Chapter 38

YARA

I should have just stayed at home.

It was raining heavily when I eventually stepped out of the shower, the blood thoroughly scrubbed from my skin and how empty that man had felt bouncing around in my mind. It affected me more than him being dead did, and it kind of felt like some of that absence in him had snuck into me and was making its way through me.

I stopped drying my face with the towel in my hand and closed my eyes, shaking my head sideways like that would get rid of the feeling. It didn’t.

An exasperated sigh escaped me and I hung the towel on its rack before staring at myself in the mirror. You’re going to taint Aiden’s bloodline raced through my mind in Estelle’s irritating voice, and I gritted my teeth… mostly because she wasn’t exactly wrong. Not because I was latent though.

She’d wasted no time telling her father seeing as he mentioned it in the hospital, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Aiden was bothered by it. He’d been pissed when the man said he’d father half-breeds, but was he thinking about it in his room right now? Yes, I knew he cared about me, but apparently, a good amount of his pack members didn’t like witches and latents, and the man had mentioned that he had to think of the pack’s future.

…Shit. Feeling like a cold weight had settled in my stomach, I walked out of the bathroom… and found Aiden sitting on my bed with his gaze fixed on the bathroom door.

“Oh!” I blurted out.

Had he been… I thought he went to his room right after I entered the bathroom. If I’d known he’d been waiting, I’d have come out earlier.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice soft, and I swallowed, wondering if he was going to bring up what Estelle’s father said.

“Yeah?”

He gestured for me to come closer and I walked over like he was reeling him in, stopping between his legs. Then he took my hand in his and pressed a kiss to my wrist before muttering against my skin, “I’m sorry.”

I frowned slightly. “What for?”

“...That you had to see that.”

Oh. The dead man.

I heaved a sigh and moved to sit next to him with my hand still in his. It had been surprising, but that hadn’t been my first time seeing a dead person. After getting kidnapped by witches once, one of them had killed another member of their group in front of me by slitting their throat, so I wasn’t fixating on the state I’d found that man in the woods in. What I was fixating on was how empty he’d felt.

“Do you know what happened to him?” I asked. That emptiness was surely not natural and nothing that happened to him could have caused that… except a witch.

“Not yet,” Aiden replied, a frustrated expression crossing his face, while my mind reeled.

Could one of the witches after me have found out I was here? Did they do that to that man?

“Could a witch have been involved?” I asked before realizing my theory about it being one of the witches after me didn’t really make sense. If they knew I was here, they’d have come for me. Why would they bother killing a random man in the woods and just leave?

Aiden frowned. “What makes you say that?”

I couldn’t exactly explain the emptiness I’d felt in the man without outing myself, so I just pressed my lips together before muttering, “I don’t know. I’m just…” Confused. The man had to have been killed by a witch, but why? Did he do something to one?

“You’re safe here, Yara,” Aiden replied, his voice firm. He assumed I was thinking about the witches who were after me. “No one’s going to hurt you. I promise.”

At that, Estelle’s words rang in my ears again, and my mind drifted to the magic relinquishing spell. I might not have been able to save the man in the woods—nothing could have saved him—but I’d successfully performed a healing spell, so I could try the magic relinquishing spell. It was quite the jump. The healing spell was basic while the other seemed extremely complex, but I had to try.

Then it occurred to me that even if I was able to perform the magic relinquishing spell, the fact that I was a witch would still hang over my head. Always.

“Yara?” Aiden called, drawing my attention back to the face of the man I’d only known for almost two weeks, but already cared so deeply for.

“...About what Estelle’s father said.”

He scowled, unconsciously tightening his hold on my hand. “Don’t worry about that—”

“He’s right though.”

“Don’t. Don’t say that. He’s not.” He moved his hands to my face, cradling it as he spoke softly, “Hey, look at me. You’re my Luna… You’re my Luna. Absolutely nothing is going to change that.”

Not even me being a—

He pressed his lips to mine, kissing me like he needed me more than he needed to breathe, and butterflies went wild in my stomach. “Absolutely nothing, Yara,” he repeated, and I blinked at him before he continued, “You haven’t met all of the council members.”

That was right. Only some of them had come to the house on his birthday.

“I want you to meet all of them tomorrow. And as my Luna, you have to start sitting in on council meetings soon.” When he said my Luna, he seemed a bit mad that I’d felt I wasn’t good enough and the corner of my lips twitched, but I bit down on the insides of my cheeks.

“Are you sure about that, Aiden?”

“More than anything else in my life.” He was completely serious when he said, and at the sight of how much he cared about me, I couldn’t stop the goofy smile that threatened to break out on my face, so I quickly raised my hand to cover my mouth. He furrowed his brows in concern. “What’s wrong?”

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I responded by dropping my hand and closing the distance between us, kissing him sweetly. Aiden’s hands dropped to my waist while my heart did a slow, heavy roll in my chest, and I crawled into his lap, straddling him. His grip on me tightened as the kiss deepened, his tongue tangling with mine.

More.

I buried my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer and melting into the solid, warm wall that was his chest as the world narrowed down to how his lips and tongue moved against mine.

When I finally broke the kiss, gasping for air, what I met was his predatory gaze and I became very aware that the only thing I was wearing was a towel.