Chapter 22 Avery #2
“And then I would’ve said, ‘Pick me.’”
Heath sucked in a harsh breath, like a boulder had hit him in the chest.
I forged on. “Pick me. As your central, or even just as Aiden’s or your legal spouse. Pick me, and I will challenge Holden Blackwell for custody of Clara because my beast is really fucking powerful, and I bet I can beat him. And the thing is, now I know I can beat him.”
Heath was on me in a flash. He grasped my face, his handsome features terrified. “How, Avery? How could you know that?”
I held his wrists but didn’t push him away. “Because he accosted me in the hall after the open SWIM challenges. He tried to force me to shift, and I broke his hold.”
He paled and released my face. “Fuck,” he said, beginning to pace, running his hand through his hair. “Fuck, this is bad.”
“He can’t know what she is,” Aiden said, rising from the bed. “If he knew about her tiger, we’d have heard about it. And he certainly doesn’t know she’s our Fated.”
“But he’ll know she’s a female with a powerful Prime animal,” Elijah said. “One that’s potentially more powerful than him.”
“He’d feel threatened,” Wyatt added. “Especially if he suspects she’s also a feline.”
Heath’s gaze snagged on the tears rolling down my cheeks.
He stopped pacing and cupped my face again, wiping my tears away with his thumbs.
“Baby, you have to stay away from my father. I have no doubt that you are at least as powerful as he is, and as it stands, your tiger does have a better shot at him than my wolf does. But I need you to listen to me—I will never risk your life like that. He’s too powerful, not just his beast but as a member of the regional Council, and he can’t know what you are. I will die before I let him hurt you.”
“You’re not allowed to die,” I hissed.
He shook his head sadly. “I’m going to try to find another way.”
I finally mustered up the strength to shove him away.
“None of this matters!” I shouted. “Because you didn’t come to me.
You didn’t save even a sliver of decency for me when you decided to throw away anything we could’ve possibly had.
I said I could’ve forgiven you for seeking what you’d been taught was the most stable and powerful bond to save Clara, but how am I supposed to forgive you for the way you treated me? ”
The silence in the cabin was deafening.
“You made me feel this small,” I said, holding my thumb and pointer finger half an inch apart. “You ruined the best battle against the SWIM I’d ever had, in front of the entire school. You were dismissive, belittling, you left me in the woods—”
“Avery.” Heath’s voice was a tortured cry.
“—and you paraded other fucking women in front of me.” I whirled and glared at Wyatt. “Including one who’d said horrible shit about my dead mother—”
“Wildcat,” he said, the word scraping his throat like sandpaper. “I know, and I’m so sorry.”
He looked so broken, so unlike the sexy confident guy who’d fucked my brains out less than twenty-four hours ago. It hurt to look at him.
I turned back to Heath and poked him right in his bare chest. “So you tell me, Alpha, how am I supposed to forgive you for that?”
My heart fell right out of my body when a tear leaked from Heath’s eye.
“I don’t know, baby,” he said softly. “I made the decision to treat you like that because I was selfish. Because I was fucking weak. I thought it would be easier if you hated us. Easier to keep our distance from you, easier for us not to long for a girl who despised us when we were planning to bond another. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it was agony.
The whole thing was my idea, so blame me, not the others.
Especially not Elijah, he was so opposed to this—”
“No,” Elijah said. “Don’t do that. I went along with it, and I hurt the love of my life just as much as everyone else in this room.”
“Don’t call me that,” I sniffed.
The quiet anguish in his yellow eyes pierced me like a bullet. “Dove, you’ll always be the love of my life, even if you never love me back.”
A sob escaped me. I was drowning. Tears blurred my vision and my hands shook.
Strong arms wrapped around me, and I caved to the urge to bury my face in that solid, naked chest because I wasn’t sure I could remain standing otherwise.
“You’re not, and you never were, no one,” Aiden whispered into my hair.
“Saying that about you made me want to vomit, and I didn’t even know you were my Fated then.
And I still have nightmares about sending you away in the woods.
I thought I was protecting you. I’ll be sorry for what I did for the rest of my life, Avery.
I was scared shitless for Heath, but that’s not an excuse. ”
Another hard body pressed in behind me. “All we can do,” Heath said, his hands on my hips and his lips on the back of my neck, “is keep trying to show you how we feel. Keep trying to convince you that we’ll never hurt you again and that you’re the sun around which we all want to fucking orbit for the rest of our days. ”
My tiger purred so loudly in my chest at being sandwiched between the shirtless Blackwell brothers that it was a wonder I wasn’t vibrating like a cellphone.
Everything was so muddled—my anger and resentment, the memories of all the qualities each of these men possessed that’d made me start falling for them in the first place, the way my body responded to them, the echoes of the feeling of bleeding out on the forest floor after they’d dismissed me for the last time.
The way they looked at me now as if they needed me more than air.
I shook myself loose from Heath and Aiden, and they released me without a fight. “I just…. I need some time to process this,” I said. “Hearing about everything from Clara and then jumping straight into a fight where I essentially killed another shifter and then having sex with Wyatt was… a lot.”
“Do you regret what we did?” Wyatt asked.
I’d never seen him look so vulnerable, and I found that I passionately hated it.
I looked him in his sad eyes. “No. Absolutely not.”
That got me a sexy grin, and it loosened something in my chest.
“Good,” he said. “Because it was the hottest and best thing to ever happen to me.”
My face was already flushed, thank the Moon, disguising how my cheeks heated at those memories. “Well, um,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “It’s almost time for dinner, so I should let you all get dressed.”
“I am dressed,” Elijah said, stepping out from behind Aiden like the phantom he was. He wore our Guardian-issued black track pants and one of his loose tank tops that hardly qualified as a shirt. “I’ll walk you to dinner.”
“I don’t think—”
A chill infused the air between us, his eyes two lighthouses in a stormy sea. “Please, Dove.”
“Okay,” I whispered. This conversation had been a lot, and I wasn’t callous enough to think I was the only one wrung dry.
Wyatt, Heath, and Aiden watched us go without a word.
Elijah slipped his hand into mine and threaded our fingers together, and I didn’t protest because it felt good and right, the same way being wrapped up tight in Wyatt’s arms while his dick was inside me had felt good and right.
We walked in silence to the chow hall. After a few minutes, George came slithering out of the forest and joined us. He rose up to nose at Elijah’s hand, and Elijah stroked an affectionate thumb across George’s shiny head.
The longer we walked, the more the chill dissipated.
At dinner, Elijah gathered a plate of my favorite foods from the buffet line and deposited me next to Ian and Brody without a fuss. He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, and then he disappeared into the kitchen to charm the cafeteria ladies into making him something special to eat, as usual.
Ian watched him go with a furrowed brow. “Are you okay?” he asked me.
“No,” I replied. “But ask me again tomorrow.”