“I don’t know!” Lola said, nearly shouting out the words. She was frustrated, angry, and still coming down from the emotional distress of everything she and Russel had just been through. She had been pushed past the edge of terror over and over again and she still wasn’t back to being okay. The added pressure of knowing that two different werewolf kingdoms wanted her dead wasn’t helping.

She stopped bathing him and took a step back. Tears sprang to her eyes and her body started shaking with the force of her sobs.

“I honestly don’t know,” she said. She looked at him with pleading eyes. “You have to believe me. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m a nobody. An unimportant girl from a village so small it doesn’t even show up on maps. Why would your father want me dead? Why did Drake kill all of my family and friends just to get to me? None of this makes any sense.”

Russel gingerly pulled himself out of the bath, most of his hideous wounds nearly fully healed now. His face was still a horror show but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it had been after the fight with his father.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Russel said, pulling her toward him and hugging her close.

She felt the strength of his arms around her and took immense comfort from them. She leaned in closer to him, still crying despite hating herself for being so emotional. There was nothing she could seem to do to stop herself. The tears just kept coming. WIth everything that happened to her, it was a minor miracle that she hadn’t broken down before now. The images of her parents burning to death, of her friends being slaughtered, of Russel nearly dying at the hands of the ghouls, and then his own father all bore down on her mind almost every second. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take.

“None of this is your fault, you hear me?” Russel continued, still trying to soothe her.

“It has to be,” she murmured. “Why else would all this be happening?”

She looked up at him.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on either or why you’ve been targeted but I am going to find out. Somehow. And you’re not just some girl, Lola. I’ve been with you long enough now to know that’s definitely not true. You’re special.”

“What would be special about me?” she asked.

“You can…do things I haven’t seen anyone else do.” He smiled down at her. “At first, I thought it was my imagination. I thought my mind was making me interpret things that weren’t there but the more time I spent with you, the more I became sure. You know it too, don’t you?”

She didn’t say anything at first, and if she was honest with herself, she really didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

I’ve done things he hasn’t seen before? she asked herself, wondering what he could’ve been talking about. She didn’t remember doing anything out of the ordinary. Although, admittedly, she had gone through so much that she hadn’t had a lot of time to think straight.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, still crying a little but trying to figure out what he meant was distracting her from all the emotional feedback from the trauma. She was actually starting to feel a little better.

“Think,” he encouraged. He wasn’t being pushy or making her feel stupid for not knowing. He genuinely wanted her to see what he’d seen for herself. To come to terms with it on her own. “Just think back to the last few weeks. Do you remember anything out of the ordinary?”