“For all this?” Ivy gestured round at the preposterous surroundings. Excluding her suitcase, she was fairly certain she was the youngest thing in the room by several centuries. “You know, I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’re a unicorn. Of course you come from a castle.”
He let out a long sigh, raking a hand back through his hair. “I still should have warned you. I was just terrified that if I told you the truth about my family, you’d refuse to come.”
“Well, I probably would have done,” she had to admit. “Hugh, your mother is much more gracious about the whole thing than I could have hoped. But I can’t possibly stay here.”
“Why not?” He took a step forward, a hopeful, entreating light in his eyes. “It’s private. Secluded. The estate boundaries are secure, and we carefully vet everyone allowed into our territory. There aren’t any shifters apart from ourselves. You’d be free to be yourself, without having to worry about endangering anyone.”
She knew that what he said made sense. A dangerous freak like her should be locked away in a remote castle, where she couldn’t hurt anyone. But to narrow her world down to one house, and a bare handful of people…something deep in her soul recoiled in horror from the thought. A cage was still a cage, no matter how beautiful the bars were.
Hugh would be here, she tried to reason with herself. It wouldn’t be so bad.
And maybe it wouldn’t be…if they could touch.
“What about you?” she asked. “Could you be happy here? I got the impression you don’t come home very often.”
His shoulders tensed a little. He went to the window, brushing back the brocade curtains in order to stare out into the dusk. On this side of the house, the trees crept close to the walls, their tangled branches black and bare. There were no signs of other human habitation, or artificial lights. They might have been the only two people in the world, surrounded by forest older than time.
“I ran away from all this,” he said quietly. “I told myself that I was going out into the world to use my talents, that it was my duty…but in some ways, I was just running away from my other duties. Maybe it’s time for me to work out a way to balance them both.”
He turned back to her, a forced smile stretching his face. “My mother’s renowned for her charity work. I’m sure she could find a role for me in one of her projects which would give me an excuse to visit the local hospitals. I could still go out and heal people. I’d just be working undercover. On my own.”
She thought of the tight camaraderie of Alpha Team—before she’d ruined it all—and her heart broke for him. But he was standing so straight and tall, so determinedly putting a brave face on things, that she couldn’t bring herself to argue with him.
He was willing to sacrifice everything for her. How could she tell him that she didn’t want him to?
“Okay,” she forced out, through her tightening throat. She matched his smile, attempting to make a joke of it. “But I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do here. Unless your parents could use another maid.”
“We do have a lot of toilets,” he agreed solemnly. “If you’re truly missing your old job, I’m sure I could find you some bleach.”
She threatened
him with one of the tasseled pillows. He raised his hands in surrender, his smile finally reaching his eyes.
“More seriously,” she said, tossing the pillow back on the bed. “If I am going to stay here, there’s clearly a few secrets you still need to tell me. Like just what’s up between you and your father.”
“Ah.” He dropped down into a richly-upholstered armchair, wincing. “Yes. Though that’s not so much a secret as just dirty laundry. Not something the family airs in public.”
“I’m not public.” She perched on the bed opposite him. “And believe me, your family can’t possibly be more dysfunctional than mine.”
He raised a wry eyebrow at her. “Want to bet?”
“My mom’s in shifter jail for murder,” she said simply.
He stared at her, his mouth half-open.
“Right,” he said, after a beat. “You win. Good Lord. Who did she murder?”
“Hope’s dad.” The words came easily, the plain facts worn smooth by time. She’d long ago abandoned any anger or sadness about this part of their past. “We don’t have the same biological father. Our mom always just shacked up with a guy for a few months and then moved on. She did it for their own good—she could control her venom pretty well, but she was worried about small doses building up over time.”
“I can only imagine that prolonged intimate contact with a wyvern shifter isn’t good for one’s health,” Hugh said. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Anyway, she didn’t exactly have good taste in men. Mostly they were just deadbeats, but Hope’s dad was different. Dangerous. A viper shifter, and a crime boss, kinda like Gaze. He’d use visitation rights to Hope as an excuse to try to pressure Mom into making him poisons and stuff. Sometimes she’d do it, sometimes she wouldn’t. Then, one day when Hope was ten, our mother said no to him once too often. There was a fight.” Ivy shrugged. “And she killed him.”
“In self-defense, though, one assumes,” Hugh said, looking rather wide-eyed by this tale. “Yet she was still jailed for it?”
“Oh, she deserved it,” Ivy said, shrugging again. “She could have just paralyzed him if she’d wanted to. But she always had better control over her venom than her temper. Anyway, it was just lucky that I was eighteen and a legal adult by then. It took some fighting, but I got custody of Hope. It’s been just us ever since.”
Hugh stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. “Suddenly my family dramas seem rather pathetic.”