Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,33
there’s something going on, if your family is hurting you, there are—”
“My family isn’t hurting me!”
Hardwick winced.
No. No, that hadn’t been a lie. Her family weren’t hurting her. Because she’d figured out how to stop that from happening. That was the whole point of—
“It’s nothing like that,” she said quickly, which was a neat, tidy cover-all, especially if she didn’t specify what that was. She ran her fingers through her hair.
“What is it like, then?”
“It’s—”
Complicated. Too much a part of her life for her to peel off and talk about like it was something separate, like it wasn’t her.
“—not my story to tell. Not all of it,” she said at last. “But I’m not—I’m doing it to stop other people from being hurt. Like I don’t want to hurt you. Nobody’s hurting me.”
Hardwick grimaced and put one hand to his forehead. “That’s not true.”
“I just told you, my family—”
“I’m not talking about them.”
Regret clawed at his features, making him look older than he was. “You must have guessed. You must have felt something. You’re right about lies hurting me, but I can’t blame you for hurting me when I’ve been doing the same to you since we met.”
“You haven’t—” Her heart thrummed in her chest. Her cheeks were hot. “I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My power hurting me isn’t the only thing you suspect me of hiding, is it?”
“You—” Delphine cut herself off and went completely still.
Chapter Sixteen
Hardwick
Hardwick was acting like an ass. He knew that. He’d been acting like one since the moment he woke up, alone and wretched on the sofa.
But he wanted to hear her say it. Not for any bullshit macho reason. This wasn’t a power play, or some sort of twisted game.
He just needed to hear her tell the truth. Needed it like he needed to breathe, or eat, or for his heart to keep on beating. Looking at her now, her face like a mask, he felt as though he’d opened his heart and was about to have it crushed.
“I understand why you didn’t say anything. You’ve been watching me, figuring me out, and I think I figured a few things about you, too. You’re a non-shifter who lives among shifters and you have to convince them you’re one of them. You’re always watching. You can’t trust your own senses because they’re not the right senses: you can’t send or hear telepathic messages; you can’t shift. You can’t even meet their eyes, in case they look inside you and all they see is human,” he added, remembering the way her eyes danced away from his after that first, wonderful moment of connection. “The only way you can know what people are saying, with words you can’t hear, is by waiting for their reactions. Body language, expressions, vocalizations… Like my griffin. A whole different language that they don’t even know they’re speaking.”
He took a step closer to her.
“You probably don’t even trust your own senses anymore.”
She leaned towards him, her feet rooted to the ground.
“Not your normal senses.”
“I don’t have any other sort,” she whispered, and he couldn’t tell whether the thudding in his skull was new or the same baseline pain. Perhaps she didn’t know, either.
He stopped. He wanted to reach out to her, lay it all out, give her the framework she so clearly relied on and let her build her story on top of it—but he didn’t only want to reach out to her.
He wanted her to reach out to him, too.
She licked her lips.
“You’re right,” she said.
True. His griffin crooned relief.
“I can’t trust senses I don’t have. I have to guess—educated guesses, but I don’t always get it right. And that’s with things I know. People I know. I can pass it off as a misunderstanding, mostly, or let them think that I wasn’t paying attention or didn’t care enough to be listening to them, but it’s never… never anything important. I make sure of that. If there was… something important… and I felt something new, something I didn’t understand…”
Her hand fluttered to her chest again.
“How could I believe it?”
“Trust yourself,” Hardwick urged her. “Stop thinking about what you ought to do and trust what your heart wants.”
“I could hurt—”
“I don’t care if you hurt me,” he said. “I thought I did. I thought I could push you away until I was better, but I’ve just made it worse.”
Her hand flew to her chest. “I don’t know what you—”
A flash of pain across his forehead. She gasped.
“Please,” he whispered, and