Page 32 of The Florist and Her Alphas

“Sometimes and sometimes I have to be a free therapist for customers,” I say, telling him about the woman who orders peonies seasonally and once cried in my front room when she told me why. I tell him about how I chose the sage paint for the door because my grandmother had a door that color on her garden shed, and how I found the mahogany counter at an estate sale in Red Hook and dragged it up onto the subway on a dolly by myself.

I stop.

I have been talking for approximately ten uninterrupted minutes. My face is hot.

“I’m sorry,” I say, to my hands. “I’m boring you.”

“You’re not,” he says immediately.

“I’m talking about my life like you actually care.”

He sets the anemone down. He looks up. His eyes are steady, patient, and very direct. “Liana. I care.”

My heart skips a beat, and my palms shake.

“When you talk about your shop, your whole face changes,” he says with a smile. “It’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a long time. Not many people have something they’re passionate about.”

I look down at the stem in my hands.

I do not know what to do with that. I condition three more anemones in silence, and Cole conditions three more beside me, and the radiator ticks, and the record player is off this morning because I forgot to start it, and the quiet is surprisingly easy to be inside.

“My family was murdered.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to…,” he says, trying to give me an out from my blunt statement. But I don’t want to stop talking.

It feels like the floodgates have opened, my body knowing instinctively that I could trust him.

“Six years ago,” I say. “When I was eighteen. All of them. My parents, my uncle, my grandmother. In one night. There were guests. I was outside in the garden with my grandmother, weeding the peonies.”

I stop, my voice level. I’m surprised by how calm I sound.

“What happened?” asks Cole, going still as he watches me.

“A man found me. An older alpha named Magnus,” I say. Saying it still feels strange, like pressing a bruise to check if it still hurts. It does. “I don’t know his pack name. I lived with them for three years. Then, when he died, I left during his funeral. There was cash in his study. I took it. I came here. I built this and worked here for three years.”

When I finally look up, Cole is not looking at the anemones. He is looking at me. His face is controlled and very serious.

“They couldn’t claim you,” he says.

I go still. “How do you know that?”

“Because the scar on your arm and collarbone shows failed claiming attempts,” he says, voice careful. “A mark heals instantly. The marks on your skin aren’t healed.”

“Yes, they tried to claim me,” I say, very quietly. “A lot of times.”

He puts down the anemone. He moves around the end of the workbench to my side of the table. He stops. A careful arm’s length away. Close enough that I can smell him. The scent of black tea, cool and clean, wafts around me. Calming me.

“May I look at your arm?” he says. “Just look. I won’t touch you.”

I bite my lip. I never deliberately show my scars to anyone, but I silently lift my left arm. I push the sleeve back to the crook of my elbow. The scar is there in the early dawn light — silvery, jagged, brutal. Four attempts layered over each other, the bites overlapping where Magnus and his pack returned to the same spot and tried multiple times.

It’s not pretty.

But Cole looks at it without wincing or looking away. He studies it with the same careful attention he gave to my roses, my bell jar, my shop.

“He bit you four times in that same spot,” he says.

I blink. “How can you tell?”