Chapter Forty-Three

“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

Fred and I were on a Gondola, and in the background soft music played while the afternoon dusk sneaked in.

Fred, who was sitting beside me and had an arm wrapped around me as though it was the most natural thing in the world to do, glanced at me with those red eyes of his, sighed, and returned his gaze to the sea, as though seeing something that I didn’t. “There’s not a day in which I don’t regret things I did in the past,” he said quietly, “the mistakes I’ve made sometimes resulted in catastrophic, you see.”

I leaned my head on his shoulder, trying to show him support without words that he could talk about anything he wanted to. He got the hint, and my heart warmed when he opened up to me. “That day I made my mother miscarry the child, I couldn’t even look at me in the mirror. I hated myself so much, hated what nature forced me to be, and I didn’t want to be the Alpha. But when Casimir, the second Alpha, told me time after time the baggage I was going to carry on my shoulders, I knew there was no way around it, and I had to accept what I was going to become. Even though I still hated myself.”

Without noticing, I caressed his hand. “Have you ever met Christopher… my father?” I asked, wincing at the last two words. It was still hard for me to believe that the first Alpha of the Millennium was my dad, that I was born in a different time and age, that I was, in fact, even older than Fred, or Magnus, who was technically my younger brother and not older.

“Yes,” Fred answered. “He came once to one of my training sessions with Casimir. He is a good man, I could see it in his eyes, but he is very old, even though he looks young, and he’s constantly drowned in sorrow. Sometimes I even had trouble breathing in his presence because of all that sadness and exhaustion he omitted.” He glanced at me. “You don’t look like him at all, Angela. Except for the eyes - but I should’ve known. Not everyone has your specific brand of gold eyes. Christopher has them, and so does Magnus.”

I couldn’t look at him. “What about the hair?” I asked, my voice choked. “Does Christopher has hair… like mine?”

“Christopher’s hair is more of a light brown,” Fred replied gently, “but from my understanding, you got your hair from your mother, Lucia.”

I nodded and found myself blurting, “If I’m half a werewolf, why am I not as beautiful as Samantha? Or Maria? Or Sally and Cora?” I blushed right after that, feeling pathetic. Why did I care so much from what he’d say? I knew I wasn’t pretty. Why did I ask this stupid question?

Fred’s friend rested on my face suddenly, drawing my gaze up to him. “You’re no less beautiful than them, Angel,” he said quietly, giving me an inscrutable look, “beauty isn’t just external. Your beauty might not be of the werewolf kind, but it’s human, and add to that your stormy personality… It gives you a radiance, a brightness like that of the sun. With your ginger hair, those gold eyes, the golden skin, and the freckles… You’re like the sun, Angel.”

I wanted to look away but his hands cupped my face and his gaze penetrated mine with blunt intensity. Feeling even more pathetic, I murmured, “It’s just an excuse to me not being pretty…”

He put his forehead against mine. “I don’t know what others think of you,” he said in a low, caressing voice, “I just know that for me, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”

I gasped, completely shocked, and he pressed his lips against mine. A shiver went through my spine, and my eyes closed when I felt that divine feeling I’d had the last time he kissed me. He tightened his lips to mine, and when I gasped, trying to breathe right, he slid his tongue in, snuggling mine with it. My heart pounded loudly in my chest, and I grabbed his muscular arms while he pulled me into his arms.

The feeling of kissing the most attractive man I’d ever met on the Gondola was momentous. While the sun started to slowly disappear from the sky, Fred kissed me, the music playing around us lulling us into some sort of a trance. I didn’t care how much time passed, because kissing Fred was the best thing that had happened to me in a long while…

“Finish,” the Gondola sailor whom we ignored up to this point said, and made Fred and I jolt apart. Our time at the Gondola came to an end, and when we reached the shore, Fred came out first, giving me a hand for help. My cheeks flushed and my heart beating rapidly, I took his hand and he helped me out of the Gondola without effort, as though I didn’t weigh one-hundred-and-fifty pounds. Once my feet were on solid ground, he didn’t let go of my hand but intertwined our fingers, making my heart beat even faster.

And when he sent me that little, gorgeous smile of his, I felt my face turning a bad shade of tomato. He knew. He’d known all day I wanted him to hold my hand. And now he did it and made me melt all over again.

Was her sure I was the sun? Because it seemed like he was the sun, considering my melting motor.

“In an hour there’s the traditional lamp ceremony,” Fred told me with a wide smile. “Now there’s the light-show. We can see it, then go to the ceremony.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to talk, and hand-in-hand we walked toward the light-show. On our way we saw a couple of girls who were about thirteen sending gazes to the boys who were with them, while they wore a Yukata. A small ache twitched my heart, but I forced myself to let it go. The past is the past. What’s important was the present.

We reached the light-show and we went through all of the exhibits - sculptures made of colorful, wondrous lights. Sunset was almost over when we finished at the exhibition and Fred took me back to the sea, where the light ceremony took place. There were two options to participate in the ceremony - one was flying the lamps into the sky, and the other was to sail them across the sea that would take them far away. This time, it was the latter.

Many couples were in the area, all of them buying cloth-made lamps with Chinese writing. Fred bought us one too and lit it up with a small fire that would let it float over the water. We held it together, and when I turned to look at him, I saw his gaze focused on me. “Have you done this before?” he asked me, as though he felt something was off with me. And of course he was right, because I couldn’t not think about Brock. “Yeah,” I looked away. “With Brock, about seven years ago. He promised me then that we will… marry.” A small, nostalgic smile rose on my face. “We were like a ‘couple’ as only little kids can be. We flew our lamp to the sky together after he wrote our names on its surface, so we would be ‘forever and ever’.” A wave of sorrow rushed over me.

Fred wrapped his arm around me, hugging me to him, bringing me the comfort and safety I needed. “I understand,” he said quietly, and I couldn’t help but snuggle in his heat.

When the time arrived, everyone put the lamps on the water and sailed them away. As night approached, Fred and I looked at dozens of lit-up lamps on the water, while the darkness grew larger around us. The lamps were like a path of light leading to the horizon. I leaned against Fred while he pulled me closer, and watched together as the lamps got farther and farther away, their light disappearing one by one.

“It’s one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen,” Fred murmured, “and I live forty years already, so I believe it says something.”

I turned to look at him with surprise. “Forty?” He didn’t look a day older than twenty-something.

He nodded, glancing at me with a half-smile. “I was born in 1973, and froze into my immortality in 2000, when I was crowned the Alpha of the Millennium at the age of twenty-seven,” he explained.

“Got it,” I said, smiling a little. “It’s weird. Technically, I’m, like, two-hundred years older than you.”

He laughed softly. “Thanks for making me feel good about being too much older than you.”

I laughed as well, and I found myself bracely rising on my tiptoes and giving him a kiss on the mouth. He didn’t hesitate, even though it was obvious he was surprised by my sudden courage, and wrapped me in his arms, pulling me even closer.

Afterwards, we strolled a little more in the festival because we weren’t ready yet to go back. It was so fun here, without worries and no one else, just the two of us together. We went hand-in-hand from booth to booth, while Fred decided to act like the “Alpha” and try to get me a stuffed doll. He got me ten eventually, and I felt like a little girl, hanging around with ten little teddy-bears.

When I tried my luck with a shoot-and-aim, I failed so hard it was mortifying. Fred teased me a little bit, and very flirtatiously, that the next time I should let him get me the prizes because I wasn’t so talented in this, according to him. I stuck my tongue out at him, embarrassed, and he just laughed and pulled me into a heady kiss. It felt like we were already a couple on paper. The way we were silent together, the way we talked, the way in which we understood each other without words… It felt like we’d known each other for years.

And in the end, when we got into the car to go back to college, Fred’s phone went off. When he answered, he was still smiling and calm, but when whoever-it-was said something, his face turned terse so suddenly, my eyes widened.

“What’s wrong?” I asked when he hung up and turned on the car.

“Adria had a prediction,” he said quietly, looking at me unreadably. “A prediction she kept on insisting you would know the meaning of.”