Given to an Alpha Who Saw Through Every Lie novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Casserole

Colt and Regan visit to test her amnesia, and Regan whispers that she was never supposed to wake.

Regan brought lasagna in my mother's old blue dish.

I knew it was my mother's dish.

Regan had borrowed it from my house two years ago and never given it back.

"Oh, Nannie," she said at the door, and her eyes filled right on cue. "Look at you."

I kept my face friendly and a little lost.

"Hi," I said. "Sorry. You're Regan, right? Colt told me. I'm so sorry I don't remember."

She pressed the dish into my hands and hugged me over it.

Her curls smelled like vanilla. For twelve years that smell had meant safe.

"Don't you apologize," she said into my hair. "I'm just glad you're alive."

Colt came in behind her with his hands in his pockets.

He looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, then at the staircase. He looked everywhere except at me.

Dane stood at the far end of the kitchen with a coffee and made no attempt to leave.

"Sit," he said. "Nan, you too."

We sat at his long pine table, the four of us, and nobody touched the lasagna.

"Do you remember anything at all?" Colt asked.

"Bits. Light. Carrie's voice. The ceiling at the clinic." I shrugged. "Nothing before that."

"Nothing about us?"

"Us who?"

He flinched. It was small, but I saw it.

"You and me," he said. "We were engaged."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"I'm so sorry, Nan. I handled things badly. I was scared."

"That's okay," I said. "I don't remember being engaged."

"Right. Well." He cleared his throat. "The ring."

I looked down at my left hand.

The ring was still on it, a thin gold band with a chip of stone.

I worked it off slowly and set it on the table between the salt and the pepper.

"I don't know whose it is," I said. "Sorry. I think it's yours."

Colt picked it up and rolled it between his fingers.

He did not look sad. He looked relieved, and so did Regan.

"Do you remember the lake?" Regan asked.

She said it lightly, buttering a roll nobody had asked for.

"Which lake?"

"Our lake. The summer we were sixteen."

"What happened?"

"You stole my dad's truck and drove us out to Hollis Point."

She laughed.

"You put it in the shallows, and he grounded us for a month."

I had never driven a truck into a lake in my life.

We spent the summer we were sixteen working the diner counter.

If I had really lost my memory, I would have believed her.

"I did that?" I said, and I let my mouth curl. "God. I'm sorry. I sound terrible."

"You were hilarious," Regan said. Her shoulders came down, and I watched her relax.

By the window, Dane set his coffee on the sill.

"That's a long drive for a girl of sixteen," he said mildly. "Whose license did she have?"

Regan blinked.

"I don't remember," she said. "It was a long time ago. We were kids."

The kitchen went quiet.

"You were the one in the truck, though," Dane said. "You'd remember that."

"Alpha, I just meant it was the kind of silly thing we did," Regan said.

She gave a little laugh and glanced at Colt for rescue.

Colt stood. "We should go. Nan needs rest."

"Of course," Regan said.

She hugged me again at the door, longer this time.

She tucked her mouth against my ear, and her whole voice changed.

It was flat and cold, and I had never heard it before.

"You weren't supposed to wake up," she whispered.

Then she was bouncing back, her smile in place. "Eat the lasagna! It's my mom's recipe!"

I stood in the doorway holding my mother's blue dish and watched them walk down the drive.

My hands were shaking. I gripped the dish harder so they wouldn't.

The truck door shut. The engine started. The sound faded down the ridge road.

Behind me, a floorboard creaked.

"I heard it," Dane said.

I didn't turn around.

"She said it right into my ear. You couldn't have heard that from the kitchen."

"I walked out the side door and stood on the porch," he said. "I hear everything."

I turned.

His face was perfectly still, but his hand had closed on the doorframe so hard that the wood creaked.

"Then do something," I said. "She tried to kill me, and she just told me so."

"She told you in a whisper, and the only witness is me," Dane said.

"The pack will want more than that."

"So we wait?"

"We wait for her to try again," he said. "She will."

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