Page 4 of Rune’s Solace

She sure as hell didn’t belong with me.

I’d decided that early.

Decided it again when she started looking at me.

Decided it hardest the night I kissed her.

Then I’d gone and made the decision for both of us, because apparently knowing better and doing better were two different goddamn things.

I closed my hand around a stalk of mint and cut it clean with my knife.

Good.

She was doing what I’d wanted now. Going to school. Making friends. Letting some boy walk her to her car. Building something normal.

Good.

Had to be.

I gathered the herbs for Brenda and got to my feet before I could stand there arguing with myself about it again. Her back was hurting, and that was something I could actually do something about. Herbs, heat, the right mix in the cup, maybe something stronger if she’d quit being stubborn long enough to admit she needed it.

That kind of hurt made sense to me.

Amy didn’t.

I brushed the dirt off my knees and headed toward the cabin with the mint in my hand, leaving the chamomile behind me and Amy Dawson exactly where I’d been trying to keep her for months.

Out of reach.

At least until the next morning.

CHAPTER TWO

I HAD A system, and the system worked, which meant I didn’t spend much time thinking about what would happen if it stopped.

Up at six. Coffee in the kitchen while the clubhouse was still quiet enough that nobody tried to feed me or ask how I’d slept. Out the door by seven, across the bridge around seven-thirty, and most mornings I caught the river right when the sun came up over it, all pink and gold and ridiculously pretty for something I was driving over half-awake with coffee breath.

Those ten minutes were mine.

I’d earned them by getting up at an hour no nineteen-year-old should willingly see.

The drive was probably my favorite part of the day, which I would have admitted to exactly nobody because saying you loved forty minutes alone in a car made people look at you like they should start checking in more often. But I did. I liked the road, liked the radio low enough that I could think over it, liked watching the compound disappear in the mirror and Charleston start showing up ahead of me.

Nobody needed anything from me in the car.

That was probably the real reason.

For forty minutes I wasn’t Brenda’s girl or somebody the club kept an eye on or the person everyone checked before they went to bed. I was just Amy driving to school, usually five over the speed limit, occasionally singing badly when nobody could hear me.

I liked that Amy.

Campus was already loud when I parked, full of people carrying coffees and backpacks and talking at a volume I could never understand before eight in the morning. Most of them seemed younger than me even when they weren’t, which wasn’t their fault. They’d just had different lives. I’d spent my first few months here being irritated by how easy everything seemed for them, how they’d complain about roommates and parking tickets and somebody leaving them on read like those were things worth losing sleep over.

Now I mostly let them.

Must be nice.

And I meant that less bitterly than I used to.