In reality, the choice had been made nights earlier, and she knew what she was going to do. Back when she’d been walking arm-in-arm with Kayla to her car that night, Sunday made a wish. A single, stupid wish to see him again. With that wish, she made herself a promise. If she ever saw him again, she would do something about it. She would give herself a chance because she deserved it. Fate mapped the Incarnate’s life and Fate dropped this hulking werewolf into her lap. For once, she wasn’t running from it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was either the worst mistake he could ever make or the best decision of his life to have followed her so obviously. For a long minute, she stood, wheels visibly turning in her mind, debating whether to keep walking out that door or to confront him. He was smiling like an oaf and he knew it. It had been so long since had been filled with such anticipation that he chose to embrace it. She stood there too long to be doing anything but imagining every possible outcome to the scenario. He didn’t read minds or sense emotions, but she was transparent. At least, right then, she was to him.
Even so, it was a shock when she, with a furrowed brow and clenched jaw, finally turned and stalked toward him. He’d turned back so that she wouldn’t have seen him looking at her, but he doubted that she didn’t know. She took the seat beside him and dumped her purse at her feet. Crossing her legs away from him, she pressed her back firmly into the chair and stared at the screen. If she were anything but annoyed, he wouldn’t have been able to pick up on it. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to, but she had, and now, she was stuck with her decision.
She chewed her popcorn as though she was racing to win some prize. Her breaths were forced sighs. She fidgeted in her seat, crossing and re-crossing her legs, slouching, and then erecting herself back into a tense, firm posture. The theatricality of it all was unbelievable.
The ever-feared, ever-revered god-woman of death and destruction. The woman who possessed power over nature and man. The wielder of a wrath so terrible that she’d destroyed the estate and all who’d resided at it. That same Incarnate. This was a woman who, as a child, he’d carried to her bed after almost two weeks of torture at the hands of the most powerful, evil witches ever known to have existed. This was a woman who, as a child, had endured more physical and psychic pain than anyone he’d ever met who’d lived to be centuries older. Yet, at this moment, she was bubbling with nerves. She’d handled demons. Real, from Hell, child eating demons. She’d created wind and lightning storms. However improbable, sitting next to him made her writhe. He lavished in every second of it, keeping a steady gaze on Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray while wholly focused on Sunday in his periphery.
“You going to sit there making a nuisance of yourself for the rest of this movie?” he teased. Never moving his eyes from the screen, he watched from the corner of his eye as a scowl formed across her face, pinching her nose at the bridge. She continued to stare ahead, just as he did.
“I have a stomach ache,” she snapped, shoveling another fistful of popcorn into her mouth.
“I don’t think the popcorn’s helping.”
She huffed as she chewed and grabbed her soda to wash it down. Cyrus took it from the armrest cup holder as soon as she’d drawn her hand from it and took a sip for himself. With a jolt, she sat up in her seat and turned her entire body to face him. Soda still in-hand, Cyrus relaxed into his backrest and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Problem?” he asked. His expression masked the humor beneath it. He was trying her, standing his ground. He was a dominant wolf, just as dominant, and probably more so than his pack’s Alpha.
Sunday’s eyes followed his hand as he tilted the cup and drew the straw back between his lips. The werewolf took a long, deliberate slurp from the cup. He swirled what was left of the drink, and shook the cup so that she heard the ice resettle at the bottom.
“Want some more?” he asked.
Even though she hadn’t replied, Cyrus rose from his seat and stepped over her legs on his way into the aisle. “Be right back,” he said over his shoulder. He walked through the exit and left her sitting alone.
With the werewolf gone, Sunday’s entire body relaxed. She tossed the popcorn box, which by this point held little more than unpopped kernels and burned pieces, into the seat next to her and drew her feet onto her seat so she could press her forehead into her knees. She had acted badly and she’d hated every moment that she hadn’t been able to control her frustration. Sunday didn’t like not being in possession of her own will. She was deliberate in everything she did, as she had to be. It was self-preservation and the fear of hurting anyone else that held her together. But the closer she had gotten to the werewolf as she’d made her way past the empty seats had made her regret the decision to approach him.
One of her gifts had always been her ability to read people like the open books they so often avoided being, yet the closer she got to the man, doubts entered her mind about whether or not she was being too aggressive. She could approach any man with absolutely no doubt as to whether or not he had wanted her to. Coyness and insecurity around men was strange for her. Sitting beside this man, though,
this one man
, she fumbled. Lost all self-assurance. She had to keep telling herself that she was
supposed
to find him, that there was some reason behind this rare and extraordinary attraction. Things like this didn’t just happen if they weren’t supposed to.
She had decided to take the bull by the horns and meet it head-on, but so quickly, she lost her gall. After the longest ten minutes of her life, she’d bothered him so much that he’d gotten up with the excuse of going to the concession stand. He might as well have said he was going to the bathroom and made a quick escape. She was certain that she’d scared him off.
Her
scaring
a werewolf
off by acting like an imbecile.
I must’ve really gone around the bend,
she chided herself.
Feeling all the shame of rejection and self-loathing for giving this man no other option than running for the door, she gathered her purse from the floor and walked out of the theater. She was utterly and completely stunned to find him paying for a soda at the counter of the concession stand. Her mouth was agape when he turned to see her, eyebrows gathered with a look of confusion slapped across his face.
“You going to the bathroom?” he asked. His tone was nothing short of defeated. His whole graveling rumble of
I don’t think the popcorn’s helping,
and
Problem?,
as if she’d been an asshole for assaulting his movie-going experience with the audacity of her neurosis, was gone. In its place was a voice that had come out almost as a whimper. He needed reassurance that she wasn’t leaving him behind. Before she could think of a lie or an excuse, she nodded and pointed in the direction opposite the one in which she was headed.
“It’s over there,” she sheepishly admitted. “Oops.”
She hung her head and released her shoulders, turning back for the ladies’ room. She spun around. He was standing in front of the door that led into the movie. He was watching to make sure she wasn’t going to jet out of the theater.
“You coming back?” he asked. Though he’d regained some semblance of certainty, she could sense the underlying need for her reassurance again.
When she nodded, he walked back into their theater, looking over his shoulder to her once more before disappearing into the low-lit room.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After the movie, they agreed to have drinks at the Coalmine, a nearby bar. She was nervous. If he hadn’t been able to smell it like the werewolf he was, he would have still been able to pick up on it by her demeanor. She shot glances over his shoulder and shook her head while deliberating. Her cheeks were permanently blushed. It made things
real
. It made things seem almost normal, like they were two normal people who just met and found themselves instantly attracted to one another. It was new for Cyrus, and he was betting that, by her behavior, it was new for Sunday, too. Of all the impossible things he had encountered in his life, this was the most impossible of all. And he wanted her to want it just as much as he did.
“Are you going to lie to me and tell me you’re not a werewolf?” she asked.
He shook his head and leaned across the table. Her question came as a shock. It ripped him from the reverie he had never foreseen himself falling into. Here he was, the hunter impassioned by fury and rage to track down the one thing in this world he couldn’t understand, sitting across from the flirtatious grin and the cocked eyebrow of the one that got away, the one he had sworn an oath to himself to eliminate. Despite all that, Cyrus couldn’t help himself but to smile.
Like this, it was easy for him to forget the powerhouse she was. Like this, Cyrus could believe that the Incarnate was just a part of her past, a part that had long since lain dormant. But he knew better. The Incarnate threatened everything about the world in which they lived, a world that straddled the fence between the mundane and the magical. It was a fragile boundary, and the Incarnate was foretold as the harbinger of its obliteration.
It was hard to believe that the woman who smiled shyly and bit her lip could unleash a cataclysm by sheer will. This was a woman whose eyes sparkled with humor. It was also a woman who pricked with a bit of fear. She could have been the slightest bit fearful when the reality fully dawned on her that
she’s decided to get drinks with a werewolf.
And she might have been, after all, but she was more excited to be with him.
If he had to force himself to set aside everything he knew about what she really was all night, Cyrus would. He would leave the worry for later. Cyrus didn’t waste a second indulging the conundrum tonight.
“You’re blushing, wolf,” Sunday teased before looking down to the napkin soaking up the sweat of her pint glass and nervously tearing at the corner of it. Bringing her eyes back up after a pause, she crinkled her nose. “You don’t seem like you do much blushing. You’re out of practice.”
Her attention to it only made Cyrus blush more. He brought up his hands and fought with his beard, combing it down, and clearing his throat before addressing her question.
“I hadn’t planned on lying to you at all,” he replied. The lie bit into Cyrus’ cheek, but the sting of it was quickly soothed by Sunday’s painted lips curling into a grin.
“So what truths are you planning on telling me, Cyrus?”
The sound of his name had never stirred such appreciation in him. On her lips, his name was his favorite song. She was talking to him, addressing him, and using his name to let him know it. He leaned back into his seat, another deep breath escaping his lungs. What truths
could
he tell her? What lies was he willing to avoid having to tell if it meant that he could sustain this moment with her?
He shook his head, entertained by the incredible situation he found himself in. The dreams of retaliating against her for the years of torment she made him to suffer were a distant memory replaced only by the immediacy of their present situation. Cyrus was fully aware that each second he spent with Sunday only added to the difficulty he would have in facing his objective, but he couldn’t stop himself. From the moment she’d leveled her gaze on him at the club, he was done for. The objective, his contract, and the ire that drove him to hate her for the decade prior had been his sole purpose for living. Now, he was lost due to a most unprecedented wrinkle.
Her.
“Ah,” Sunday said, biting her lip and her expression falling under a veil of disappointment. “I see the un-truths are going to be the crux of any conversation we have. What with all the difficulty you’re having in coming up with something true worth talking about.”
“You gonna tell me how you knew I was a werewolf?”
Cyrus watched Sunday’s expressions carefully. The grin never left her lips. The sparkle never left her eyes. He would never be a mind reader. He would never know what it was like to tick off the list of every thought in someone else’s head. But god, how much he wanted to know what she was thinking. After a pause that lasted for much too long, Sunday finally blinked and answered.
“I was trying to be civil. Give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren’t trying to shine me into being a willing entrée or something.”
She was all playfulness and sass. She betrayed nothing of her nature and nothing of her gifts. This was who the fourteen-year-old in the backseat of the car had grown into, and he could see it now, the same attitude with the edginess and false pride of adolescence pushed aside by maturity. “You know how you werewolves are.”
He laughed at her assessment.
“Thank you,” Cyrus said softly under his breath.
“For what?” Sunday looked genuinely confused, but regardless, smiled encouragingly.
For letting this happen,
he wanted to respond.
For letting this ride.
She wasn’t running from a werewolf, and she wasn’t dredging up a history that would interfere with their flirting. He wanted to say something, but he said nothing. There’s only so much power that Cyrus would allow the Incarnate to have, and offering her just that small admission was more than he was willing to part with. Nonetheless, he meant it. If it meant they could talk more, then he would let her take jabs at his curse, a curse that weighed on him more and more every day that he didn’t
just die
. For the first time in his life, Cyrus didn’t hate it. He would endure all of the torture and torment because it let him live long enough to find Sunday again. This woman who was, for too long, the bane of his existence had become something totally new. If he’d harbored any doubt in the days since their most recent encounter, he was certain of it now. Sunday was his mate.
“You’re the one playing me, Sunday. If that’s even your real name.”
He tipped his glass pointedly to her before taking another swig of whisky.
“That’s rich, Cyrus. Really rich. Fine then, if you’re not planning to eat me, then why don’t you tell me a little about yourself. What kinds of things do you like? What kinds of things do you do for fun? Or for work? So,
Cyrus,
tell me about Cyrus.”