Adopting a Little Dog - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Riding my broom, I made it back to the wooden cabin before Lu Qie did.

As usual, I lit a candle and sat in the dim yellow glow, reading a magic book.

The fallen leaves piled outside the door rustled softly.

Lu Qie pushed open the wooden door.

He took off his coat, still dusted with wind and frost, and deftly sorted the things he had brought back into the compartments of the medicine cabinet.

Then he put the bread into the stove to warm it up again.

I caught the familiar scent of butter.

Firewood crackled in the stove. Carrying warmth all over him, he walked over and gently picked a fallen leaf from my hair. “Did you go out just now?”

I closed my book, nodded, and lied through my teeth without so much as a change in expression.

“I couldn’t find you, so I came back. I thought you’d left.”

His lashes trembled. Some indescribable emotion surged in his eyes.

After a moment of hesitation, he said, “I won’t leave.”

I let out a laugh.

Not bad acting, Little Wolf King.

Lu Qie was very good at providing emotional value.

If I only treated him as a pet, then I had basically hit the jackpot.

When my adoptive father, the Old Wizard, was alive, he had kept a black cat.

The black cat barely acknowledged him and even rolled its eyes at him sometimes.

Lu Qie, on the other hand, obeyed me in almost everything.

While brewing the potion, I thought about it for a long time and decided there was no point in fussing over something a puppy had said offhand.

Late that night, I sat beside him as usual, applying medicine to his wounds while telling him strange bedtime stories.

Stories like Little Red Riding Hood, The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The ending was always the same: the wolf died.

Lu Qie listened with his brows furrowed, his back so tense it had gone rigid.

I raised a hand and stroked his ears. “Wangcai, you’re different from other wolves.”

His ears twitched, and the soft wolf fur brushed across my palm.

It tickled a little.

The candlelight flickered, warm and dim.

Lu Qie sat there while I stood up, dipped a cotton swab into the potion, bent down, and carefully dabbed it over the pink scar on his neck.

I liked raising pretty dogs, so I didn’t want him to be left with scars.

A few strands of my hair slipped down naturally and brushed against his neck.

He drew in a soft breath. “Hiss…”

Startled, I instinctively looked up. “Is the potion I made today too harsh?”

Lu Qie’s eyes darted away, his voice a little hoarse and unnatural. “No.”

His ears were so red they looked ready to drip blood.

I understood at once.

So the potion really was too harsh after all.

I’d improve it next time.

He was too embarrassed to make demands of me, but a mature owner knew how to read between the lines!