"Is your next check-up with the healer in three days? Do you need someone to go with you?"
"No need," I replied, my voice flat and hollow.
"Suit yourself," he muttered, draining the last of the amber liquid from his glass.
Minutes later, his phone buzzed against the stone countertop. The instant his gaze fell on the name glowing across the screen, something shifted in his face. A small smile curved the corner of his lips. The kind of smile I had been starving for across eight long years.
Later, as I padded past the guest chamber on the second floor of the pack estate, his voice drifted through the heavy oak door.
"Don't worry, Scarlett. This one's on me. I'll make it up to you tomorrow," he said, his tone warm and impossibly tender.
It was a tone I had never once heard him use for me.
The only smiles Caspian Thornecrest had ever offered me were mocking ones, sharp as bared fangs, whenever his temper flared. Beyond those, he was nothing but cold distance and silence.
But it didn't matter anymore. I refused to let it matter. The next morning, I prepared breakfast for one.