Chapter 12: The Wedding Night Line

Orla's POV

"You said something to me on our wedding night," I said.

Torin stood very still in his mother's room.

"I was twenty-four. I'd stood in a ballroom for six hours smiling at people who called me wolfless to my face."

I kept my voice level.

"I came up to the bedroom you'd given me, and you were waiting outside it."

"I remember."

"Say it."

His jaw worked.

"You'll have the title and the house," he said. "You will never have my bed, or my name in your mouth like you own me."

I had carried that sentence for four years.

"Why?"

"Because I was afraid."

"Of me?"

"Of what I was," Torin said. "My wolf had never been calm in my life, and it was worse around you."

He rubbed his face.

"It paced all night. It wouldn't let me sit in the same room. My mother told me it would hurt you."

"Winifred told you that."

"She said a wolfless woman couldn't survive a beast like mine. She said the wolf wanted to break you."

His voice was rough.

"I believed her. So I said the cruelest thing I could think of, and I said it fast, so you'd keep your distance."

"You could have said that."

"I was twenty-seven, and my mother was standing in the next room."

I looked at him for a long time.

I had thought, for four years, that he had never wanted me.

I had put every cold look and every empty hallway into one drawer and labeled it that.

"The wolf wasn't trying to hurt me," I said.

"No."

"It was trying to get home."

His eyes were wet.

"It wanted you from the first day," Torin said. "And so did I. I did not know what to do with either of us."

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