Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
That got me a side-look from him.
There were a lot of things Matti hadn’t been able to talk about that all revolved around one side of his family. Some of them he had kept to himself, and other things had slipped through. The ranch being one of them.
I drew my fingers across my lips and tossed them over my shoulder. I’d never told a soul and never would. I hadn’t even shared its knowledge with Sienna, and she knew the intensity level of my monthly period cramps. Plus, it wasn’t like he’d shared any information that valuable with me anyway—at least I didn’t think so.
“You knew?” Sienna asked me, and I nodded.
“Just a little bit, and he did it on the phone a couple months after he got there. We’ve never talked about it again since,” I clarified, knowing she wouldn’t be upset about it but still not wanting to risk it. There had never been any weird feelings between us where Matti was concerned. Even if I hadn’t always talked about him like he was my best friend, she had always been able to sense with her nose that there was zero sexual attraction between us. It was the same with Matti and my friendship with Sienna. I loved them both differently and equally, and that love was reflected back in the same way.
My favorite people were married. Mated. I got to see them both at the same time. It was a win-win.
Fortunately, Sienna’s reaction didn’t let me down. She made an understanding but squinty expression. “Okay, so why would living at ‘the ranch’ work?” Sienna snapped her fingers. “Wait! He owns a lot of land in Colorado that we’ve never been invited to but that he inherited from someone.” She snapped again. “Is that the ranch? That’s where you lived back then?”
He nodded.
“Ahh. You haven’t brought it up much, and the couple times I’ve seen Henri, he’s… oh.” It dawned on her. “I see. It’s a secret. Is there that much acreage there? Is that why we’re talking about it? If Henri doesn’t want us to visit, why would he let Nina move there?”
There was that mention of Henri again. I was well aware that Sienna had met him a few times and that she thought he’d been standoffish and “a little cold.” That had been one of the few mentions of Matti’s older cousin I’d heard in years.
My oldest friend sat up and angled his attention to focus on his wife. “There’s enough acreage that there’s been a village of magical beings who have lived there for hundreds of years, and no one bothers them. Henri inherited it from his dad’s side, which is my dad’s side. Except my dad gave up his rights to the ranch when he moved away permanently, and I did the same when I left too. I had to sign legal paperwork. Now it’s all Henri’s. He doesn’t live there by himself,” he said all matter-of-fact, like it was a suburban subdivision with a billboard off the highway.
From the look of her face, I wasn’t the only one who thought he’d framed that explanation loosely. “Aren’t those ‘magical communities’ cults? Like communes?”
Everyone who had any kind of mythical ancestry in them had heard of the kind of communities that were whispered about in small circles. The places where magical beings lived in homesteads of sorts, out in tracts of land where most normal people had no interest in living or visiting—at least that’s how those places had been explained to me. Places where privacy was affordable, or had been at some point.
It was a place for beings who wanted to live near others similar to them, so that they didn’t have to pretend to be something else. The closest to that I’d ever found had been where I’d grown up, and even then, there had been a certain level of hiding because it hadn’t been a strictly magical place. There hadn’t been walls or security, just people who knew how to keep their mouths closed and were really good at pretending.
“It’s not like that. It’s… a village, and some people work for it, and some who live there work outside of it. But everyone there is magical, and they’re all expected to participate in running it and maintaining it.”
“Still sounds like a commune,” she argued, shooting me a look like she was expecting me to agree with her.
And I mean, it kind of did with just the small amount of information he’d shared just now.
“It’s not,” Matti assured her. “It’s as self-reliant as they can manage. It’s also supposed to be a secret. How people keep their favorite vacation destinations to themselves so that everyone doesn’t start going there and ruin it.”
“If it’s so great, what’s wrong with it then? Why did you leave?” A thought occurred to her. “Why didn’t your mom and dad live there to begin with?”