Chapter 37

Aria

A week without Darren turned out to be a lot easier than I had initially expected. His apartment was the epitome of luxury—a guest room all to myself, a state-of-the-art kitchen, access to whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it.

By the third day, I had found a comfortable rhythm with Lucas. He definitely seemed to miss his father, but he was also over the moon to spend every single day with me, sometimes to a fault. In fact, he kept getting so excited that his little wolf ears or fangs would pop out. He even fully shifted once on one occasion, when I surprised him with mac and cheese for dinner.

I never thought I’d say this, but I started getting used to the little werewolf boy’s shifting episodes. I got so used to it, in fact, that it almost started to turn into more of an inconvenience than something wondrous to look at.

It was clear to me that Darren hadn’t had the chance yet to teach Lucas how to avoid shifting when his emotions got the best of him. And if he was going to survive in a world where his true nature needed to be kept a secret, then he’d have to learn eventually.

So that week, I took it upon myself to teach him.

“And then you breathe in really slowly,” I instructed as I sat cross-legged on the carpet with him. “Just like this.”

Lucas followed my lead. His little chest expanded as he mimicked my deep breath. “Like that?”

“Exactly like that,” I said, a smile tugging at the corners of my lips. I could already see the tension in his shoulders easing, even if only a little. “Now hold it. One… two… three…”

Lucas, always eager to try new things, followed my lead. It also helped that I’d promised to give him a cookie if he practiced with me for a while.

Liam showed up regularly throughout the week. He brought groceries, checked on Lucas, and even stayed to chat a couple of times. He seemed to hate me less, although only a little. Most of the time, though, it was just me and Lucas in that apartment when we weren’t upstairs in the playroom or downstairs in the office.

As the days passed, I had myself convinced that the kiss had just been a mistake, some kind of fluke. Maybe Darren really had been driven by whatever mate bond we shared during those moments, and as for his glowing eyes striking up an old memory from nearly two decades ago…

Well, I knew fully well that werewolves’ eyes glowed sometimes. I’d seen it in Liam the night that he had tried to kill me. So it was no wonder that Darren’s eyes glowed a little when his wolf instincts temporarily took over.

But as for the memory of my puppy, there was no way that his eyes glowed. My puppy had mismatched eyes too, yes, but he was just a normal dog that eventually ran away and never returned.

He wasn’t a werewolf.

Still, it gnawed at me. But I had plenty of other stuff to keep my mind off of it.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, with Lucas down for a nap in his pup form, I found myself wandering the apartment, scooping up discarded clothes to throw a load of laundry into the machine. Darren would be home by tomorrow, so I wanted the place to look nice.

I paused outside Darren’s bedroom door, the laundry basket propped on my hip.

I hadn’t gone into Darren’s bedroom yet, even though I’d already been here for six and a half days. Darren hadn’t mentioned that any areas of the apartment were off-limits, but his bedroom felt too… intimate. So I’d avoided it.

But, just in case, I cracked the door open and poked my head inside. Just to see if he had any laundry that needed doing, or so I told myself. Although I think a tiny part of me was also just curious.

His scent hit me first—faint traces of cologne mixed with the smell of his body wash. The smell, reminding me all too well of being trapped beneath that tent with him, nearly made my knees buckle the instant it hit my nostrils.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open a little further.

Darren’s bedroom was immaculate, not a thing out of place. A massive bed with neat charcoal gray blankets and pillows, ever the minimalist, sat in the middle of the room. Two nightstands sat on either side of the bed, one of which looked entirely unused, like he’d purchased it just for symmetry and nothing else.

My gaze wandered to the nightstand that did look used. A small stack of books caught my attention—business texts, historical novels, and then, tucked underneath them, a well-worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.

The sight of it made me smile. Somehow, I couldn’t quite picture Darren poring over a story like that, but the thought of him reading it late at night, in this very room, sent a strange feeling of warmth through my chest.

I almost left then. I should have.

But something else caught my eye—a picture frame on the dresser, facedown.

I shouldn’t have looked. I knew better. But curiosity got the cat, and before I could stop myself, I crossed the room and picked it up.

The photo was of Darren, clearly younger by quite a few years, with his arm around…

A woman. She was stunning, her brown hair tumbling over her shoulders, her head tilted back and eyes shut in laughter. There was something intimate about the moment. Something candid. They looked happy.

They looked like they belonged together.

Something twisted deep in my chest. Was this Lucas’s mother? Darren’s wife?

“Aria?” Lucas’s voice suddenly echoed faintly from the living room, nearly making me drop the picture in shock. “I’m thirsty.”

I shuddered and set the frame down, carefully positioning it exactly as I’d found it, my heart racing. I took one last glance at the room before retreating. The smell of Darren’s cologne lingered in my nostrils as I closed the door behind me.

In the kitchen, Lucas sat on one of the stools at the counter, kicking his legs. I poured him a cup of milk, which he sipped with both hands clutching the plastic as I loaded the laundry into the machine.

But try as I might to fall back into a routine, I couldn’t get the image of that woman out of my mind. She was stunning, and now that I looked at Lucas, I could see that he really looked like her. He had her hair and cheekbones, at least.

As for his eyes, they were definitely his father’s eyes, although her eyes had been closed in the picture.

Unable to hold it in any longer, I found myself asking, “Lucas, what happened to your mommy? Do you ever see her?”

Lucas paused, looking at me with a milk mustache on his upper lip, before he shrugged one shoulder. “My daddy says she died.” He sighed softly and kept chugging his milk.

“Oh.” I felt my heart sink. I wanted to reach out, to hold him, to say something that might help. But all I could offer was a quiet, “I’m so sorry, buddy.”

He shrugged again in that flippant way that kids his age often do when it comes to such things—before they’re old enough to really understand what death means. “It’s okay. I have you now.”

My throat tightened. I blinked quickly, trying to push away the tears that were suddenly threatening to come. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, when the distinctive sound of the elevator doors opening cut me off.

Startled, I turned, expecting Liam to walk in.

But it was Darren who stepped out of the elevator, snowflakes melting against his raven hair. Rather than being glad to see him, though, I was just surprised by the downward arrow lit up on the elevator behind him.

The elevator had just come down, not up. And yet he had snow on his hair and jacket.

“Were you just looking for us in the playroom?” I asked.