Chapter 39 Avery
AVERY
Awareness came and went. Rough but soft hands on my fur. Deep voices whispering to me, then arguing with one another. Cool, smooth scales wrapped around my beast body, holding me gently.
Mates, my tiger half said.
No, I told her. They rejected us.
She huffed, which turned into an audible whine as pain shot through my ribs.
“Hey,” a deep voice cooed at me. “Lie still, baby. We’ve got you.”
My beast eyes fluttered open. Heath sat a few feet away, naked, his worried gaze on me like I was a precious, breakable treasure.
The long, cool body curled around me tightened slightly, and an annoyed hiss sounded.
“Elijah.” That was Aiden’s voice. He sounded exasperated. “She’s our mate too. You have to let us near her.”
No. Not their mate. They didn’t want me.
The tiger huffed again. She’d been hurt by them just as I had, but the pull to their beasts would be harder for her to resist.
“Wildcat, can you shift?” Wyatt’s voice came from somewhere at my back. “I’ll be able to carry you to the infirmary once you do.”
I growled.
“Easy, Killer.” Heath crawled closer, and he reached to pet my nose. My tiger let him get one good stroke in before I took over and snapped my teeth at him. Heath chuckled, but it sounded forced. “None of that. We don’t bite our mates.”
I managed an angry snarl before the pain crescendoed, making me dizzy.
“Don’t agitate her,” Aiden barked at Heath.
“Just because she’s pissed at us doesn't make it any less true,” Heath barked back. “She’s our Fated.”
Just hearing the word brought back the echo of ecstasy marred by bone-deep hurt that had consumed me the moment my tiger had laid eyes on these men in their glorious beastly forms.
I couldn’t deny it. Mallory had waxed poetic many times about how it felt when her cat and Allen’s wolf realized they were Fated. I recognized it for what it was.
It was supposed to be the most joyous moment that an incredibly rare few of us would ever experience.
And yet mine had been tainted.
By all the cruel things these men had said to me to push me away.
By their buying into the bullshit smear campaign that’d been waged against females with a beast for millennia.
And by their abandonment in this forest when I’d needed them the most.
It was too little, too late.
I hate them, I thought at my tiger.
She whined again—mournful, angry, desperate.
Pain scorched my body, and everything went black once again.
To Be Continued