The lock clicked into place with a definitive, heavy thud as Knight, GG, and Rhett slipped out of the room, their footsteps fading down the long, carpeted corridor of the leadership wing. The silence that rushed in to fill the space was dense, still humming with the residual static of Stormy’s Alpha roar and the sharp, violet crackle of the magic that had erupted from my own hand just minutes before.
I stood there in my emerald silk dress, the fabric cooling against my skin as the heat of the confrontation began to evaporate. I didn’t say a word. I just watched Stormy as he stood in the center of his forest-green sanctuary. His jacket was slightly askew, his broad shoulders rising and falling with a heavy, ragged rhythm as he stared down at the polished floorboards, his jaw locked tight enough to crack.
The air between us was thick with things unsaid, but my mind wasn’t spinning with jealousy over the older woman who had launched that tray at my face. The mate bond—that deep, ancient pull the universe had slammed into my chest the second I crossed the border into Pinecreek—was a powerful thing. It cased me in his heat, filling me with a soul-deep love for this towering woodwork master that was so overwhelming it practically drowned out the smaller, nagging pricks of my inklings. I didn’t care about his past. I had only been here for three days, and a man who looked like Storm Maverick Kinkaid, living in a world built on the rigid, old-school traditions of the pack, was bound to have history. Even the female wolfies accepted that double standard; it was just the way they grew up, a part of the landscape like the snow and the pines. If there was a tiny, faint inkling in the back of my mind that his old ways hadn’t completely vanished the moment the Beast rolled into town, I deliberately pushed it down.
I had much bigger ghosts to worry about, and they were currently rattling the door to my own closet.
“Veronica,” Stormy rumbled, his voice cracking the silence like a dry branch. He lifted his head, his ice-blue eyes searching my face with that raw, fierce intensity that always made my heart do a rhythmic stutter. He stepped toward me, his massive frame eating up the distance between us until his heat was washing over me again. “You’re trembling, my Moon Shadow.”
“I’m not cold, Stormy,” I whispered, my thirty-year-old Ohio gumption the only thing keeping my voice steady as I looked up at him. “And I’m not hurt. But we need to talk about what happened out there. Not the tray. Not the woman. We need to talk about me.”
He stopped, his brow furrowing as he reached out, his large, calloused hands gently taking my wrists. “Rhett said your eyes flamed. I felt the pulse myself, Veronica. It felt like… like a wall of solid energy. What was that?”
I let out a slow, shaky breath, turning my hands in his grip so I could hold onto his wrists instead. The familiarity of his pulse beneath my fingers gave me an anchor, a piece of reality to hold onto as I prepared to dig into the dark soil of my own memories.
“I’ve always known I was different,” I began, my gaze drifting past his shoulder to the deep green walls of the room. “Back when I was growing up in Wellsville, I just called it my inklings. My Gramma always told me it was just our family’s intuition, an occasional bit of precognition. She called them ‘blessings.’ But I never explored that side of myself, Stormy. To me… they always felt like a curse.”
Stormy didn’t interrupt. He just stood there, a silent, massive anchor, listening with an intensity that made the room feel incredibly small and private.
“The times I can remember using it… they weren’t positive experiences,” I said, a bitter laugh catching in my throat as the old memories began to surface, sharp and vivid. “When I was just a little girl, a child who had never even experienced death or understood what it meant, I sat next to my Gramma. I looked right at her and told her the exact date and the exact time she was going to die. I didn’t understand the weight of it. I didn’t understand why her face went entirely pale, or why she gripped my shoulders and told me to never tell another soul that kind of information again, even if I did know it. It terrified her. And it terrified me.”
I swallowed against the jagged frog in my throat, the memory shifting, the clock winding forward to a hotter summer night when I was twelve years old.
“Then, when I was twelve, I was visiting my paternal grandparents, Gramma Alice and Popeye,” I continued, the names tasting like home and old dust. “Popeye wasn’t my biological grandfather—he was Gramma Alice’s second husband—but he and I shared something special. We both loved horror movies. Gramma actually introduced me to them back home. She’d wake me up at 11:30 at night to come sit on the living room floor and watch Chilly Billy Theater with her. Gramma hated the blood, so she would close her eyes during those parts, and I hated the suspenseful music, so I would cover my ears and describe everything that was happening on the screen to her.” I grin remembering, “anyway that night at Gramma Alice and Popeye’s house, we were sitting there on the rug, me curled up by his feet, watching The Blob on the floor model television. Gramma Alice was sitting in her favorite armchair right behind us, completely ignoring the screen, working on a crossword puzzle because horror definitely wasn’t her cup of tea.”
Stormy’s thumb brushed against the back of my wrist, a slow, soothing motion as he felt the sudden spike in my heart rate.
“The movie was playing, the TV was glowing, and out of nowhere, the air in the room just changed,” I whispered, my eyes burning with the memory. “The static hit me. I didn’t even think about it. I just spun around on the carpet, looked right back at my Gramma Alice, and said, ‘Oh my god, my daddy is dead.’ I always called him daddy… it just slipped out.”
I paused, the silence of that twelve-year-old’s memory echoing in the quiet of the leadership wing.
“And then the phone rang,” I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. “Right on cue. It was my stepmom calling to tell my grandparents the news. My daddy had indeed just passed away, right at that exact moment. My inkling didn’t save him. It didn’t change anything. It just delivered the blow a second before the world did.”
I looked back up into Stormy’s ice-blue eyes, my jaw setting with that familiar, stubborn grit. “When I was a toddler, I can vaguely remember being able to make my toys move toward me across the floor when I wanted them. But after my daddy… after the phone call, I locked it all down. I spent the next years pretending I was just a normal girl from Ohio who had good instincts. But tonight, when that tray came at my face… the wall just broke. The purple light, the freezing time… it’s like whatever is inside me has been waking up the second I met you… since the second I crossed into Minnesota.”
Stormy stared down at me, his expression a mixture of profound wonder and a deep, protective ferocity. He didn’t look at me like I was a witch or an anomaly. He didn’t care about the laws of physics the elders were weeping over. He just reached out, his massive arms wrapping around my waist and pulling me flush against his chest, burying his face in the crook of my neck.
“Your Gramma was right about them being blessings, my Moon Shadow,” his voice rumbled against my skin, deep and permanent. “It isn’t a curse. And whatever fire is hiding in your blood… it belongs right here beside mine.”