Page 127 of Black Willow Witch
He palmed it possessively beneath her long shirt. ‘It’s mine. I should be able to stroke it whenever I want to.’
Dear Lord.‘It’s not a pet, Rip.’
‘But it’s a part of my toy, and toys are meant to be played with.’
She let out a soft snort. ‘Just go to sleep.’
‘Answer a question for me first.’
Emberlyn opened her eyes to find his gaze fixed on her. ‘Shoot.’
‘Why don’t you ever ask me anything truly personal? I nose into your business – past and present – all the time.’
She didn’t detect any hurt in his voice, only curiosity. Still, she snuck her hand out from under her pillow to brush her fingertips over his chin as she assured him, ‘It’s not because I’m not interested. I just know that your past has to be extremely hard for you to talk about.’ Painful, even. ‘I figured that if you ever felt comfortable telling me then you would.’
He traced the dimple on her butt cheek, having apparently memorized its exact location. ‘Ask whatever you want to know,’ he invited.
Emberlyn bit her lip, conflicted. She had lots of questions. And she wanted him to know, tofeel, that she hadn’t kept them to herself so far out of disinterest. But she was leery of hitting a hot button. ‘Okay, but if you don’t want to answer then you don’t have to – I won’t be pissed or anything.’ She paused. ‘Do you remember the time you spent Rabid?’
He hesitated only briefly. ‘Not a single day of it. I can recall flashes of this and that, but they’re dreamlike. They don’t feel real. What I most remember is the feeling of . . . simplicity. Human emotions are absent – there’s only primal instincts and urges. You’re not you. You’re not anyone. You have no past, no future. You just exist.’
‘What about what happened . . . before?’
His gaze turned a little inward. ‘I can vividly remember my father battling another wolf; remember seeing him die. I remember my mother’s scream – there was so much grief and fury in that sound. Then she was soon after dead, and a battle broke out around us. I saw Logan on the floor, bloody and still. I thought he was dead as well.’
Pausing, Ripper brushed his lips over her bare shoulder. ‘The next thing I remember is waking up in the Watcher’s unit with people hanging over me, saying it was good to have me back.’
Emberlyn blew out a breath. ‘It had to have felt like you’d skipped four years ahead in a matter of moments.’
Nodding, he snaked his hand further up her shirt and swept it halfway up her spine. ‘My body didn’t feel like mine. It was older. Different. So was my voice – it had broken by that point.’
‘That had to have been so weird.’
He grunted. ‘Everyone was smiling, glad I wasmeagain. But I didn’t feel at all like me, and I was still mentally stuck in that moment where I’d lost my parents.’ He smoothed his palm back down to her ass. ‘The only thing that stopped me from beingoverwhelmed by the grief, discomfort and rage was seeing Logan alive.’
‘But then you also felt guilty,’ she surmised.
His eyelids lowered slightly. ‘What makes you think that?’
It was an obvious assumption to make. ‘You’re super-duper protective. He’s your younger brother. You’d just learned you’d been gone four years and he’d been relatively alone all that time.’
After a few moments, Ripper closed his eyes. ‘Yeah, I felt guilty as shit.’ Sighing, he rubbed the back of his head. ‘Logan sensed it. Told me it was fucking stupid. He didn’t hold it against me that I left him.’
‘Because youdidn’tleave him, Rip. You thought he was dead. Nobody chooses to turn Rabid—’
‘I almost did,’ said Ripper, opening his eyes.
Emberlyn felt her brow crease. ‘What?’
‘I felt the pull to go back to Bloodhill. Like a birdsong. It called day and night. More than once I almost gave into it.’
‘So you could go back to feeling nothing again,’ she reasoned. ‘Makes sense.’
His brows flicked together. ‘Does it?’
‘Your world had imploded. It had gone to shit with the death of your parents, which for you felt like something that happened two minutes ago . . . and then on top of all that you had to process you’d been missing forfour years. There was so much you needed to adjust to. It’s only to be expected that there were times you wanted to escape it all.
‘You didn’t escape it, though, Rip. You stayed. You pushed through it. Youthrived. I mean, you’re Alpha of your fucking clan. An Alpha who’s massively respected and whose clan is tight. So don’t give your fourteen-year-old self a hard time – he doesn’t deserve that.’
