiest outfit by any measure. There was a slinky, slate blue dress hanging in my closet that was to-die-for, but I wasn’t going for sexy. Comfort was the name of the game because what I was about to do had me wound so tight that even the rub of the wrong fabric might be enough to turn me around.
I stared at the door as cold rain soaked my hair and clothes. It was new—had to be after my team smashed in the last one—but it blended well enough. The only obvious sign of its recent replacement was the knob. It was too flawless to match the rest of the weathered exterior.
And yeah, I was using those useless details to buy myself time.
This was a stupid idea. I easily could have reached out to Emerson with my mind and asked him to meet me somewhere, or even better, used our connection to ask him what I wanted to know without ever seeing him. But no, for some gods forsaken reason, I’d slipped out of the safety of Lexa to come here.
For what? What did we actually have to say to each other?
I knew what I heard that cursed night all those years ago. I’d replayed it in my mind thousands of times.She’s nothing.
He would never know how deeply those words cut.
He would never know how long it took me to stop believing they were true.
And yet, ever since he’d stepped out of the shadows and back into my life, something inside me had been quietly questioning my understanding of that night… and of him.
Should I have had more faith in him back then? I honestly didn’t know. He hadn’t spared me any of the gruesome details when he’d shared the fates of other witches who had gotten themselves tangled up with the Brethren.
