Page 37 of An Unending Claim
Savannah was silent until I finally looked at her again. “We both have a two-ton container of baggage following us. And I’m not saying you haven’t had legitimate reasons for keeping your past from Nathan, but…”
When she trailed off, I jumped in after a quick scan of the area. “Can we talk somewhere else? I actually told Nathan I was coming to see you, so this is the first place he’ll look.”
Savannah sighed. “I’d call you a coward for running from him, but that would simply be the pot calling the kettle a fucked-up mess. Besides”—she shrugged as she stepped back from the door and ushered me in—“it’s kind of nice to know you’re human.” She paused, then added, “Ish.”
She motioned for me to come in and went back to the bedroom. The pack had several small, one-bedroom cabins that they maintained for situations where someone needed a temporary home. Emerald was in a similar one just down the street. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Savannah hadn’t attempted to put down roots in Silver Lake yet, but if she didn’t want to talk about it, I wasn’t going to pester her. Asher did enough of that to drive her insane.
Savannah returned to the main room with a stack of clothes and threw them to me. We were similar in height, though her bone structure was more delicate than mine. So she’d brought leggings and a sweater, warm socks, and then tossed me a scarf and jacket. Over the last week, the temperature had dropped to typical numbers for winter in upstate New York. The cold didn’t affect Nathan much, but I’d taken to wearing warmer clothes and sometimes a coat. However, we had to dress more appropriately when we were mingling with humans.
“Where should we go?” I queried as I pulled on the outfit.
“You don’t have a place in mind?”
I shook my head, then bent down to pull on the boots she’d taken from the front closet. They were a tad snug, but not so much that I couldn’t wear them for now. “The falls seems like too obvious a choice, and I don’t know the rest of the area very well.”
“Good point.” Savannah shrugged on a denim jacket over her long-sleeved T-shirt. “There’s a beautiful path into the forest preserve about a quarter of a mile from here.”
“Sounds good.”
Once we were both clothed, we set off on our walk. I spotted Allison’s wolf the second we exited the front door and lifted my chin in acknowledgment. I figured Nathan had kept a guard on me at all times. Not that it would keep him from lecturing me about leaving “alone.”
Savannah waited until we’d entered the woods before bringing up our previous conversation.
“I want to ask you something before we go back to our other conversation,” she started.
“Go for it.”
She hesitated and I glanced at her curiously. “Why are you fighting your feelings for the Alpha? I can see the desire to stay growing. What is it that keeps you from exploring your wolf side to see if it’s more dominant than you’ve allowed yourself to consider?”
I didn’t answer at first, not quite sure what to say. There were so many sides to my answer, but I went with the most simple and most pressing issue. “He still doesn’t know I’m half wolf.” My panther brushed her fur under my skin, giving me comfort because she felt my growing anxiety.
“You’ve known Nathan for a couple of months now”—she railroaded over me when I went to argue—“butyou’ve spent the last month in his home and a lot of it sleeping in his bed. Am I right?”
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and nodded, focusing my gaze on the path in front of us.
“In all that time, you haven’t come to the realization that you can trust him?”
“It’s not that I don’t trust him…” I didn’t want to admit my insecurity, which made me feel like a stubborn child, because I’d never run from my truths. “I’ve always been confident in who I am. What you see is what you get—insecurities and all. All of a sudden, I care what someone thinks of me. And by extension, an entire pack of people.”
“You’ve been running from your past for almost twenty years, Peyton,” Savannah replied.
“Not running,” I corrected, although I didn’t sound any more confident than I felt. “Hiding. With good reason.”
“I won’t dispute that it was necessary, but I’m surprised that you haven’t figured out that Nathan is the one person who will always keep you safe.”
“You can’t know that,” I protested dejectedly. I finally voiced my fear. “Foxy, I survived my childhood because I didn’t know what I’d been missing. If Nathan finds out who my family is, I’m not sure I could survive it if Nathan looked at me with the same disgust and contempt that was directed at me through my childhood. And how would we raise a child together if he despises her mother?”
Savannah sighed and stopped, bringing me to a halt with her hand on my arm. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you, Peyton. I’m not sure there is anything you could tell him that would push him away. I mean, how bad could it be?”
I mashed my lips together and debated. I’d never told anyone the full truth, and as much as I wanted to find out what Savannah’s reaction would be to have some gauge of Nathan’s, I couldn’t do it. If I ever admitted the truth out loud, Nathan deserved to be the one I told. So I tried to gloss over the details and see if that would be enough to get a sense of how she would react given the full truth.
“If you found out that Asher was related to the man who killed Tyler, would you be able to be with him?”
Savannah looked struck and the lost, desolate look that I’d seen less and less returned to her pretty eyes.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry, Savannah. I shouldn’t have brought him up.” I felt like the world’s biggest bitch.
“No,” she said softly, giving my arm a squeeze before letting go. “I just wasn’t expecting your question.”