Chapter Text
“Why me?”
“Hmm?”
Benvolio is safely tucked into a burgundy throw blanket, as usual paying no heed to the way it slips as he sips a cup of cocoa. He’s far too comfortable naked, and Rosaline knows him too well to attribute it to his condition.
“Why my yard? Did you get bitten nearby or are my azaleas some kind of wolfnip?”
He swallows, shoving the mug onto the table. The blanket slips, and this time he catches it, tucking it around his body.
“I’m not complaining,” she hastens to add. “I just think it’s weird. You’re here every full moon, and we didn’t know each other. Before.”
He shifts, uncomfortable, and Rosaline frowns at him.
“You know something.”
“I—yes. Maybe. I can’t be sure.” Finally, he meets her eyes. She can practically see his hackles rise. “It’s not like I meant for this to happen, okay? I have no more control over it than you do.”
That’s likely, Rosaline almost snarks, but there’s a flash of fear in his eyes, and instead, she takes his hand. He stares down at their fingers, streaked together like the color of his fur, dark and light and warm all over.
“I think . . . it’s a mate thing.”
Her throat goes dry. “Oh.”
The dog days of summer come snarling into Verona, and Juliet takes a turn for the worse. Her parents fret and flutter about, and, patience worn thin, browbeat their daughter into going out with some guy they know, a politician whose pedigree is almost worthy of their own. Juliet is strangely stiff afterward, jumping at shadows. When the anniversary of Romeo’s death rolls around, her cousins make the executive decision to plan a girls weekend. Juliet isn't the only one looking for an excuse to get away.
The cabin is remote, far from Verona and its memories, and though the howling wolves make Juliet hunker into her blankets, the sound soothes Rosaline to sleep. The howl that wakes her is familiar in an inexplicable, soul-deep way that she doesn't want to examine too closely. It forces her heart to her throat and her feet to the floor. She rolls out of the rumpled king bed, leaving Livia asleep, to follow the sound like some kind of siren call. She finds Juliet silhouetted against the bay window, backlit by fog pearled in the faint predawn. Tears stream down her face. She turns as Rosaline pads across the room, resting a pale cheek on her knees.
“Oh, Rosaline,” she breathes, “not you too.”
"What happened to your pack?" The question slips out unbidden. Shame crawls through Rosaline as pain and fear ripple across the still blue of Benvolio's eyes, sinking inward.
"Nevermind. It's none of my—"
His hand cuts across her protests, brushing away the careful cordiality that had grown between them like a thick winter coat. He clutches her hand and she turns her palm upward, pressing his hand between hers to stifle the tremors in his fingers. He doesn't shy away from his grief, but his voice is steady as he sets the scene: a playful summer night with his cousin leading the pack, a sleek gray wolf stalking them through the trees, the two-legged hunter lurking beyond the treeline to steal Benvolio's pack before daylight dimmed his first full moon.
“The gray alpha wanted my cousin’s mate.” His voice is full of loathing, internal and external tangled together in an inextricable knot.
“Girlfriend,” she corrects to make it less weird. He accepts that with a shrug, and she asks the last question she wants to. “And the hunter?”
“He was her cousin,” he says. “That’s all I know.”
But that isn’t all there is. The beats of the story strike home, echoing Juliet’s sobs as she told an impossible tale, hitching breath by hitching breath.
“So am I.”
His brows furrow, framing the confusion in his cool, blue-green eyes. A new moon blackens the sky, but soon enough those eyes will gleam green, and then gold.
“Her cousin,” Rosaline says, and his eyes go as dark as the sightless moon.
“This some kind of penance,” he growls when he comes to and finds her kneeling beside him. She jerks her hand away, but his anger has already fled, replaced with a lost, broken expression. “Why do I always wake up here?”
The word “mate” flits through her mind, but she isn’t foolish enough to believe that anymore.
“I don’t know,” she admits, fingers clenched together on her lap. “But you do, so you might as well come inside.”
Emotion clogs her throat when he nods, looking as reluctantly eager as she feels. She pushes off the ground, dusting off bits of grass that cling to her leggings.
“The rag’s on the porch with the bucket,” she says brusquely, realizing too late that she’s given herself away.