Rosalie Winters's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

The wolf stayed at her knee. Rosalie kept her hand still on the grass. Dante watched the animal like it had spoken to him in a language he almost knew. She had come to deliver a book. She had not planned for this. The warm weight against her leg was asking a question she could not answer, and Dante's quiet was asking the same one. "He doesn't do that," Dante said. "Not with people he just met." He set the book on his thigh. "Not with people at all, mostly." His voice was flat, not cold. He was telling her a fact. "Why you." Rosalie opened her mouth and closed it. She had spent years hiding how much she noticed him. She could not tell him that. She looked at the wolf instead. The pale marks on its side glowed faint under the red leaves of the old oak above them. A small flock of pink-marked birds settled in the high branches and began to sing in soft, paired notes. Dante glanced up at the birds, then back at her, and his mouth tightened. "I don't know," she said. It came out true. She had told herself it was luck, or a flaw in whatever he did to a room. Sitting here, with the wolf leaning into her and the birds calling above them, luck did not fit. "Something's different with me. I've known it a while. I don't know what it is." He was quiet. Then he said, "You feel nothing when I walk in. Do you." She looked at him. His hazel eyes did not flinch. "No," she said. "I mean—I feel things. Not that." She pressed her palm flat to the grass. "Not the pull other people feel." He nodded once, like a man confirming a wound he already knew about. "I figured," he said. "I've been trying to figure since the first time." The wolf lifted its head and pushed its nose against her wrist. Dante watched the animal do it. "He knows something I don't," he said. "He's telling me you're safe. He's telling me more than that." He did not name the more. Rosalie's face went hot. She kept her hand where the wolf had put it. "I can't explain him," she said. "I can't explain me either. I want to." That was as close as she had come to the letter in her pocket. Dante closed the book over his thumb. "Then we find out," he said. "Together. If you'll sit with that." She said yes before she thought about Marcus, or the six days, or the man in the gray coat. The wolf settled its chin on her boot. Above them the birds kept singing in pairs. She had come here with a borrowed reason and no answers. She was leaving with a promise to look for one, and Dante waiting on the other side of it.