Chapter 11 Heath #3
Aisha hurried toward him, gauze in hand, but Teegan grunted and waved her off.
He wiped the blood away from his nose with the hem of his T-shirt, conspicuously flashing Avery a glimpse of his abs.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I need to get back to my quad. Avery, you’re coming to the lake for rec time, right? ”
She gave him a wan smile. “Yeah, though I’m pretty sure I can’t get these bandages wet.” She glanced at Dr. Lee, and her smile bloomed brighter. “Right, Doc?”
“Correct,” Dr. Lee replied, returning her smile with a fond one of his own. “The healing spell our wonderful student-medic Aisha worked on your wounds should have them closed up by tomorrow morning, but keep the bandages on and dry until then, please.”
“I’ll save you a spot on the beach,” Teegan told her.
“The fuck you will,” I bit out.
“Sounds great,” Avery replied, pointedly not looking at me.
Teegan turned and marched stoically through the broken doors. Aisha busied herself with a supply cart, and then she wheeled it out of the room behind Teegan.
Dr. Lee rose from his stool. “I’m going to finish up your chart,” he told Avery. “I’ll be back in a very quick three minutes.” He slanted a look at me as he headed for the doors. “Do not break anything else in my infirmary, Mr. Blackwell.”
“Sorry, Doc.”
He shook his head, though he might’ve been smothering a grin.
Whatever. Alone at last.
I prowled toward my mate.
She watched me, a challenge burning in her gaze.
“Are you okay, Killer?” I asked softly, coming to a stop a foot from her bed. I ached to touch her but somehow managed not to. “Anything badly damaged, or was it just surface wounds?”
“Surface wounds,” she replied, her face hard. “It’s not lost on me that you were the one to shout the warning at me, so thank you. It would’ve been a lot worse if that mace had hit me in center mass.”
I swallowed roughly. “I know. I’d say I’ve never been so scared in my life, but that wouldn’t be true, would it? You almost died in the forest at school, and it was my fault.”
“I think you share that blame.” She shook her arm out and gingerly rolled her injured shoulder. “All four of you told me to get lost. Even Wyatt managed it as a bear.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I growled. “We thought…. Fuck, you know what we thought, Avery.”
She sighed, exhaustion weighing on her beautiful face. “It’s really pissing me off that you’re here, Heath. You only care now because your beast is driving you to. Do you remember when I got a concussion in a bout in the arena and you didn’t give a shit?”
“I gave a shit,” I snapped. “I punched a hole in the fucking wall of the men’s locker room.”
That earned me a slight raise of her blonde brow. “But you wanted me to think you didn’t give a shit, correct?”
Shame churned in my gut. “Yes.”
“Then tell me, Heath, truly.” She sat up straighter, her eyes blazing like the center of a flame.
“You didn’t want a central bond with a beast soul because you thought it would be faulty.
Weaker. You wanted the assurance of power.
Of stability. Of fertility. Now you know for certain that a bond with me means a bond with a beast soul. What’s changed, really?”
“Everything has changed, Avery,” I said, my voice a desperate rasp.
“You’re our Fated. Our perfect match, chosen for us by the Moon.
Our deity. The source of every drop of our shifter magic.
I don’t believe our bond could be anything but the strongest and most perfect union on the planet, but even if it wasn’t, I just do not fucking care anymore. ”
I’d shouted those last few words, and she stared wordlessly at me.
“I won’t take you from them again,” I whispered. “If I’m wrong, I might die for it, but I won’t ask my brother and my best friends to sacrifice for me anymore.”
She frowned. “You might die? What are you talking about?”
Avery was aware of my parents’ intentions with respect to Clara’s bonding—she’d skewered one of her dates last semester, after all—but she didn’t know that everything had escalated.
She didn’t know about the deal with the little Nelson shits or about my plan to challenge my father by Clara’s seventeenth birthday—a deadline that still loomed over all our heads.
If I challenged Holden and won custody of my sister, I could put a stop to the bonding she didn’t want to a quad of teenage assholes who were callous fuckboys at best and dangerous abusers at worst.
A month of stewing, of aching for my mate, had given me some perspective. As much as I’d wanted to spill everything to her in the immediate aftermath of the night in the woods, to somehow make her see we had a reason for doing we what we did, I knew now that I couldn’t.
Avery had only met Clara once, but she’d already performed heroic feats to save her from harm. I wanted Avery to bond with my quad because she forgave us. Because she wanted us. Because she knew in her heart how well we all fit together.
Because she loved us.
I didn’t want her to bond with us begrudgingly just to save Clara, nor did I want her to feel like there was anything behind our obsessive need to make her ours other than pure and unadulterated desire for a girl we’d all fallen for well before we knew she was our Fated.
So no matter how badly I wanted to stand here, look her in the eyes, and beg her to forgive us for what we did because it was what we thought we had to do to save my sister because maybe, just maybe, it would give her a reason to look at me with anything other than distrust, contempt, or pain—
I wouldn’t.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I replied, inching closer to her.
She tensed, but the urge to comfort my mate overwhelmed me.
I cupped her cheek, and it was soft and warm in my hand.
“I’m glad you’re okay, Killer. I would’ve let Wyatt kill Brayden Davidson if I hadn’t thought it would get us kicked out.
I know you’re angry with us, but we’ll never leave you.
You’re our mate, and we’re going to take care of you. ”
She shoved my hand away. “If the breach in the school’s wards hadn’t happened, I’d have shown up next semester and had to watch you all fawn over fucking Phoebe or some other latent princess you picked to bond with because you decided you wanted to juice your power. Go away, Heath.”
My wolf rumbled a dangerous noise in my chest. I leaned down and got right in her face. “You don’t have all the facts, Killer,” I snarled in a low voice. “You may be right, but it would’ve hurt me even more than it hurt you, I can fucking promise you that.”
Her tiger lashed at me, but my wolf held strong, reveling in the pain. Our mate was a storm, a force so fucking powerful, it made me want to cry and scream and fuck her until neither of us could walk or speak.
“All right,” Dr. Lee announced as he breezed back through the doors. “Heath, step away from my patient and get out of my infirmary. Avery, you’re released and on rest until tomorrow morning.”
We both relented. I dropped a kiss on her forehead and strode from the room before she could punish me for that too.