“Mrs. Lynch.” Her name sounds impossibly formal when Wolf says it.
“You might as well call me Granny, same as she does. Now get out of here. I’m tired.”
He laughs. It’s not the belly laugh I heard at the Andersons. It’s barely a chuckle. But I feel it ripple through his chest and flow through his arms, which are still wrapped tight around me.
“I’ll bring her back,” Wolf says.
“Not before morning,” Granny says tartly. “You two have a lot of making up to do. Take her to bed. Make her forget you’re a controlling horse’s arse.”
“Granny!” I gasp, flushing hard.
I’ve called Wolf worse before. Truth be told, I probably will again. But I’m completely flustered by the thought of mygrandmother telling him to fuck me. At least there’s no way she can know about the dungeon across the street.
“Kate?” Wolf asks, dropping his arms and taking a full step back. “You told me once your grandmother is the wisest woman you know. Will you listen to her now?”
I left for very good reasons. Wolf lied to me about Winter Reckoning.
He tracked me like an animal, following me online.
He leashed me like a dog.
But he didn’t fire Mrs. Watson when I left. He didn’t return Granny to my family. He didn’t condemn my grandmother to end her life in a windowless basement room.
I can’t find the words to answer him. I’m torn between salty and sweet, between fierce independence and something softer. Something far more kind.
So I act instead of speaking. I take a single step forward. I reach for his hand, weaving my fingers between his.
And then I turn to Granny. “Have your kip, then. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Wolf growls his approval as he leads the way out of the carriage house.
55
COLE
She came back.
Kate came back.
From the moment Nilsson told me she was across the street, I’ve been starting and stopping sentences inside my head. There are so many things I want to tell her, so many things I need her to understand.
We need to talk about the fucking leash.
I still don’t have the words—not any I’m certain will con her, will keep her here when she has every right to leave.
So I concentrate on her long, cool fingers between mine. I focus on the sound of her breath, slow and even like she’s meditating in a forest. I fight the sizzle in my brain, the inferno that threatens to jump the firebreak of every logical thought I’m desperate to apply.
Inside the house, she hesitates in the foyer. I catch her quick glance upstairs, toward our bedroom, where I caught hercutting. I clock an even quicker glimpse to the door at the end of the hall, to the steps that lead to the dungeon.
But I need her to understand what I’ve been thinking these past two weeks. I need her to know that everything’s changed—if she can trust me. If she’ll take what I have to give her.
Still holding fast to her hand, I walk her down the hall to my office.
It’s a greater request than I think it will be, asking her to step over the threshold. I forced her here last time.
“Please,” I say, when she hesitates outside the room. “I…” I don’t know how to beg. “Just… please,” I say again.
Face carefully blank, she enters my lair.