CHAPTER FOUR DIVINE’S POV

The automatic doors shut behind me, and the hospital’s antiseptic chill sealed in with them, following me out into the parking lot air. My scrubs still smelled like disinfectant and hand sanitizer, the smell that never quite washed out no matter how many times I ran them through the machine twice, but underneath it was something sweeter clinging to my collar — lavender, the kind that wouldn’t fade no matter how many times I rubbed my temples or splashed water on my face in the staff bathroom trying to think straight. She was barely sixteen. How could her scent already be that strong, layered that deep? It wasn’t normal. Not for any werewolf I’d met in my life, and I’d met plenty.

Her wide brown eyes kept flashing back in my mind the whole drive home — how they’d sparked with a diamond glint the second the news about her parents hit her, gold catching light that shouldn’t have been there to catch. Even the antiseptic and the blood in that room hadn’t covered that up, not from a nose like mine.

Aunt Duval stepped into the foyer the moment I let myself in and looked me over, the way she always did, cataloguing before she’d even said hello.

“How was your shift, Divine?”

I forced a smile that didn’t reach my eyes, dropping my bag by the door. “Fine, Auntie.”

Her lips thinned, the way they did right before she called me out on something I’d hoped to keep to myself a little longer. “You reek of confusion. Out with it.”

I led her to the sitting room, past the staff who bowed their heads a fraction as we passed, and the cushions sank as I perched on the edge of one, too wound up to actually lean back into it. “There was an accident victim today. A girl, barely sixteen. But her scent…” I swallowed, trying to find the words for something that didn’t have an easy comparison. “Strong. Like lavender blooming under moonlight, threaded with something ancient underneath it, something I don’t have a name for. Her eyes were deep brown, almost golden at the edges. When she panicked, they flashed diamond for a second. I saw it clearly. It wasn’t a trick of the hospital lights.”

Aunt Duval’s face drained of color, a slow bleaching out that I’d never once seen happen to her in all my years living under her roof. She leaned forward, fingers digging into the armrest hard enough that I heard the fabric strain. “Where is she?”

“Still at the hospital.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to, unsettled by how fast her whole demeanor had changed.

“You have to bring her here. Before the humans notice what she is.” There was no room in her tone for discussion, only instruction.

My stomach knotted, dread pooling low and cold. “Why the rush? What is she?”

Her eyes softened for a fraction of a second — grief, maybe, or something close to it — then hardened again just as fast, the way a wound closes back over. “She’s important to our world. More than you know yet. Since her parents are gone, apply for foster care. Bring her into the family — into the villa.”

I blinked, trying to reconcile the order with everything I’d been raised to believe. “But humans aren’t allowed—”

She cut me off with a look sharp enough to end the sentence on its own. “After what you smelled, do you truly believe she’s just human?”

The question hung there in the quiet room, heavier than anything either of us had said out loud yet. Neither of us said anything for a second, the grandfather clock in the hall ticking through the silence. I sat back, letting it sink in, turning the girl’s face over in my memory again — the diamond flash, the too-old scent on someone so young. Maybe she wasn’t human. Maybe she was one of us. Or something else entirely, something neither of us had a category for yet.

The drive home from the hospital had given me plenty of time to think about it already, more than I wanted, honestly. The city had thinned out behind me mile by mile, glass towers giving way to warehouses and then to the long stretch of trees that hid our villa from the rest of the world, the road narrowing until only someone who already knew it existed could find it. I’d driven that road a thousand times without really seeing it, but tonight every turn had felt loaded, like the trees themselves were listening in on whatever I was turning over in my head.

I’d grown up hearing the word priestess the way other kids heard fairy tales, a story adults told to explain things they didn’t want to explain properly. Our world didn’t talk about the priestess line much anymore, not since Francesca disappeared, not since Aunt Duval’s face went carefully blank any time someone brought up her sister’s name at a gathering. I’d learned early not to ask. Whatever mattered enough to make my aunt’s face do that, I figured, mattered enough to stay buried.

Now, watching her pace in front of the cold fireplace, robe pulled tight around her shoulders despite the warmth of the room, I wondered if sixteen years of silence was about to break open all at once, and whether I was ready to be standing this close when it did.

“Auntie.” I said it quieter this time, testing whether she’d let me back into whatever she was thinking. “You said she’s important to our world. Important how?”

She didn’t answer right away, staring instead at the low fire crackling in the hearth like it might give her better words than the ones she already had. “There are things I haven’t told you,” she said finally. “Things I couldn’t tell you, not until I was sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That the wait was actually over.” Her voice cracked on the last word, just barely, so faint I might have imagined it if I hadn’t known her my whole life. She straightened before I could ask anything else, smoothing her expression back into something composed. “Get some rest, Divine. Tomorrow, you start the paperwork.”

I went to bed that night with more questions than I’d started the day with, and none of them let me sleep easy.