Chapter Three
“Hey, mom.” Rose sat on a ridiculously ornate armchair, her legs slung over the side, abusing her privilege of being trapped in a mansion/castle/estate. Sebastian and his grandfather, Filip, watched her from the dining table. Filip's dark, bushy-eyed expression seemed less than approving of the human now sprawling over his furniture, and Sebastian got up from the table, gently but firmly grabbing her legs to place them into a more respectable position. He indicated with a slight twitch of his eyes toward the ancient Filip, and Rose mouthed sorry, before wincing as her mother's voice crackled out the device.
“Oh, hello, honey boo! So good to hear from you! How's your art course going?”
Rose reflected upon the art course she had been absent from for a week, and smiled nervously. “Uh, just fine. I'm doing that project on duality and the teachers seem to like it.”
“Good. Good. Haven't had any trouble, yet? I keep hearing that eastern Europeans have a rather nasty reputation. Thieves and the like. You've not been robbed yet?”
“No, mom,” Rose said with a sigh, “I've not been robbed. Or stolen for human trafficking, or been shot at, or anything, really. It's like living in Raleigh, except I don't understand half the people I speak to.”
“To be fair,” her mother said, “I don't understand half the people I speak to, either. Idiots, the lot of 'em.”
Rose's mother happened to be a die-hard liberal.
“Yeah. I know. Everyone's an idiot except you.” She grinned, feeling tension unravel out of her at the sound of her mother's annoying, high-pitched voice.
With this contact to the outside world, it made Sebastian seem less like a monster to her, with secret, nefarious reasons for keeping her locked in his abode. Or rather, his grandfather's abode. Speaking of the grandfather, he had that shrunken-spine look of someone well past their eighties, though she suspected that for a werewolf, it meant someone many years older than that. For all she knew, he'd seen the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire and had heard the Titanic sinking or something. Sebastian treated the elder with a great deal of respect.
Filip didn't seem to have a wife. Rose supposed she had long consigned herself to the earth as a memory and perhaps a gravestone.
Everything about the place served to intimidate her. Immensely. The house had a collection of suits of armor, paintings and furniture which Rose felt fairly certain she could never afford throughout five working lifetimes.
Tapestries adorned the stone walls, and brackets for torches symmetrically filled up the space. A brazier with burnt-out coal decorated the entrance into a small study room, which held old-fashioned typewriters, stacks of yellowing paper and books along the shelves. A disused fireplace lay snug in one corner.
Sebastian had happily toured her through the rooms, including a dungeon section which he confessed that some of his more brutal ancestors used to incarcerate traitors and torture spies. Fortunately, no more torture equipment remained, having been donated to history museums.
The information of how the room had once been used made Rose queasy inside, but she nodded and smiled anyway, focusing more on Sebastian's individual gestures, rather than the fact that his attempt to walk her through the history of the family home fascinated her. Sebastian Gregorovitch interested her instead. His peculiar, silver eyes, his light, charming smile, the smoldering expression his hooded sleep-look conjured, and the upright, graceful manner in which he conducted himself bespoke confidence. Then there was the fact that he held a certain scent, and she couldn't quite place her finger upon it, except for the fact that her panties tended to become rather tangled whenever he spent too long adjacent to her.
It made things awkward, to say the least.
“Your father is certainly trumping the idiot card today, Rosie baby. He wanted to do some DIY on the freezer, and now we have a huge leak all over the floor. He also almost killed Fluffy by shutting the cat in the freezer and not noticing.”
“Wow,” Rose replied, holding a hand over her mouth as she giggled. “Is, uh, Fluffy okay?” She recalled the image of her black and white cat, with the tuft of white on his nose and chin that made him look like he had a huge, jutting lower jaw.
“Yeah, yeah. Your father's called in an actual plumber now, so the issue should be fixed soon...”
Rose talked to her mother for another five minutes before wrapping up the call, with a promise to call again next week. She handed the phone back to Sebastian with a smile, and thanked him. The old and emaciated Filip then barked something in Bulgarian, and Sebastian translated.
“He wants to know if your parents are missing you.”
Rose shook her head. “Not really. She likes hearing from me but she likes not having me under her foot more.”
Sebastian translated, and Filip shot back with another question.
“Are you busy in life? We will be happy to send you back to Sofia soon. Otherwise, I have a proposal for you.”
Rose listened to the translation, her heart beating a little faster. What did the old man mean by that?
Sebastian continued translating.
“We are a rich and powerful family in this region. It is of value to us to have trustworthy humans knowing the secret, as the werewolf bloodlines tend to wear thin with the limited gene pool we are given. We need a caretaker for the nameless baby. And perhaps in the future, if you’d be so willing, you may bind yourself to any of the males we have here. Isn't Sebastian a handsome man? He is eligible.” (Sebastian rolled his eyes at this.)
Rose's jaw hung in shock at the announcement.
“That is not a necessity, of course. It is merely a desire of mine to look after the pack. I am impressed by your resilience and receptivity to our ways. I believe you will be a good choice to look after the little one.”
Um. What? I can't even hold a baby without dropping it, let alone look after one.
“We would, of course, pay you for your time and effort.”
Completely forgoing all sense of courtesy, Rose blurted out at Sebastian, “Are you serious? You guys kind of kidnap women and ask them to marry your kind?”
Sebastian appeared almost sheepish as he said, “Yes. There are exceptionally few female werewolves in the world. For some reason, more males are born. No one knows why. We have around five known female werewolves in Bulgaria, in comparison to the fifty-something males.”
The statistic astonished Rose. She played with her long sleeves as she took in the information, all sorts of feelings mixing inside her personal cauldron. “Jesus. So you guys need human females to keep going, right?”
Sebastian nodded. “If one stumbles into knowledge of our kind, we find it necessary to keep them around. Especially when they prove to be trustworthy.”
His grandfather said something, and he translated again. “Uh. He says you will make a fine mother and bear strong-willed children. He can see it in your face.”
It's official. These people are insane. Rose suppressed the urge to laugh hysterically. She'd been kidnapped. And asked to become an unexpected foster carer for a werewolf baby. With the offer to marry a werewolf guy at some point in the future.
Holy fucking shit. I need to sit down. Noting she was, in fact, sitting down, she began gnawing on her left set of knuckles. Nope. I've died and gone to crazy land.
She also, admittedly, didn't see any of the resilience Filip mentioned in herself. Hopping across a country and enrolling in a Bulgarian art school did not make her someone tough. Neither did not screaming in their faces and protesting about the whole situation, because there was no point.
If she really wanted to escape, it would be easier if her captors thought her unlikely to run.
After another awkward exchange of sentences, Sebastian and Rose went to check in on the nameless baby.
A woman dressed in a cleaning outfit was crooning over the baby, and greeted them with something that sounded like Zdravey. The baby, upon seeing Rose and Sebastian, immediately began flailing and making distressed noises. At first, Rose thought it was because he was terrified of them.
It turned out to be quite the opposite.
Standing over the baby, she saw his chubby little fingers reach out for her, and the distressed noises continued, until she picked the swaddled baby up and held him in her arms.
The baby quietened. He blinked at her, then said, “Guh.”
The cleaner appeared animated, and she waved a formula bottle in front of Rose. Rose took it, and Sebastian translated for her, “This is what they're using to feed him at the moment. She wants you to try. She thinks the baby likes you.”
Uh huh.
She took the bottle and smiled at the lady, who had brown eyes, olive skin and long, dark hair, with the slender build of a willow tree. The baby's eyes followed the bottle, and his gurgling increased in intensity until she stuffed the teat end into his mouth.
Sebastian watched her with a peculiar expression on his face. That playful, heart-rending smile then crept upon his lips, again generating that annoying, yeah-okay-I-find-him-attractive jitter in her stomach.
She did, but it didn't take away the fact that she'd been asked to effectively become part of a werewolf tribe. Just not become an actual werewolf.
This decision required thought. Lots of thought. And possibly some extra, intimate conversations with Sebastian – including perhaps where all the other eligible males were.
She had a feeling, though, that Sebastian liked her. Something in the way when she glanced over in his direction, he always seemed to be devoted to giving her attention. The smiles, the little moments he took to get close enough to touch – the way he eagerly imparted information to her, wanting her to see the good side of everything, though she suspected there to be a dark, ominous side of werewolves as well.
After all, Sebastian spoke so casually of the deaths that had occurred in their families, of the troubles their ancestors went through.
She examined him, even as she cradled the nameless child, which slurped at the bottle she balanced in one hand. She'd split up with her last boyfriend before moving to Bulgaria, simply because he didn't believe in long-distance relationships. She’d found out three days after the split that he'd leapt into bed with her best friend, Danielle.
Danielle obviously wasn't her best friend anymore.
Feeling as if she had nothing to lose, she said, “So, why is this place so empty? I mean, it looks like it can house hundreds of people, but there's only you, your grandpa, I think you said a sister as well? And some cleaning and cooking attendants.”
Sebastian gave a wan smile. “The rest are either out helping the Spirovas against the three Russian clans who have invaded our home soil, or they are hunting for Ivelina Lubanov.”
“Oh,” Rose said. Invasion. Werewolves. Danger. “Do these... invasions happen frequently?”
“No. The risk of loss of life is usually too great to merit attempts to take over long-established territories. But it seems there is incentive for them.” He prowled forward, and peered over her shoulder with his formidable height at the baby, who promptly locked eyes with him, and flailed one arm as if waving.
“I'm sorry,” he said, and his eyes dimmed, his expression drooped in sorrow.
“What for?” Rose felt conscious of his breath upon her neck, the closeness of his body to hers, and the heat that emanated from his tight, muscular frame. He smelled good. She struggled for the word in her head, before alighting on petrichor. The smell of wet earth after rainfall. The heady scent of nature that soothed and relaxed when it wormed its way through her nasal canal.
She wondered what she might smell like to him, or look like. She wasn't exactly ugly, but neither did she expect to appear on the cover of a modeling magazine.
She also wondered just how serious Filip was about his offer.
Good God. I'm actually contemplating it.
“I'm sorry that you have been whisked so rudely from your life. I know it's a lot to take in. And my grandfather has just placed the mark of heavy responsibility in your lap as well. He can be quite straightforward in these matters.”
“Yeah... you're telling me. I have to ask,” Rose said, though her emotions twitched in anxiety when she considered the question she intended to say, “could you have taken the baby without capturing me?”
Sebastian stared at her a long time. “I don't know. I wouldn't have known about it until you told me. I would have assumed it was yours if I heard it. But... well. Here we are.”
“Here we are,” Rose agreed. She noticed the baby had stopped feeding, and was now sleeping, or trying to, except she had the bottle shoved in his face. “Oops.”
“Do you think you might be interested in caring for him?”
Rose didn't know. It would be a hell of a thing to explain to her mother and father back home, that she'd suddenly decided to look after someone's abandoned baby.
Let alone the whole werewolf thing.
A darker, ominous thought crept into her mind. Maybe I don't have a choice. Maybe they will take it for granted that I'll agree. And if I don't...
How hard is it to find a body in the mountains?