Page 50 of Crave

“Not a clue. From what I could gather, he had to pull strings to get them to agree to this at all. Wanted a big crowd, I guess in case they need to cut and run.”

I scooped up another steaming bite of vegetable tikka masala with my naan, the rich flavor of tomatoes and cream exploding on my tongue. “I don’t like going in there blind.”

“We don’t have any choice. If we want the information, they set the terms.” Brow furrowed, Dallas pushed aside the gleaming copper dish of lamb curry. “We’ve been best friends for ten years. You picked out all the paint colors in my house. I’m psychologically pre-conditioned to hate any desserts that aren’t yours. I’ve kept that freaking orchid in my office—”

“Saffron.”

“—because it makes your face light up like a sunbeam the second you walk through my door. This not talking thing doesn’t work for me.”

“My text history begs to differ.”

“You’ve been avoiding me and I’ve been keeping tabs on you every day with BBQ deliveries. That’s not talking. Not when we’re both avoiding the elephant in the room.”

Was it true? Was it possible I’d kept myself preoccupied for weeks on purpose just to avoid this conversation we’d both known was inevitable? “Guillermo will never tell the Tracers to restore my mother’s memory. Or anyone else’s. It’s not hard to understand why. Everything the werewolf council has covered up for the past forty years has happened on his orders.”

“So we go around him. We go to River, see if we can get him to tell us the name of the Tracer who actually performed the rewrite.”

I leaned across the table. “Even if I thought River would go against your uncle, which I don’t, it’s too dangerous right now. There’s a mole on the Council. We have no idea who we can trust.”

Dallas rubbed the faint silver scar at the crease of his lip, lowering his voice until it was barely audible over the din of busboys stacking plates over by the stairs. “My goddamn uncle is the bastard in charge of this entire territory and my brother is his henchman. And damn straight I’m not going to rest until I convince them they’re wrong on this. The wolf’s out of the bag. The public knows we exist now and there’s no going back. There’s no keeping this a secret, and continuing to hurt innocent people like your mom or Hayden’s sister because we’re lying to ourselves and pretending it buys us a few more days or weeks isn’t any way I want to survive.”

I stared across the table at him, chest heaving. No way was I telling him I’d nearly gone before the full Council yesterday, tried to negotiate a deal to free my mother’s memories. I’d made it an hour south of Plano before my phone buzzed with a pissed off text, demanding to know what the hell I was thinking. I’d pulled over. We’d talked. And what had followed had been one of the longest and weirdest conversations I’d ever had with River. I wasn’t sure what he was being forced to do on the Council. But something definitely wasn’t right.

Was it a mercy, River had asked, to be able to forget? Maybe that was what he told himself in the seconds before he stole threads of people’s lives. But memory was a hazy mirror with no sharp edges, only endless surfaces to drown in. And every time I forgot and let an oven door slam too hard, caught the shadow of an unfamiliar figure crossing beneath the awning on the sidewalk outside and heard my mother’s pulse spike, I knew. There was no forgetting. The werewolf community, in our desperation to survive the coming war with humans, a conflict in which we were far outnumbered, infinitely outmatched in terms of firepower and military might, and with no way to hide save for disappearing into crowds that would turn on us with clubs and silver-loaded firearms in a heartbeat, had failed to question whether some acts came at too great a cost. Whether at some point we’d become the monsters they’d made us out to be.

I thought of River’s warning. Don’t defy the Council. You don’t know what you’re playing at. You’re like a sister to me. I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to you.

“We should wait, talk to your brother before we do anything.”

Dallas frowned, but nodded. “Okay. I’ll follow your lead. And if that means you and I have to stay a secret for the time being, to make things safe for Juliet, then we’ll do whatever it takes. I just want to be with you, Lacey.”

He stroked my fingers, the bond humming between us. Pulse quickening, I stared at the flickering tea lights, heart hammering in my chest. “We wouldn’t tell anyone, you mean.”

“It wouldn’t be like that. My family would know. The pack would know.”

I balled my cloth napkin into a knot under the table. Dallas could be so blindly hopeful sometimes, and right now, all he was seeing were the possibilities. A way we could finally be together no matter how improbable or fraught with risks that solution might be. Not me in five years, still sneaking out of my studio apartment for late-night hookups. Not me lying to my mother just like I did now while he got to tell his family the truth. Christmases and birthdays spent apart. Me, watching the town’s Fourth of July fireworks display alone from my mother’s picnic blanket, while pretending not to notice Dallas and his brothers sitting a few yards away with boxes of fried chicken and buttery corn. A future without any possibility of children, shared homes or shared lives. Without any possibility of us.

And I knew in that instant if I said yes, it would always be this way. Sneaking around. Lying. Being Dallas’s dirty little secret.

Just like I’d been Ethan’s.

“I don’t want to keep living a lie. I want it to be real.”

All the candles in the room seemed to flicker at once, a cold draft ghosting in from the open fire escape in the corner leading up to the street.

Dallas leaned across the table, biceps stretching the expensive fabric of his dress shirt. “It wouldn’t be forever. Just until we can figure out a way to bypass the Council.”

The condensation edging my water glass began to blur, and I realized with a start I was crying. Dallas swore.

“Lacey—”

He rose from his chair, forced to duck under the low ceiling as he came around the table towards me. I shook my head, needing to get out of there, needing to breathe.

In the restroom, I pressed cool paper towels to the back of my neck, trying to calm down. My phone chimed. I blinked back a fresh wave of tears and swiped the screen, assuming it was Dallas.

But it wasn’t.

West: You okay? Sorry I didn’t call earlier. Picked up that thing you asked for. You’re welcome, btw.