Chapter 54
Aurelia
Iwake up in a panic, fighting off my bedsheets like a caged animal. I scramble off the bed, kneeing Xander in the side and smacking Lyle’s face in the process.
“Regina?” Lyle says in alarm.
But I’m already running. I hit the floor with my good leg and get out of the room. My newer leg cramps up. I don’t let it stop me as I hobble out of the suite and up the stairs that takes me to the roof. I need air. I need cold. I need—
How do I even fucking know what I need? Cold air slaps me across the face as I clear the top stair and reach for the wall lining the roof.
Stone under my fingers and the cold air finally let me see.
My chest heaves as the images burn themselves into my mind.
Four of the pieces of the soul gather behind me, and as much as I love them, the one that I want to see is not here.
Ghoul may have been right. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready.
Perhaps my heart had torn apart enough. Had been battered and beaten so badly the bruises still smarted.
I know my father is a monster—a cruel and malevolent creature who crawled from the depths of some hell and had fooled us into thinking he was a regular person.
But this level of manipulation over an innocent child is a new level of evil.
And how I reconcile Ghoul’s child-self with the adult beast I know today seems impossible.
We are all damaged beasts. Never broken, but somehow still in pieces.
And my pieces seem to be trying to fit Ghoul into us.
But whichever way I turn it, try to jam him in, he resists.
There is no real way to undo his blood bond.
Only death will free him now. My regina’s heart shrieks out at this loss.
Shrieks in pain and hate at the beast who did this to us.
A large hand plants itself against my own, a gold ring on the thumb. “Do you want to fly, regina?” Xander asks.
Something about his deep voice, so often holding a bite, now soft, soothes my pulse.
His eyes beam their light from the corner of my eye as I look up into the heavens.
The spaces between the stars remind me of Ghoul.
That void-like darkness. The regina in me wants to be closer to him.
Wants those velvet shadows to cloak me as they cloaked him.
They had been drawn out of him through pain.
His animus had not taken over exactly, but had come to the front to take away the pain of torture.
To bring forward the monster because he recognised that an apex predator stood before him.
He had done what he needed to do in order to survive.
He had become dark-hearted to save himself.
Xander turns around and leans against the stone next to me, letting his head hang back as he breathes deeply. I feel the others lingering behind me, letting me know they are near but giving me space. My dragon closes his eyes. “What did he show you, Aurelia?”
“Don’t ‘Aurelia’ me,” I snarl, even though I can’t take my eyes off the way his muscled throat and Adam’s apple look at this angle.
The corner of his mouth turns up. “What did the basilisk show you, regina?”
“Something bad.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
“Still an asshole,” I mutter.
“No one will take that from me, not even you.”
For some reason, that makes me want to smile, but I’m determined to be furious with the world and the bad things that happen in it.
Scythe’s presence is like hoarfrost behind me, and it’s enough to make me turn.
My shark looms, his silver hair even more beautiful under the stars, his impossibly perfect beauty cutting through my vision and drawing me to him.
He places his hands on either side of my cheeks, tilting my face gently upwards.
“We must not let the past control us, regina.”
Half of the time Scythe speaks, I want to cry. “We can’t let the bad men win,” I whisper.
“We have to make sure we don’t become bad men in the process,” he counters. “Ghoul is a bound beast, regina. He made agreements. He must carry them out.”
“But he was a child when he was blood bound.”
Scythe’s eyes search mine as this new information registers, but he never hesitates. “Children pay for the choices of the adults around them. It’s not fair, regina, but it’s the truth.”
I look into his ice-chip eyes and sigh, thinking about the choices that had been made for me. A choice that tore my heart into five pieces. “I want to kill my father, Scythe.”
He nods, his hands sliding down my arms to hold my hands. Lyle’s shadow, his hair unbound, his wild eyes wrangled into tame irises, steps next to us. “That is a burden you’ll carry for the rest of your life, regina. Are you sure you want that?”
I glance at Scythe and Savage, then at Xander, who stares at me with something burning in his gaze. I look back at Lyle. “Not a burden,” I say with lethal softness. “A privilege. A right. The fulfilment of a vow I made in my mother’s name.”
“You want your pack to be complete, regina,” Lyle says. “That is your right too. We just don’t know how possible that is.”
“We don’t know much about basilisks,” I say carefully. “I need more information, and the source isn’t giving us much.”
“I’ll try the old Drakos library,” Xander says. “I want to see my family anyway. I can check if Selene knows anything.”
“Thank you.” Selene is a wealth of knowledge, having spent so much of her adult years in the dusty archives under Drakos Estate. She’d been a great comfort to me when I’d been alone.
“And I’ll help you check the academy texts tomorrow,” Lyle says.
I turn north, looking over the dark school grounds and the bushland beyond. My hand finds the stone again, a strange expansive sense travelling up from my fingers and spreading through my hands. A bid for attention. “I feel the academy. I feel like it’s trying to tell me something.”
Savage appears next to me, pressing an ear to the stone next to my hand. “What’s it saying?”
I feel it out, trying to parse the sense of imbalance. “It sounds like a warning.”
Once the adrenaline wears off and I get cold, everyone follows me back inside.
This time, I crawl next to Xander, who carefully puts his arm around me and fills my legs with his healing power.
It’s still new, being this close to him, but his power is so familiar and calming that I nestle into it.
I think it’s new for him too, because he doesn’t melt into me the way my other mates do.
He still…holds himself. As if he’s worried he might hurt me in his sleep and needs to watch me breathe.