24. Ava
Ava
“You little hussy!” Maeve said, shoving me in the shoulder.
We were in the bedroom I’d claimed for me, my husband, and my mate because it had the biggest bed.
After the strategy meeting, she’d promptly dragged Sol and me upstairs, shut the door, and narrowed her eyes in suspicion, commanding me to spill my guts.
I’d never hide anything from Maeve, and despite my connection to my twin, Sol had always been the third piece of our puzzle. Now that I’d confessed the truth, Sol sat speechless on the edge of the mattress while Maeve laughed.
I hid my face in my hands. “It’s a mess.”
“So, wait…you married Lycan,” Sol said. “Then you bit Poe. He bit you. And when Lycan found out, he bit Poe, too?”
“That’s why Lycan is worried,” I said. “Poe’s wolf could reject my mark. If it does…” I didn’t know what I’d do. My wolf had already integrated with him and his magic. I couldn’t stomach the thought of it leaving me.
“It would have already,” Sol said. “If it weren’t going to take, you’d already know.”
“How can he have two mates?” I asked. “Isn’t that against the laws of the pack or something?”
“I don’t think there are laws when it comes to mating,” Maeve said. “It seems to be a spontaneous kind of thing.”
“What are you going to do now?” Sol raised her eyebrows. “Mark Lycan? Let him mark you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. When I’d asked him about it, he didn’t get a chance to answer, and I hadn’t brought it up again, too terrified of the answer.
And there had been a moment between the three of us when Lycan’s teeth had glided over the spot on my neck, where I’d anticipated them sinking home. But he didn’t do it. I didn’t know why.
“Look at that,” Maeve said, giving me another nudge with her shoulder. “Two months in Europe and you’ve gone from prude to slut in record time.”
“Hey!” I shoved her back. “I’m not a slut!”
“It’s not a bad thing.” Maeve laughed and shrugged. “I’m a proud slut. Fucking and sucking since I was fifteen—”
The bedroom door opening cut off whatever reply I would have made, and Guin sauntered in, quietly closing it behind her. We went quiet, the children having been caught up past bedtime by our older, meaner sister. She pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips.
“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” She stopped in front of me, and I peered up at her. Despite our difference in appearance, it was like looking in a mirror. If I was the frigid Vanderbilt bitch, she was the ice queen, the template I’d carved myself from.
“About?” I feigned innocence, even blinked my eyes a few times in supplication.
Guin tilted her head to the side. “Don’t play dumb.”
“Sorry, not sorry?”
She rolled her eyes and groaned. “Lycan and Poe? You can’t be serious.”
Maeve laughed. “Oh, stop, Guin. Just because you’re in love with the king of sexually repressed shifters doesn’t mean—”
“I’m not in love with anyone,” Guin cut in, more offended by the accusation of being in love rather than the person in question.
I looked at Sol and mouthed, “Who?”
“Kodiak,” she replied.
“Wow,” I murmured. “Really?”
“No, not really.” Guin scoffed and sat in a chair at the foot of the bed. “He fucking wishes.”
Sol bit her bottom lip while Maeve shook her head and grinned.
“Your thirty days are up on Tuesday,” Guin continued. “Pruitt wants to know what to do with the paperwork.”
Lycan and I hadn’t discussed it since that one conversation after my transition, but I knew what he’d say. He’d started calling me his wife. I thought of him as my husband, even if we weren’t mated, even if we’d never be mated. No, there was no going back.
“Shred it,” I said.
Guin’s features turned to stone, reminding me so much of our father despite how much she looked like our mother. “You’re sure?”
I held my chin up higher, mirroring her expression. “Positive.”
She rubbed her forehead and mumbled something about how a woman with a law degree should have at least had the foresight to get a prenup. What exactly had my JD cost again? Much good it did me.
I ignored her. Even if I wanted to get away from Lycan, which I didn’t, I doubted he would let me go. I wouldn’t if it were reversed.
“Do you really think this is all about Mom’s bloodline?” Sol asked, glancing at Guin with hope in her eyes.
Our eldest sister licked her lips and sighed. “I don’t know. I remember those final days before she disappeared. She’d just given birth to Galahad, but it wasn’t like when she had the rest of you. The delivery was hard. It took a lot out of her.”
I vaguely recalled her extended hospital stay and the solemn look in her eyes when she returned home with our baby brother. I didn’t understand at the time, but looking back now, something had changed in her. She’d lost a spark, a vital piece of her soul.
“Before she died, she told me I had to be strong,” Guin continued. “I had to look out for my siblings. I had to be the rock. She told me it was too much to ask of me; she knew that. But she didn’t have another choice.”
I’d never heard this story before, and I imagined a confused, sixteen-year-old Guin listening to our mother in her final days. Maybe Guin was old enough to understand something was wrong, but she was still a child. She couldn’t have stopped what happened. She couldn’t have known.
“She left in the middle of the night,” Guin continued.
“I watched her from my bedroom window, but I thought it was like the other times. She’d go roaming in the woods out behind the ranch, but I know now she was going off to shift.
Except the full moon had been the week before.
I’ve never been able to make that sit right. ”
It still rattled me, knowing my mother had the gene, knowing she’d suffered alone all those years without a pack.
I ached to find out all the details. Why had she left her family in the Sierra Nevada?
Why hadn’t she mated Zion? What really happened when she crossed into Bastard territory that night?
Had the Scorpions done something to her?
And if she’d been met with foul play, where was her body?
We never had anything to bury, no conclusion to mourn.
Nothing but an empty grave, a headstone, and a violent story told by our father.
“Based on everything we know,” Guin said, freezing her features into that stony expression I recognized from the boardroom.
“I bet Marx tried to get to her first, and she went down fighting. If this siphon curse or whatever is meant for the Kennedy bloodline, he only had to bide his time until he got his hands on one of us. I suppose it doesn’t matter now.
We’re here. We shifted. And we never even got to bury a body.
So I stopped asking what happened to her a long time ago. It doesn’t change anything, does it?”
It crushed my soul to think about what her final moments were like.
Maybe she had hunted down some monster in the night and fought until her very last breath to ensure Marx couldn’t use her how he wanted.
It was a heartbreaking thought. As far as I knew, the Vanderbilts and the Scorpions had an alliance at that time.
Our father hated the Bastards as much as Marx did… enemy of my enemy and all that.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us this?” Sol asked, her voice hushed and small.
“Like mother said,” Guin continued, flicking her gaze to our sister. “I had to be strong. It was my albatross, my burden to carry. She knew our father was emotionally stunted on a good day. After her death, he’d be…well, he turned out the way she expected.”
Distant. Demanding. Stern and ruthless to a fault. I didn’t have many good memories of him. After Mother died, he poured all of his energy into his work, shipping us off to whatever boarding school or summer sleep-away he deemed appropriate. He saw us as an obligation, an extension of himself.
“You shouldn’t have had to do that,” I said.
Guin reeled in whatever modicum of emotion had seeped through her hardened interior and straightened. “It’s over now. Nothing to be done about it. We need to talk about the Fitz Global meeting tomorrow.”
And just like that, this displeasing show of Vanderbilt dishevelment had been carefully brushed under the family rug.
Back to business.
After we walked through the particulars of the meeting with Scott, my sisters said good night and went to their rooms, leaving me to shower and do my nighttime routine alone.
I heard my husband and my mate enter, flirt with each other, and collapse on the bed in a heap of giggles and soft innuendos.
I opened the bathroom door and leaned against the jamb, relishing their combined scent—leather and pine and amber.
Poe was stretched out under Lycan, his legs on either side of my husband’s hips, his arms bound overhead.
“Only if you’re good,” Lycan whispered, pressing his lips to Poe’s neck, right over his mark.
Something wanton and hot boiled in my stomach.
Jealousy, perhaps, that Lycan had bitten Poe but not me.
Or desire, for want of watching them tear each other to pieces before they did the same to me.
Memories of last night flooded my mind—the sound of Lycan’s dominant tone, the taste of Poe’s sweat-slicked skin, the scent of sex intoxicating the three of us.
They both turned to face me, two sets of eyes glowing in the moonlight.
“Uh-oh,” Lycan murmured. “I think our Trouble is having naughty thoughts.”
“Hmm,” Poe replied. “What to do about that?”
I laughed as Lycan pushed himself off the bed and stalked toward me, scooping me in his arms before gently flopping me into the bed next to my mate.
We kissed and touched and teased, and Lycan took his time with both of us, bringing us nearly to our breaking points before scaling back and starting all over again.
He hushed us when we got too loud and gloated when he found that one spot that drew us wild.
And when it was over, when we were knotted together and sweating adoration, he wrapped an arm around both of us and kissed us off to sleep.