Chapter 22 Avery
AVERY
Ian and I arrived back at camp a few hours before we had to report for Sunday night dinner. After a quick run around the perimeter of the grounds and a shower in the detached bathroom facilities I shared with the female staff, I spent fifteen minutes pacing the cramped space of my cabin.
There was something I needed to do, and I couldn’t put it off much longer.
“Boys are so fucking dumb, George,” I said to my serpentine friend, who was coiled up on the concrete floor, basking in the late-afternoon sun streaming through the window.
He made a soft hissing noise and unfurled slightly, shifting to catch the sun’s rays on a different part of his shimmering purple scales.
“Yeah, you’re right. It’s in their DNA. That’s not an excuse, though.”
I’d slept damn near twelve hours last night, and I’d awoken feeling rejuvenated and full of energy. Unfortunately, it appeared that having transcendent sex with Wyatt had the same effect on my body as spending two straight days at a spa.
My beast flicked her tail and licked a claw at the thought.
Quit it.
Before we left home, Ian and I brought our dads up to speed regarding what had gone down with Mahoney, and they’d seemed equal parts concerned and proud.
Ian, in a rare fit of charity toward my not-mates, had assured us all that he was extremely confident in Heath’s ability to button up Mahoney’s death and erase me from the scene.
Ian had delivered this news, apologized to me for his part in it all, and then disappeared into his room. He’d been acting shifty all day, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get to the bottom of it.
I had other assholes to interrogate.
“Okay, George,” I said, tossing my damp braid over my shoulder. I took a deep breath and squared up to the cabin’s screen door. “Let’s go.”
We set off for the Guardian cabins. The July sun heated my exposed skin, and the warm breeze smelled of maple trees, mountain laurel, and musky shifter boys. Without all the bullshit, it might’ve been downright pleasant here.
Along the way, I ran into Kellan, who was sweaty and shirtless and coming from the direction of the outdoor pavilion that served as the camp’s weight room.
“Hey, Baxter,” he said, deploying his six-million-dollar golden-boy smile. “Out for a stroll?”
“Something like that.”
“Where you headed? I can walk you—”
George, who had veered off the path twenty yards back to slither around in the thicker foliage that bordered it, sprang from the underbrush like a jack-in-the-box and latched his sharp teeth around Kellan’s calf.
“Oh fuck,” he barked, hopping on one foot and violently shaking the leg George was attached to. “Call him off, Avery!”
I sighed wearily. “Don’t worry, he’s not venomous. George, let go of him, please. We don’t have time for this.”
My python companion did as I asked. He released Kellan’s leg, leaving behind a bloody mess of tissue damage. He blinked innocent snaky eyes as he slithered around my legs and then rose up to nose at the hem of my shorts.
I stroked a finger along his scaly head. “Sorry, Kellan. Nothing a quick shift won’t heal, hopefully?”
He laughed, and it almost didn’t sound forced. “I’ll live, but if you wanted to swing by our cabin later to check on me, I wouldn’t be opposed.”
George hissed at him.
It was time to move on. I stepped around Kellan and continued down the path. “I’ll see you at dinner,” I said over my shoulder.
I waited until after I’d passed the Support Squadron cabins and had begun the march up the sloping hill that led to the Guardian cabins before addressing the naughty snake at my side. “Did you have to break the skin?”
He didn’t answer.
“I know you think you’re helping Elijah with all the hostility towards Kellan and his quad, but I promise it isn’t necessary.”
Still no response.
“You do realize that if you keep antagonizing Kellan, he could shift into his griffin and snap you up in his beak? It’s a testament to his character that he hasn’t.”
That got me an irritated hiss.
I reached the first set of Guardian cabins. There were at least two dozen of them, set in several opposing semicircles with the bathroom facilities in the middle and the dense forest behind them. These cabins were twice the size of everyone else’s, which was Prime shifter favoritism at its finest.
I let my beast float to the surface, where she simmered, thrumming with anticipation at our mates’ nearness and incensed at the secrets they’d been keeping. It was the tiger that led me to the second set of cabins, and I stopped at the one right in the middle of the pack.
George departed, leaving me to my private business. Probably for the best.
Steeling myself, I stepped onto the small stoop and rapped my knuckles on the wooden frame of the screen door.
Heath appeared behind the screen. He was shirtless, all carved muscles under golden-tan skin, the wolf tattooed across his chest staring at me with a dominance that was almost palpable.
“Avery.” The air left him, as if seeing me standing on his doorstep was the biggest relief he’d ever experienced.
“I need to talk to you,” I said flatly.
He opened the door and beckoned me inside. In an effort to further delay the inevitable, I paused to examine the cabin’s interior.
Four double beds, two on the left wall and two on the right, a small night table situated between each pair.
One bed was unmade and covered in discarded clothing and what looked like a handheld gaming system—Wyatt’s.
The bed next to that one was made, had a worn paperback lying on the pillow, and looked as though it’d hardly been slept in at all during the month we’d been here—Elijah’s.
Across the room was another neatly made bed, though the covers were a little rumpled and smelled like wolf—Heath’s.
So the last bed was Aiden’s—extra obvious because Aiden himself lay spread out on top of the covers, also shirtless, holding a tablet in his hand and staring at me with raised brows and wide eyes.
Heath stepped in front of me and searched my face, his hazel eyes burning bright. “What’s wrong, Killer? Is everything okay?”
Fury scorched through my body as everything I’d been feeling in those final moments in the car with Clara and the Gale girls came crashing back. “No, everything is not fucking okay, Heath, as you well know.”
He frowned, and his wolf reacted to my beast’s aggression by bubbling into the space between us. “You’re right,” he growled. “Nothing will ever be fucking okay until you’re ours.”
“Avery,” Aiden said carefully, sitting up on his bed and watching me like I was a ticking bomb. “What is this about?”
I clenched my fists, my blunt nails digging into my palms. The pinch of pain helped me focus. “I know,” I said softly. “I know why you did what you did. Why you were suddenly in a rush to bond.”
“Fuck.” Heath sat down on the trunk that lay at the foot of his bed and buried his head in his hands. “Clara told you.”
“She did. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me. I know that I wasn’t receptive to hearing anything you had to say in the immediate aftermath of the night in the woods, but you’ve had ample fucking time to say something in the month we’ve been stuck together as a quintet.”
Heath met my eyes, and the same despair I felt was reflected back at me. “Because we decided we couldn’t put that kind of pressure on you or, Moon forbid, guilt you into bonding with us. I’m going to figure out another way to save my sister—”
“Heath.” The word came out an anguished plea.
“I understand now. I understand why you all made the decision to pursue what you thought would get you the most power to face your dad. All you’ve ever been taught is that the strongest bonds are made with latent females from a Prime line, and I know that, even if I’ve always known that it’s wrong.
The fact that you as a Prime quad would be seeking a latent bond was the thing that kept us denying our attraction for each other from the jump.
I’d started falling for each one of you, despite knowing I wasn’t considered central bond material, just stupid, naive hope—”
“We would’ve chosen you in a heartbeat, Avery,” Heath said. “In a fucking heartbeat if I hadn’t planned to challenge my father—”
I let out a humorless laugh. “I almost believe you, Heath. You’re so fucking noble, so of course you planned to fall on your sword to save your sister, and Aiden was going to have to stand by and watch his little brother put himself in danger, and the same for Elijah with the guy who’s his rock and Wyatt with his best friend.
” I sucked in a breath and blinked back the tears that had welled in my eyes.
“I could forgive you for that, Heath. I could forgive all of you for prioritizing Clara’s and your safety over your little crush on me, or whatever it was—”
“It wasn’t a fucking little crush, Avery,” Heath barked, surging to his feet. “Every single one of us was obsessed with you. You were under our skin and the star of every dream for the future we couldn’t have and the object of every dirty fucking fantasy.”
“Then why didn’t you just tell me!” I screamed. The tears escaped and flowed freely down my cheeks. “You could’ve come to me and said, ‘Avery, the worst has happened, Clara’s in trouble, and we’re so sorry, but we have to do something we don’t want to do.’ And you know what I would’ve said?”
“What, Dove?”
The cabin door clicked quietly shut, and then Elijah and Wyatt were there, standing in the tight space in front of the door with wet hair, wearing nothing but towels around their waists. Elijah was as somber as I’d ever seen him. Wyatt just looked stricken.
I scrubbed the tears from my face with the back of my hand. “I would’ve asked you if the custody challenge rules apply to bonded mates or legal spouses the same as they do to blood relatives.”
Heath stared at me with a slack jaw.
“They do,” Aiden said quietly.
I already knew that because I’d looked it up before I left home earlier today.