Until a woman walked into a cabin with a four-year-old daughter who tilts her head the same way he does.
I look at him. He is looking at me. Patient the way he is patient about everything.
Five years of silence between us.
I open my mouth.
“You called me something.” My voice is steady. Costa spine. “In that hotel room. A name.”
His jaw tightens.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“Estrella.”
One word. Quiet. Delivered in the same voice he used against my throat five years ago in a hotel room in Montana.
The second lock clicks open.
“No one has called me that since that night.”
The silence between us is no longer a question.
It is an answer.
19
JUDE
“Estrella.”
The name leaves my mouth and lands in the space between us and detonates.
I said that name five years ago. Into the throat of a blonde woman in a Montana hotel room with city lights behind her head and cold glass against her back and my cock buried inside her while she made sounds I have never been able to forget.
Estrella.
“No one has called me that since that night,” Lucia says.
She is sitting across from me in the dim bathroom. Towel wrapped around her. Dark curls. Dark eyes. Curves where there used to be collarbones and sharp hipbones and the rail-thin body of a woman who was twenty-two and furious and free for the last time in her life.
She is not the woman I met on that plane.
She is the woman that woman became.
The math hits the way a diagnosis hits. All at once. Irrefutable.
The Thunderbolt, the Gunnar blood-curse I shared with Logan and Nick, wasn’t just a reaction to the woman.
It was a homing beacon for my own blood. The data points align into a clinical picture so obvious I want to put my fist through the wall for not seeing it sooner.
The blonde girl on the plane. Allergic reaction. Throat closing. My hands on the EpiPen. Her eyes swollen shut and her face a mask of inflammation and a medical mask covering everything below them.
The bar. Corner booth. Whiskey. Her laugh. Surprised and real and undignified. A laugh I heard three days ago in this cabin when Tyra told me the grey wolf needed a bath because he smelled like a mountain.
The same laugh.
I have been hearing that laugh for five years without knowing where I heard it first.