26. Daphne

CHAPTER 26

DAPHNE

F or the third time in less than twelve hours, I woke up without my bearings.

When my eyelids peeled open this time, a bright light was streaming in from a massive window beside me, and the room was abuzz with various beeping and whirring sounds. When I glanced down at my body, I was happy to see that I was no longer bound, but there was an IV sticking into one of my arms. My head was pounding, and it was a struggle to keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time, but I sensed I was safe.

When a warm, familiar hand slid into mine, I felt even safer.

“Rory,” I said softly, trying to look at him but not doing a very good job.

“Shh. I’m here. You’re in the hospital. They are trying to flush the drugs out of your system and make sure that you don’t have any internal injuries. Can you tell me if Missy hurt you in any way?”

I shook my head slowly. “I just… I got banged up in the car.”

“Anything hurt right now?”

“No… I don’t think so.”

“Alright, I’ll let the nurse know.” He used his other hand to push some hair out of my face, and I let my head fall into his palm. “You can go back to sleep now. You need your rest.”

I smacked my lips together, getting ready to argue, but it was like when Rory said the word ‘sleep,’ he had put some spell on me. I held on tight to his hand and promptly slipped back into dreamland.

“Okay, it’s been long enough. I feel a lot better. Can we please talk about what the fuck happened back there already?”

It had been almost an hour since I’d woken up for good, and it seemed as if Rory was looking for an excuse to put off the conversation we so clearly needed to have. First, he insisted on me taking it easy and not taxing myself. Then he went to find the nurse to come check on me. And lastly, he went to the cafeteria to purchase a variety of snacks, even though I’d told him I wasn’t even hungry. Now that he was back by my bedside and out of reasons to stall, I reached for his hand again and dragged him down into the chair next to me.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s talk. There’s literally nothing else for us to do while we wait for the doctor to come back and discharge me.”

“Yeah, I know… But…” He looked around nervously. “I was hoping they would admit you into an actual room so we would have more privacy.”

“There’s no one around, and we’ll talk quietly.”

He sighed but nodded his head. “Alright, alright. We can talk about this now. Where do you want to start?”

“Uh, how about with the fact that you’re also a fucking werewolf!” I said in a soft but stern voice. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not a werewolf.”

I rolled my eyes, shocked at his audacity. “You can’t seriously think that you can gaslight me when I literally saw you turn from a wolf back into a human.”

“No, I’m not trying to gaslight you.” He squeezed my hand. “I would never do that. I just meant that I’m something else. It’s called a shifter, and we are different from werewolves in a few ways. We don’t have the same rules, so to speak.”

“Shifter…” I frowned. “That sounds… familiar. I think the psychic in town mentioned shifters when I went back to him after my first transformation.”

“I’m sure he did. If he knew about werewolves, then he definitely knew about shifters. We are a lot more common because we haven’t been hunted to near extinction like werewolves.”

“Why not? Are you not as dangerous?”

“Sort of yes, sort of no,” he said. “In some ways, we can be more dangerous because we can shift whenever we want and tend to run in much larger packs. But on the other hand, we have a lot more control over the wolf side, whereas wolves like you don’t. For that one night every month, you really do become the most violent version of yourself. There are ways to train for it, to get better at not going totally berserk, but it takes a lot of work. Throughout history, werewolves have brought a lot more attention to themselves by accidentally killing people and not being able to hide it. Hence, why there are so few these days.”

“Okay…” My brain still felt a little fuzzy from the drugs, but I was pretty sure I followed what he was saying. “So you don’t change on the full moon. You just change whenever you want to?”

“Yes.”

“And you can change back when you want to?”

“Yes.”

“And then, are you born as a shifter?”

“Yes to that as well.”

“And that’s not something someone can be turned into?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I’ve only ever heard of curses that turn someone into a werewolf, like you, but not a shifter. Then again, there are a lot of crazy things that go on in this world that I don’t know about, so who knows?”

I laughed. “Ain't that the truth.”

“Changing someone into a shifter sounds more like a gift than a curse, not to sound like a pompous ass.”

My smile widened. “I’m pretty sure I said something very similar to the psychic.” Then I frowned again. “But I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me any of this last night. It would’ve been nice to know that I wasn’t completely alone in all of this craziness. ”

“I know. And I wanted to give you that sense of security, but…” He trailed off.

I drew in a deep breath. “I don’t think you realize how scared I was to tell you the truth, and when you took off like that… I didn’t know what to think. I thought I might never see you again.”

He looked away, visibly upset. “It was wrong of me to do that. I felt fucking awful about it, and that was even before I learned that you had been taken. Now, it feels like the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I almost lost you.”

When he looked back at me, I saw that his eyes were moist, and it was obvious that he was telling the truth—that he might never forgive himself for not staying with me last night.

“Then what sent you running?”

“My family.”

“Hmm?”

“The reason I left without telling you the truth,” he explained. “Was because it’s not just me that I have to worry about. My friends—the only people in the world that I can still call family—they are shifters, too. In case you haven’t already put that together. They have just as much to lose as I do if the wrong person were to find out the truth about us. I didn’t feel comfortable making the decision for them, and I was worried that there would be no way to just tell you the truth about me and not have you suspect them of being shifters as well.”

I thought about this for a second and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. You’re probably right about that. I would’ve likely made the leap. But that doesn’t mean I would do anything to hurt them! It took a lot out of me, revealing the truth to you like that. It would’ve been nice if you shared your secret with me in return. You hurt me. Just leaving like that.”

“I know. I’m so sorry. I was shocked, worried, I needed to process. I needed to warn my family. And I handled it all wrong. I wish I had stayed with you.” He raised a single brow. “But, to be fair, you didn’t trust me with all your secrets, either. Not that that’s an excuse for me leaving.”

I drew back against the lumpy pillow behind my head. “What are you talking about?”

“Nic did some research on you,” he admitted. “She found out that you were lying about who you were. That your real name is Daphne Pearl and that your parents are on the run from the IRS.”

“Oh.” I gently took my hand out of his. “That.”

He laughed. “Yes. That little white lie.”

“I was going to tell you,” I said, sounding a little more defensive than I meant to. “But for the same reason that you wanted to protect your friends, I also wanted to protect my family. I’m not nearly as close to them as you are to your friends, but they’re still my kin. If you were to find out who I was and take that information to the police, they could try to use me to find my parents. My sister. I couldn’t risk that.”

“I understand. But I would never put you in that position.” He took my hand again. “Please tell me you know that now.”

I smiled through the tears that were now falling down the sides of my face. “Yes. I do. And I hope you know that I would never do anything to put you or your friends in harm’s way.”

“I do.”

We shared a smile, and then a wave of exhaustion washed over me with little warning. I must’ve looked tired, too, because Rory had the nurse come back around to double-check that I was okay.

“This is common with the cocktail of drugs she was dosed with,” the nurse said after giving me a once-over. “Your test results came back about an hour ago, and the doctor will review everything and hopefully come see you shortly. Oh, and the cops are waiting to speak to you in the lobby.”

“Can they wait a little while?” Rory asked. “She needs more rest, and you know they are just going to force her to relive the whole ordeal.”

“That’s fine. She can take all the time she needs,” the nurse said. “But you need to come out and give your statement, sir.”

He nodded, and she left.

I shot him a worried look once we were alone. “What are you going to tell them?”

“That Missy kidnapped and drugged you, had plans to sell you on the black market,” he said.

“But—”

“I’m not going to mention which market she was planning on putting you in,” he quickly added. “She can decide how crazy she wants to make herself look when they arrest her. If she goes ranting and raving about how you are a werewolf and that’s why she took you, they will just think she’s nuts and probably institutionalize her.”

“You mean she could get off without any jail time?”

“It’s possible. But don’t worry. No matter what happens with her, I’m never going to let you get hurt again, you hear me?”

I smiled and wiped a couple of tears from my cheeks. “Yeah. I hear you.” He looked at me for a second longer and then walked behind the curtain and was gone.

“And I love you,” I whispered to the curtain.