Profound Devotion

Chapter 19

July 26th
Cassius

  The last of the dishes clattered against the plates beneath them as I pushed the cabinet door closed. "Just say whatever it is on your mind." I growled, growing irritated the longer Raian's eyes followed me around the room.

  "I did not say a word." He smirked, but I knew him well enough to know when he was holding something back. "I am just sitting here."

  I stopped wiping down the counter and turned to face him with a scowl. "You have always been a terrible liar."

  He shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. "I am just interested in your sudden infatuation with Naia."

  "I do not have an infatuation with her." It was clear by the way he tilted his head and raised one of his thinner eyebrows that there was no world in which he believed me.

  "I believe it is you, brother, that is a terrible liar."

  Swallowing my desire to argue with him or knock him out of his seat, I dried my hands once again on the towel hanging from the oven and flipped the light switch off.

  "That is all? Nothing else to say?"

  He jogged to catch up to me as I made my way toward the room he had been sleeping in. "I am choosing to ignore you." I grumbled and pressed through the bedroom entrance.

  The dresser across the space had been stocked with clothes that members of the pack generously donated to us, and I slipped my used shirt over my head to replace it with a thinner green one. They were all a tight fight length-wise, but I had no right to complain.

  Raian scoffed and dropped his body onto the surface of the bed. "Really? Why are you against speaking on this?"

  "That is because there is nothing to discuss." My eyes closed with my heavy breath, and I used too much force to close the drawer, causing the dresser to rattle on its thin legs.

  Monaia was not something I wanted to speak about with anyone, at least until I knew what this lingering feeling in my chest meant.

  After finding her within Lycan territory, I have had this incomprehensible need to relieve her from whatever pain and suffering plagued her. However, sharing a room and holding her while she sleeps was never something I expected nor planned.

  I felt drawn to her in a latent way, as if I had been sucked into her out-worldly orbit and am now fighting to stop her from drifting away.

  Perhaps I was allowing things to go too far. This was all uncharted territory for me, and if I did not proceed with caution, I may find myself in way over my head. After all, I had already given up on keeping my distance with these wolves. Becoming involved, even in a seemingly innocent way such as this, with one of them could only spell disaster.

  "I have just never seen you this way around someone outside of our family. Hell, even Caryn had to fight for the little attention you offered her." His eyes trailed me as I wandered toward the window and rested against the sill.

  It was hard to contain a growl as Caryn's memory swirled back into my mind. My parents had insisted that I needed to be wed to become a great leader. They set up what I could only explain as a blind engagement with the daughter of their second-in-command and sister to my closest friend.

  She was a fiery, shorter woman with blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, and she had gotten on every single one of my nerves in the short amount of time we had lived together.

  My mother swore at me for the first time in years when she heard we were not sharing a room, but how could I? I felt no connection to the woman, and every fiber of my being begged for her to just leave me alone.