The footsteps came sooner than he anticipated, well before he was compelled to seek her out. He invited her to enter.
Cassidy hesitated in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” she said. He rose from his chair, unable to maintain his customary calm. “You ran from the ceremony,” he said harshly. “Why?”
She closed the door and came farther into the room. She was, he noted, wearing one other London gowns, armored in formality against him. Such formality offered them both a kind of protection. But she must understand, as well as he did, that there was no protection against the truth.
“I should have told you earlier,” she said, almost in a whisper, “but I didn’t realize that you expected—that I was supposed to know—” She faltered. “When we ran together in the forest, I wanted so badly to Change, to be a wolf like you. And when I realized you wanted me to Change during the ceremony, I…”
Braden came to a stop in the center of the room, every muscle locked in place. “You can’t—” he began, and his mouth refused to form the word.
The room was deathly quiet.
“My mother died before she could teach me,” she said. “I… don’t know how to Change.”
Braden swayed on his feet, battered by a wave of shock. If he were human, it would have been as if she had told him she didn’t know how to walk, or eat, or keep her heart beating.
Or that she had never been born.
The storm of emotion caught him unprepared. He retreated across the room, clutching at a glass-paned bookcase.
“You have… never Changed,” he said.
“No.” Her breath shuddered out. “I’m sorry. I thought…”
Profound emptiness followed shock, leaving him as cold as the glass under his hands. “I believed that you were one of us in every way,” he said, summoning words out of the void. “You showed the signs, had all the other abilities. Your mother—”
“My mother told me I would do it someday. I thought that if I found my family, they could teach—”
“The Change cannot be taught,” he said. His hands knotted into fists on the bookcase. “It is what we are.”
From the very first, he had made a critical error. He had assumed that Cassidy was one of them in every way. Others, half-human or worse, had inherited the Change, and she was the last of the American Forsters. His devotion to the Cause had blinded him.
Unacceptable mistake. Unforgivable weakness.
“I can learn,” Cassidy said, her voice steadfast with determination. “I’ve always known that I was like my mother—”
“Your father was human.”
“And you despise humans. You… despise me.”
A child who couldn’t even Change should not have had such power to move him. Her words should not strike him like a blow beneath the ribs, driving the air from his lungs. He should be safe from the compassion that tore at his heart and awakened something very like shame.
He remembered the sense of completion he’d felt when they’d run together in the woods, something he hadn’t felt since boyhood. He acknowledged his constant awareness of her unique scent of sagebrush and desert earth. And how, when he’d thought of her as Quentin’s mate, his mind had refused to supply the inevitable details.
He lifted his fist from the bookcase and slammed it down again with all his strength. The glass pane shattered. Cassidy cried out. Shards drove into his flesh like needles.
“Despise you?” he whispered, and laughed, flexing his hand. Blood ran the length of his fingers.
“You’ve hurt yourself!” Cassidy was beside him, gently lifting his injured hand by the wrist. “I’ll have to pull out the slivers, and it must be bandaged.”
Her touch, so careful and sure, filled him with a strange lassitude. Her husky voice held concern, consternation, worry—for him, in spite of everything.
“Caramba!” she cried. “My dress is too stiff. I can’t tear it. I’ll call Aynsley—”
“No.” Ignoring her protests, he shrugged awkwardly out of his coat and let it drop to the floor. He began to unbutton his waistcoat one-handed, but Cassidy’s fingers worked under his and usurped the task.