Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,123
because I’d known it’d make Dad wince the way it had just now. Mom set down her coffee, knitting her brow. “You should feel like the apartment is completely yours, hon. We don’t want to stifle you.”
“I know.” My hands fell to my lap, and I twisted one of the glass beads on the charm bracelet they’d given me for my tenth birthday and that I’d added to every year since. Each charm was a symbol of a love or a dream I’d shared with them. Why couldn’t they understand this longing? “All you have to do is look out the window to see who’s coming and going. Sound travels up. Even if you’re not trying to monitor what I’m doing, I can’t forget that you’re right here.”
“All right,” Dad said. “That’s fair enough. Maybe we should have taken that more into consideration. And then cons?”
I held back a grimace. He wasn’t going to let me fudge this list. “I’ll be spending money I could otherwise be saving. If I have a few bad months in selling my figurines, I’ll have to dip into the savings I already have. I won’t be able to just pop up here and grab something to eat if I’m feeling hungry and lazy, but maybe that’s a good thing?”
“It won’t be as safe,” Mom said. “You’d be living around strangers.”
“I’m going to have to sometime, aren’t I?”
“It’ll be extra stress when you have your studies to focus on,” she went on. “And you’ll have a lot more pressure to keep going with your current job because you need that money, even if you decide you want to try something new that’s more of a risk. In some ways, you’ll have less freedom.”
“It’s not that we’re trying to keep you here forever, Rory,” Dad said. “We just want to make sure you get the best start we can give you. Why not wait another couple years until you can really launch a career for yourself, and in the meantime we can try to find ways to help you feel more independent here?”
It was hard to argue with that. There were tons of cons. I didn’t know how to express how important the one main pro was to me in a way they’d accept without hurting them a whole lot more than I wanted to.
As I bit my lip in thought, Mom smiled, her voice falling into the softer lilting tone it often did when she was about to work her magic. “I know you’ve been getting a little stir-crazy, wanting to do some traveling too, so I thought we could finally take that trip to New York City this summer—see the Met and MoMA.”
Her words did exactly what she’d intended. A spark of delight lit in my chest at the idea of jetting across the country to some of the most respected art galleries in the country. We’d done a bit of traveling as a family before, but only within the state.
With that joy came a knot of guilt as well. I was already planning my own solo trip—a week in Florence, Italy to see all the amazing galleries and architecture there—and I didn’t need parental sign-off to do that. I hadn’t decided yet whether I was going to wait to tell them until I was heading out the door or not until I was actually on the plane. Telling them now, months in advance, would only mean more arguing.
Mom couldn’t feel the guilt, though. As a mage, she drew on joyful feelings to perform her magic, so she was finely attuned to only that aspect of my emotions. With a soft murmur and a flick of her hand, she set my cooled coffee steaming again. A bit of comfort to ease the sting of their disagreement.
“Thanks,” I said. “And that trip sounds fantastic.”
“I’m looking forward to it too,” Dad said with a grin. “I’ll see if the Conclave has any special projects I can take on. I expect we’ll have plenty of energy to work with.”
He was a mage too. The two of them could turn any joy they stirred up in each other or me—or anyone else we ran into—into power. Dad’s specialty was healing. Around his ordinary accounting job, he volunteered at a nearby hospital, nudging people’s recovery along. Always be open to happiness, he’d told me when I was little, half playful and half serious. Every time I make you smile, it could save someone’s life.