“I will take you to Brucella at once,” Sergius informed us. “And then you can recount to us all that you wish, and explain your reason for visiting so unexpectedly. We were just in the dining hall, finishing dinner. Are you hungry by any chance?”
Even now, I still wasn’t hungry. I doubted I would feel hungry again until I was safely back in The Shade with my family. Bastien answered before I could refuse, however, “Yes, we are both hungry. We would be very grateful for a meal.” Somehow I doubted that was true for Bastien either, and he was asking for food for my sake.
Sergius led us along several more corridors, which were really more like tunnels, before he stopped abruptly in front of a pair of double doors. Pressing his giant palms against them, he shoved them open. As we stepped through, I expected a large hall, but instead it was a small chamber lit by glowing lanterns, not much bigger than the living room of my parents’ and my penthouse back in The Shade. The only furnishings were a cherry wood table running down the center and matching chairs. The table looked large enough to fit ten, but only three were seated around it.
A middle-aged woman sitting at one end of the table rose from her meal and stared at us. She had straight, light brown hair. I wondered if that was Bastien’s aunt. Next to her, on her left, sat another woman, also middle-aged, with blonde hair and light amber eyes. She resembled Sergius. Perhaps they were siblings. And then the third person seated at the table was a young woman who didn’t look much older than me. She had both amber eyes and light brown hair. Brucella and Sergius’ daughter?
The three women shoved back their chairs and surged toward us. Bastien lowered me to the floor as they gripped his shoulders and kissed his cheeks, drawing him into tight hugs one at a time. Watching them greet each other, I learned that my guesses had been correct. The older brunette was Brucella, the blonde woman was Sergius’ sister, Lavonna, while the young daughter was Brucella and Sergius’ daughter, Rona. Bastien’s cousin.
When they stepped back, their focus shifted to me.
“This is Victoria,” Bastien introduced me. My skin tingled a little as his arm snaked around my waist. “She is my friend.”
I braced myself beneath their curious stares. It was actually more of a glare that came from Brucella. Rona was the warmest of the three, and she even gave me a small smile, which I returned.
Brucella cleared her throat. “Please take a seat.” She gestured toward two empty ones: one on the other side of Rona’s place, and another on the opposite side of the table, next to Lavonna.
I wished that I could have sat next to Bastien—I was feeling awkward enough as it was—but Bastien was already obliging, and moving to where Brucella was pointing out for him: the seat next to Rona. We all sat down, myself sandwiched between Lavonna and Sergius.
Brucella headed through a door at the back of the room that had escaped my notice until now and when she returned, she was holding two full plates of steaming food. As she placed one down in front of me, it looked rich and nutritious, and probably delicious, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a few nibbles of bread. My stomach was still too tight for food.
As I glanced at Bastien, he also was picking rather than eating.
“Hunters,” Sergius began. “You must tell us everything.”
“Yes.” Bastien heaved a deep sigh, setting down his fork.
He began to recount what had happened to him—how the hunters had swept through the Blackhall lair in the dead of night, how he’d watched his parents and siblings murdered, then been dragged back to their base with not a clue as to why or what they wanted with him. How they had decided to keep them alive and caged him up… As he recounted this part of the story, I wondered whether they had kept Bastien alive because they’d detected something unusual about him, that he was a different kind of werewolf, and rather than kill him had instead wanted to take him back to their headquarters on Earth for testing. Hmm.
Bastien moved on to explain how I had rescued him. Even though in fact it was Arwen who’d cut his bars and freed him—I was just the one who’d suggested it—he spoke of the incident as though I were the only one involved, as though he had only seen me. Then he recounted the painful experience of discovering that his uncle and cousin had betrayed him. Brucella, being the sister of Bastien’s mother, and not directly related by blood to either Detrius or his father Orion, was quick to cry curses at the men and decry them as monsters.
Brucella turned into a weeping wreck, having learned she’d lost her sister, brother-in-law, and her nieces and nephews in the span of one night. Rona also cried, though not as loudly.
As Bastien finished his tale, he looked up at me, grim.