Chapter 306: Chapter 306 - You don’t go around kissing your friends

Seraphine tried to turn her head away. If she could just stop staring right at him, maybe she could think clearly.

Maybe she could get her balance back. But he was right there, that sharp jawline, those eyes that had always noticed way too much. He wasn’t about to let her hide inside her own thoughts this time.

"Two days ago," she started, grabbing onto the first real thing she could find, "you asked me to be your friend. Two days, Voren. And now you’re here asking me to be your woman?"

She figured that might make him pause, but it didn’t.

The corner of his mouth lifted just a bit, not a full smile, more like he was pulling back some kind of curtain.

"Asking you to be my friend was really just my way of getting you through the door." His voice got even lower. "You don’t go around kissing your friends, do you, Sera?"

Heat started creeping up the back of her neck and settled into her ears. She knew he could feel it too, the way his eyes dropped to her face and stayed right there.

"Our first kiss," he went on, like he’d gone over this in his head a thousand times or maybe just carried it around long enough that it came out clear and sure, "wasn’t our wolves messing around."

"Bloodfang wanted things I wouldn’t go for. Things I wasn’t about to take from you unless you actually chose them. But that kiss, I let it happen because I wanted it to. Not because my wolf forced anything on me. Because I really wanted to."

He paused, his gaze never leaving hers. "And you know deep down it was the same for you. You’re not the kind of woman who lets some guy she doesn’t feel anything for put his mouth on hers."

Seraphine felt those words crashing into every wall she had quietly put up around herself over the years.

She couldn’t really argue with him. That was the frustrating part. She had never once in her life let a man get that close if there wasn’t something real there.

Seraphine had never been that kind of woman, the type who just let stuff happen without making the choice herself first. And Voren knew it. He had always understood her, even back when she figured she was pretty much invisible to him.

She parted her lips, trying to find something to say, anything at all. "I..."

"If you had pulled away the second our lips touched," Voren cut in quietly. "I would’ve walked away. I would’ve told myself I got it all wrong and I would’ve let you go. But you didn’t pull away, Sera. You responded to it. And the moment you did, I knew."

Something deep in his eyes went completely calm. "You just hadn’t caught up to it in your head yet."

"I tried to pull back right after," she said quickly.

His expression changed, something dry and understanding settling into the lines of his face. "So did I. Every single time."

He pushed himself up a little, giving her a bit more space to breathe, but his eyes stayed locked right on hers. "We’re a lot alike, you and me. We’ve both gotten really good at burying what we actually feel and trying to call it something else."

He let that hang there between them for a second before his jaw tightened.

"When Ravyn sent you that first divorce, I thought, okay. Maybe now. Maybe she’ll finally get some room to breathe." His voice got rougher around the edges.

"Then he showed up at my pack with Daisy. Said all kinds of stuff about you that I won’t even repeat. Things that made me want to punch him in the face. I figured after that, after everything that went down, you’d be finished with it all."

"But you turned down the divorce. You sat there and let him keep all the authority over the pack’s accounts. You let him take pieces of you away bit by bit and you still stayed."

Seraphine’s throat tightened up. She didn’t say anything to interrupt.

"Every time he came back with some new set of conditions, I told myself, this is it, this is the one that finally sets her free." His voice went flat now, not exactly cold, just kind of empty. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

"But every single time, you bent instead of breaking. And I started wondering if maybe the real problem wasn’t you at all. Maybe the problem was me, thinking I even belonged in any of this."

He let out a long breath through his nose. "I told myself I’d rather stay alone than end up as somebody’s second choice. I wasn’t going to be anyone’s backup plan."

Seraphine stared up at the ceiling for a moment before she could make herself look back at him again.

"And then," he continued, something changing in his expression, something that looked a lot like old pain that hadn’t been covered up very well, "he told me he was making Daisy his co-Luna. Said it like the decision was already final."

"Like you didn’t count anymore. I wanted to attend the ceremony to see if you’d really agree, but business took longer than I expected. By the time I got there, it was already over. And then you walked right into me."

His mouth pressed into a tight line. "But you were ice cold, Sera. You looked straight through me. And I thought I’d waited too long. That whatever chance there might have been had already closed up."

Seraphine lay very still under him, taking all of it in. All those years she’d spent staring at Ravyn’s back, hoping he’d turn around and really see her, and somewhere in the background the whole time, Voren had been waiting too. Quietly. Stubbornly. Fighting his own silent battle.

Did it hurt, realizing that?

Yeah. It did. A little more than she wanted to admit right then.

She let out a breath. "I stayed because of Bryan. You know that." Her voice came out quieter than she meant it to.

"But that last condition... I just couldn’t do it. I was stuck in bed for months after what happened with that chemical attack. Months, Voren. Daisy set that whole thing up and I still ended up saving the pack, and Ravyn never once came through that door to see how I was doing. Not even one time."

Her eyes hardened a little. "And then it all happened again recently, the same woman, the same kind of move, and here I am all over again." She stopped for a second. "But you... after everything, after the divorce, you never showed me anything either. You stood there and asked me to give Daisy my blood. My blood, Voren."

She was so angry that she pushed him off her with all her might. It didn’t work but Voren respectfully rolled to the side, guilt weighing heavily on him.