She heard his sharp inhale, but felt too raw, too exposed to look at him. “It is what it is. The only cures are isolation or capitulation. You find a way to live with it, or you give in. Easy.”
For a long time, there was silence between them. The fire crackled, sparks popping as the logs slowly began to collapse in on themselves. Heat radiated outward, making her cheeks flush, but inside she felt a deep, dreadful chill.
“Teddy never said anything.”
Curling her legs up to her chest, Camille wrested her chin on her kneecaps and dared to look at him through the shimmering heat of the flames. “Well, it’s a sensitive subject, particularly for him. Thaddeus was always a little crazy, but it was the pull that drove him over the edge.” Fiddling with the cuff of her slim black pant leg, she quietly added, “Besides, after… well, I made him promise not to tell.”
He shifted his weight in the sand, restless and tense. A muscle ticked in his smoothly shaved jaw. “Why?”
“Because you would have felt obligated to be with me if you knew.” Disgust soured some of the warmth in her stomach, made it a sickly, feverish heat of unfulfilled longing. “Anything — anything at all — was preferable to that.”
Camille had spent her life balancing one obligation after another. From the moment she could walk, she stood between her mother and her brother. Supporting both, shielding them from one another, she carefully managed her mother’s rages and Cameron’s tender heart. She kept Marian in line and fulfilled her obligations to the main family. She took over as head of the family and then as her mother’s caretaker when she declined.
The burdens were endless. The guilt was even worse. She had no desire to become a chore, an added weight, to someone else.
“Cam…” Viktor planted one hand in the sand in front of him and rose onto one knee, as if he wanted to launch himself across the fire but held himself back at the last second with rigid control. His expression was hard edged, desperate. The skin around his eyes was tight, his brows pinched in a ferocious frown. “Cam, you have to know that you would never have been an obligation to me. You certainly aren’t one now.”
She shook her head. The wind whistled through their little alcove, singing a haunting melody with the rushing waves. “Doesn’t matter now. I—”
“No, this is important.” Viktor’s eyes flickered back and forth between cornflower blue and coyote gold. “I need you to know what you mean to me. You need to understand how afraid I was for you.”
She tucked her arms around her middle. “Your father?”
He swallowed and slowly leaned backward, dropping out of his crouch to sink into the cool sand. “Yes. When you asked me to run away with you, I… Gods, I wanted to, but it was all wrong. I knew that I wasn’t strong enough to take on my father yet, and if he came after us, he’d kill you first. And even if he didn’t, I still would have been leaving my mom, the rest of the pack. I’d be asking you to leave everything you loved behind, too, and I wouldn’t even be able to protect you, provide a pack for you to lean on… I couldn’t do that.”
Viktor breathed out slowly, the muscles of his neck and jaw working hard as he clearly wrestled with some great internal force. When he spoke again, his voice was low, tight. “You were this beautiful bright spot in my life, Cam. When I was with you, I felt like I was worth a damn. Like I wanted to make a future for myself, not just run headlong into the ground the moment I took out that sonuvabitch. But running away with you— it scared the shit out of me. I’d be putting you at risk, and even if I wasn’t, I had no idea how to care for a mate, how to build a life with you outside of everything we’d ever known. I reacted on instinct.” He blew out a noisy sigh.
Camille had the strangest sense of something unraveling inside of her — a knot of hurt buried so deep, it felt like it was being drawn from the pit of her soul. Almost to herself, she said, “We were sixteen, Vik.”
And that was the long and short of it. They were sixteen and in the foolish sort of love that you never forgot, never let go of. It shaped who they were, but it was not all they could be.
“Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have said what I said,” he admitted. “I didn’t know how— I didn’t know what to say, how to tell you about my father, what I should have asked… Honestly, I fuckin’ panicked, sweetheart.”
A startled laugh bubbled out of her, surprising them both. Camille covered her mouth with the tips of her claws as some old and brittle ice began to thaw inside her.
It wasn’t funny — especially not when she knew how cruel his father had been, how he’d terrorized his son and mate, his pack. Dominic hated elves, but Camille had always gotten the sense that he hated his pack and his obligations to them more. Perhaps if he had less of an ego, he could have given it all up and provided a little peace to everyone involved, but he was too possessive, too dominant to do that.
Not that Viktor had ever, ever let her meet him, of course.
Everything she knew of Dominic Hamilton was gleaned from context, rumor, and Viktor. The teenager she knew had been obsessive about her safety, always going out of his way to make sure his father had no knowledge of their relationship. The only reason he let her come so close to the pack’s land at all was because his father, a childhood victim of a vicious school of mermaids, wouldn’t go within a hundred yards of the beach.
Nothing about that was funny. What made her chuckle with disbelief was the idea that the alpha sitting across from her, always so self-assured, could possibly panic because of something she did.
When Viktor looked at her like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be offended or amused, she promised, “I’m not laughing at you. I’m just— I actually can’t really picture you panicking about anything, let alone me.”
A slow smile curved his lips up. “Sweetheart, I hate to break it to you, but you drive me crazy. I don’t think I’ve stopped panicking since the day we met.”
Pleasure suffused every inch of her, rushing like bubbles through her veins to make her head feel light. Camille hugged herself tighter, as if she could lock in that feeling, hold it close for a little longer.
Viktor’s smile widened even as his eyes got softer. They flickered back to blue and stayed there. “Now, I promised we’d get to know one another like two people who don’t have a fucked up history.”
She arched her brows. “And how do you propose we do that?”
“Wanna play twenty questions?”
Another bubble of laughter escaped her. A grin, irrepressible, cramped her cheeks. “Are we twelve?”
“Nah, I’m just in love with you.” Viktor stared at her mouth with a faintly dazed look before muttering, half to himself, “Damn, that’s the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen.”
Nah, I’m just in love with you. He said it so casually, so unremarkably, like it was a fact of life and not a declaration that shook her to the core.
Camille held her breath. Gods, I feel like I’m going to come apart at the seams. Stripped of her anger, overflowing with treacherous hope, she had nothing to hide behind. With effortless ease, he had once more revealed the softness she tried so hard to conceal.
Flustered and needing a distraction, she said, “Okay, fine. Twenty questions. You go first.”