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to toss because she was petite. But she didn’t die…they turned her into a werewolf.”
    The faint images of Scarborough stabbing Sebastian hovered behind her eyelids. “She showed me what you described. I dreamt it tonight. You and Scarborough at the river, him stabbing you, you going into the water…”
    Liv snapped her eyes open. “I thought I just had a crazy, wild, active imagination, but…” She couldn’t even articulate where her thoughts were going.
    When Sebastian had first said that Scarborough had stabbed him on that fishing trip, it had suddenly all seemed to make sense. The dreams had been reality, or showing her reality, and she had felt like she’d stumbled on an answer.
    Now it seemed like sheer lunacy again.
    Liv rubbed her temples and tried to clear her head.
    “It’s not your imagination.” Sebastian sat down on the bed next to her. “Here is the truth, Liv, the whole truth, as unbelievable as it seems. The bride in your dreams is your great-grandmother. She was the first of the Lugaru line of werewolves, turned the way you saw it in your dream. She and the pack migrated to Canada from France and moved down into Wisconsin with my ancestors, the James clan.”
    Liv knew her great-grandmother had been French, but she had known little other than that given that her own parents had died before she’d had much chance to ask them anything.
    “Werewolves are real. I am one. You are one. Scarborough is one. As far as I know you never shifted before I was stabbed, but an emotional upheaval can cause the first shift.”
    It had definitely been an emotional six months, there was no denying that.
    But werewolves? It was impossible. They were the stuff of horror movies and medieval legends.
    Yet she had seen Sebastian shift with her own eyes. She had felt herself shift in what she thought was a dream.
    Sebastian was confirming the scene between him and Scarborough was real, and he had the scar on his shoulder to prove it.
    “I…I don’t know what to say. This is…”
    “Crazy. I know. But at least Scar and I had our parents to explain. Yours died before they could reveal the truth to you.”
    Sebastian reached out and took her hand in his, and Liv stared down at his callused fingers covering hers, the touch warm and familiar. It brought a melancholy ache to her heart and she felt the tears pricking at her eyes.
    If she believed in the impossible, in the insane story he was telling her, then she was a werewolf, a hairy, snarling beast.
    But it also meant that Sebastian hadn’t left her willingly.
    And God help her, she was actually thinking that was more appealing than shape-shifters not existing and Sebastian breaking her heart on purpose.
    “I want you to understand something.” His expression was earnest, open. “The reason I never asked you to marry me was not because I didn’t want to be your husband. It was because I didn’t want you to ever feel that I had chosen you even in part for the purpose of an alliance, for the strength you would bring to our pack. I was pack leader, and you’re the sole survivor of our allies, a pack that has psychic abilities. Together, you and I would have given an edge to our pack, but I wanted no part of that.”
    Sebastian’s finger trailed across her lip again, as it had the night before, and this time it was tender and soul shattering. “I just wanted you,” he said. “I wanted to be with you, for no other reason than for the fact that I love you.”
    Liv felt her throat closing with emotion. The words he was saying were bizarre, convoluted, a description of a world she hadn’t known existed and didn’t understand, but when she stripped that away, what she heard was the truth in his voice that he did love her.
    That the nightmare she’d been living in for the six months, the reality that had devastated her, was in fact fiction, and the dreams that had plagued her sleep were actually reality.
    Nothing mattered but those last three words he’d just