Matebranded, p.18
Matebranded, page 18
“Celeste,” I said, forcing myself to forget her father and step inside. “Do you want something to drink? Are you hungry?”
It was hard to act human when the jut of Celeste’s chin and the redness of her cheeks promised she remained furious. I wanted to tell her to hit me. Wanted to fall to my knees and promise to be a better sister. Promise that I’d make everything up to her, that I’d never betray her again.
Celeste’s purpose other than anger, though, was unclear. Because she just shook her head stiffly in response to my questions, ignoring Orion as he retreated into the kitchen to gather the snacks she’d refused and give us a little privacy. Then, without bothering with greetings, she dove right into what she’d clearly come here to say.
“When you left, I got curious. Well, first I got mad, then I got curious.”
I wanted to apologize again, but something told me now wasn’t the time. So I just nodded and listened as Celeste explained how she’d pored over security footage from the night I’d visited. Had noted the fact that I’d gone into Julius’s office and stayed there for longer than it took to read the journal she’d also quickly tracked down on the shelf behind his desk.
“It was obviously fake,” she observed, cheeks even redder than they’d been a moment earlier.
I was so intent upon monitoring my sister’s fury that it took me a moment to respond to her words. “Wait, what?”
“His notes are supposed to be over two decades old,” Celeste pointed out as if stating the obvious, “and the paper was cheap. Not acid-free. But it hadn’t yellowed.”
“I...didn’t notice that.” Although now, in retrospect, I remembered that the journal’s cover had been stiff and unscuffed rather than soft around the edges. Not what you’d expect from a lab notebook someone wrote in at intervals over the course of weeks and months.
Celeste shrugged. “Notebooks aren’t your thing. Hidden compartments are. So I looked for those next.”
“You found the documents in the ceiling beam.”
“Those and the ones under the loose floorboard.”
Could I really have missed something as basic as a floor compartment? Yes, I could have. I’d searched until I found the information about my past and my parents’ past, then I’d had no thoughts other than to retreat as quickly as possible from the house that had never been my home.
Now, I swallowed, trying to understand why Celeste had come here. She didn’t seem to want to talk about that yet, so I nudged her back onto the conversational path she’d been following. “What was under the floor?”
“You didn’t know?” Celeste’s tense shoulders loosened just the tiniest bit. And for the first time I realized that she wasn’t angry with me. Or at least, not only with me.
I shook my head while Orion brought in a plate of cheese and crackers along with an armload of bottled drinks. He paused for a moment along the way, testing the soil of the potted cactus he’d sent me two weeks earlier along with a page of instructions that amounted to ignoring the plant for its own good.
I hadn’t been able to ignore the plant, though. It reminded me of Orion, so I’d watered it. And watered it again. And now it was looking sickly and yellow.
Orion raised one eyebrow, and at first I thought he was berating me for my lack of a green thumb. Then he glanced at Celeste and I realized he was asking me something entirely different—should he make himself scarce?
“Stay,” Celeste answered his wordless query, sinking onto the end of a couch that was entirely coated in wolf hair. When I hesitated, she patted the seat beside her. “I’m not going to bite. Not you at least.”
My sister’s legs tucked under her and I was so tempted to settle down knee-to-knee the way we’d whispered secrets to each other as children. But then she readjusted to face forward and I took the obvious spot mirroring her, six inches of air and so many of my mistakes holding us apart.
“The thing is,” Celeste said, “Julius is my father. But I was an experiment just like you were an experiment. In vitro fertilization after manipulation of my genome.”
There were so many possibilities opened up by that assertion and it was hard to focus on any of them when Celeste’s body language raised a lump in my throat. “I need the punchline,” I said after a moment of loaded silence.
She nodded. “Punchline it is then.”
Rather than speaking immediately though, she swallowed so loudly I was pretty sure even Orion could hear. Then her words were mouse quiet as she admitted:
“I’m a wolf. Like you. And I’m not the only one.”
I hope you enjoyed Matebranded! If so, Elspeth’s story continues in Shadowmated, now available for preorder and due to launch in June 2024. For a sneak peek, simply turn the page.
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Thank you so much for reading. You are why I write!
What's a werewolf to do when tattoos dole out dating advice?
Once, I blindly followed the orders of a shadowy Council. No more. These days I'm on a quest with my estranged sister to free kidnapped shifter children before they're taught to disdain their own kind.
Trouble is, the frozen tattoos from my broken mate bond keep interfering, trying to once again intertwine my fate with that of the alpha protector Orion. Worse, a matching mark has appeared on my sister, irrationally linking her to a dangerously charming stranger we rescued along the way.
As manipulative Old Magic threatens to override our free will, can we save the experimented-upon youngsters? Or will compulsions from our mystical tattoos draw us back into the clutches of enemies we worked so hard to leave behind?
Preorder your copy of Shadowmated here.
Aimee Easterling, Matebranded
