15. Sadie
TENSION
I groaned as harsh sunlight streamed through the bay windows and woke me up. The first thing I noticed—the pint of ice cream lying empty across my pillow.
The second thing I noticed—five other females were piled across my arms and legs.
On my one side, Lucinda was wrapped around me in a bear hug.
On the other, Aran was resting her hand across my head like she was trying to comfort me.
Jinx was sprawled in the middle of the bed, lying across Jess, and Jala was lying beside them with her arms linked with Jess’s.
I decided not to dwell on the fact that Jinx’s eyes were wide open and she was muttering something under her breath.
She was the only person not sleeping.
Even Noodle was spread out on his back in her arms, snoring softly.
I squinted and realized I wasn’t imagining it: the ferret was wearing fake eyelashes, and his dark fur glinted like he’d been dipped in sparkles. Pretty.
Abruptly, I remembered the events of last night, and emotions crushed my chest to the bed.
The men.
I’d done what I had to do, but holy shit, that didn’t mean it hurt any less.
I was wanted for being a half-breed, and the don had threatened all our lives if I dared to bond with them.
He didn’t even know about my fae heritage, and he still forbade it because I was an alpha.
Logically, I was happy with my decision because I’d kept the men safe.
Illogically, I wanted to cry like a little baby while they held me and told me everything was going to be all right.
Maybe that was what growing up was?
Recognizing that it wouldn’t be all right unless you made it so. That sometimes you couldn’t do what you wanted to, only what you had to.
Sometimes, the only person who could save you was yourself.
And if you couldn’t save yourself, all you could save were those you cared about. I’d protected the men by making the only choice any of us could make.
And how had they rewarded me?
Ascher telling me to fuck off, Jax turning his back to me, Xerxes sneering that I should find someone to dominate, and Cobra cutting off his connection to the little snake on my flesh.
The moment he’d severed the connection, the little snake had screamed into my mind like it was dying.
By some miracle, it hadn’t disappeared completely. It was a lighter gray, no longer a dark, shadowy black, but it still moved across my flesh.
Which was weird, because if it was a part of Cobra’s consciousness, it shouldn’t exist after he’d removed his connection from it.
My little miracle snake.
I reached down and kissed it, and it twirled across my fingers and sent me images of comfort.
The ache in my chest persisted.
Cobra was over me.
My emotions boomeranged back and forth between righteous anger and overwhelming pain.
There was no in-between.
A part of me wished to go back in time and tell the men I wanted them to be mine.
It wouldn’t have been hard to give in to my desire and beg them to take me, beg them to fight impossible odds for me and protect me from life’s horror.
But I hadn’t grown up being beaten within an inch of my life to wimp out when it mattered.
I didn’t need any man to fight for me.
I could do it myself.
The don had been clear, and I agreed with Jala that everything happened for a reason.
The men’s reaction to me asking to just be friends was the confirmation I needed that I’d made the right choice.
They still didn’t respect me as a person .
They just wanted to own me sexually, order me around, and treat me like a simpering princess that needed saving, and when I’d refused, they’d turned nasty.
I scoffed as indignation burned through me.
How dare they treat me like this when I was putting aside my own wants so they could be safe and happy?
“Fuck men. I hope I die a virgin. That will show them.” I threw myself out of bed, unable to lie still and wallow for a second longer.
“Virginity rocks. Kill them all,” Aran chanted sleepily, patting the pillow while wrapping her other elbow around Jala’s neck and squeezing.
Before she could asphyxiate the pink-haired teen, I punched Aran in the gut and wrestled Jala out of her grip.
Both of them were still asleep, but Aran grinned widely, like she enjoyed trying to kill someone while unconscious.
Back in the shifter realm, at mandatory therapy with Auntie, I’d thought Aran was being dramatic when she’d said she wanted to kill everyone at all times.
Now that I knew her better, I 100 percent believed her.
A lifetime ago, I’d explained that the numb made me feel nothing, and Aran had said something about rage consuming her until she was burning alive.
Goose bumps made me shiver.
As I stood dwelling on the past and unfortunate circumstances that were our lives, suddenly the familiar voice of the numb echoed clearly in my head.
I’m ice; he’s fire . You need to complete it.
My blood froze.
The numb wasn’t activated, but the familiar voice had just spoken to me.
“What?” I whispered out loud. “How are you in my head?”
Silence.
My heart beat erratically. “How did you speak to me?”
Still nothing.
If the numb were a normal phenomenon that spoke to the half warriors in battle, why was it whispering riddles to me?
The numb always gave emotionless directions in battle.
It instructed me on how to punch; it didn’t whisper ambiguous directions about completing something.
“What do you mean, ice and fire? Do you mean Aran is fire? Who the fuck are you? Is the song of the hunt somehow ice?” I said as I looked around for an invisible intruder.
“Um, sis?” Lucinda asked with concern.
No voice responded.
“She’s hearing voices. Either she’s some type of cursed parasitic host, or her mind has deteriorated from too many concussions,” Jinx said with a “duh” tone like my theatrics were boring her. “Probably the latter.”
I made a face at her. “Go to sleep. Oh, wait, you can’t.”
“Real mature.” Jinx stroked Noodle.
Embarrassment streaked through me as I realized I’d just mocked a twelve-year-old for suffering from insomnia.
“Are you sure you’re okay, sis?” Lucinda narrowed her too-familiar ruby eyes at me.
“No, I’m not okay. Creepy voices love to talk to me, and apparently instead of being maternal, I instinctively want to bully small children.”
Aran groaned as she opened her eyes and stretched. “You’re being dramatic, Sadie.”
I glared at her. “A female voice in my head just said, ‘I’m ice; he’s fire,’ and, ‘You need to complete it,’ most likely referring to me and you, since you’re the only guy here. Well, kind of. I don’t know.”
I pressed my palms into my eyes. “It was the numb’s voice, but I hadn’t activated it, so theoretically it should be impossible to speak to me. Why do voices always talk about us? What does any of it mean?”
The room went silent.
At least now everyone would panic with me, and Aran would finally realize how serious the situation was.
“Oh no,” Aran said as I grabbed a small paper bag from the en suite bathroom and breathed into it rapidly.
I rasped, “I know, right,” and continued huffing into the bag.
Aran pulled her sleeping mask back over her eyes. “The sun god probably realizes I’m an absolute dynamite of a man and wants to tell me how sexy I am. You probably need to complete your life’s purpose by telling me that.”
It was official.
I was about to murder my best friend.
Jinx choked on a laugh, and Lucinda cracked a smile. Jala and Jess woke up and looked around, confused by what was going on.
“Jinx, hold the glam ferret,” I said.
She scooped Noodle up protectively, and I let out a war cry, throwing myself on Aran, elbow pointed down for maximum impact.
Even with a blindfold over Aran’s eyes, it wasn’t a fair fight.
“Fight, fight, fight,” the teenage girls squealed with glee as we tussled across elegant silk sheets and I tried to stuff the paper bag down Aran’s throat.
The match ended quickly.
Aran pinned me beneath her with her forearm across my windpipe, and my left arm twisted behind my body at an awful angle.
She grinned down at me, still blindfolded by her sleeping mask, perfect white teeth flashing. “Admit I’m sexy.”
“Something serious is going on here,’’ I whined. “I can feel it in my bones. Maybe I’m ice, and you’re fire. We probably have to do something together. The creepy poems said something similar to us. Also, you only pinned me because your male enchantment makes you wider and stronger.”
Aran shook her head, eye mask still on. “Oh, dumb, innocent Sadie. The enchantment is a mirage. It makes me appear wider with a more masculine build, but doesn’t actually change my physical form at all. Just what you perceive.”
My jaw dropped.
The hands pinning me to the bed were strong as shit, and I’d lost circulation where they pressed against me.
Then I remembered what she’d said. “I am not innocent.”
“So you finally admit you’re dumb?” Jinx asked lazily as she petted Noodle.
For what happened next, I blamed the terror that still shook through my veins from the voice speaking to me.
“So you admit you’re annoying?” I mocked the twelve-year-old.
“So you admit you’re a nincompoop?”
“So you admit you’re the size of a garden gnome?”
Jinx’s dark eyes were cruel. “So you admit you’re probably going to die in this realm because you have no idea what you’re doing, abilities you can’t control, no idea how to maintain a relationship with men, and confusing circumstances surrounding your existence that probably indicate you won’t live to see your next birthday? ”
Jala groaned and pressed a pillow over her face, fluffy pink hair sticking out.
Jess kicked Jinx. “We talked about this.”
Aran laughed and climbed off me, so she was no longer violently smushing me into the bed.
After a long, tense moment where I tried to regain a semblance of dignity after being emotionally assaulted by a child and thoroughly outwrestled by my best friend, who was blindfolded, I pointed out the obvious. “You don’t have many friends, do you?”