for someone else. Isn’t that what men did? Most never seemed satisfied with what they had. Even my own father reeked of perfume most nights after staying late at the office. My mom looked the other way but the hurt in her eyes was too obvious to ignore. She settled because it was easier to patch up the boat than to rock it. I was too scared to get in the boat at all.
Ozi played with my hair, twirling strands through his fingers. “Where did you go, darling?”
“What do you mean? I’m right here.”
He pressed a finger to my temple. “In your head. Where did you go in your head? I can hear it in your breath, in your heartbeat, you wandered off to somewhere else.”
“I can’t help it sometimes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to stay present. There are things that are hard to forget. Dark corners that I’ve become so used to, they don’t even scare me anymore.”
He shuddered and tightened his grip around my shoulders. “I’ll protect you from the nightmares.”
I felt warm and safe in his arms, but as I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help but remember his words. I don’t have any demons. I am the demon.
I didn’t have any nightmares, or dreams for that matter, for the rest of the night. By morning, the sun was shining again and all of my fears felt silly. That was until he kissed me goodbye and put me in a car back to the city. The further the car took me away from his house, the bigger the ache in my chest became. Was it his absence? Suppressed emotions that were now resurfacing because I didn’t have Ozi to distract me? It was a feeling like homesickness, only I wasn’t sure which home I was missing more.
Two days. That’s how long he said we’d be apart. I felt like the bubble was going to burst. But what could possibly change in two days?
“Cassius. Did you find out anything?”
“A little but mostly firewalls. I need access to the local stuff. Feel like taking a trip?”
“Fuck. All right. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
I hung up the phone and pulled up my GPS. It was a three hour drive to Maplewood. If we left soon, we could be back in New York by early morning tomorrow. We could drive all night. And we would if it meant getting some answers. There were things that just didn’t add up. Things her family was keeping from her. And what were the odds that the hacker pinged activity from the same place that Raven grew up in? What were the odds that a girl from a small town interned at my winery in Italy and then coincidentally found herself working at my restaurant in New York? I needed to know if there was a connection.
This need to protect her grew stronger by the minute. I would tell her whatever I found out after but I didn’t want to worry her for nothing. I placed a cooler full of blood bags in the back seat of my sedan and headed out to the lake to pick up Cassius. Even though it was still three more days till the next full moon, I’d also loaded the chains in the trunk just in case. There was a time when I was strong enough to hold him down with my bare hands, but with every shift, he became harder and harder to control. If he would just stop fucking about and find himself a mate, it wouldn’t be as bad.
Back on the road with no driver, it was just me and Cassius on another adventure like the old days. If Lux were here, he’d call me an asshole but come along just so he could taunt me the whole way. He had a knack for talking shit but that was his way of showing love. We were brothers in a sense, the three of us. We’d do anything for each other. I didn’t know what we were going to find in Maplewood. But something told me it was not going to be good.
I fixated on the green olives swirling around in my martini glass, watching them float amidst the tiny ice crystals inside the vodka.
“Raven, you haven’t said a word since we got here. What is going on with you, girl?” Max asked.
I shook my head and took a sip of my drink. “It’s nothing. Sorry I missed brunch on Sunday. Something came up.”
“It’s