Chapter 23 Wyatt
WYATT
Iwaited with Heath and Aiden outside our cabin, dressed in my workout gear. Campers were beginning to emerge, most of them headed to breakfast, while others who had gotten a later start were scrambling around, rushing to and from the bathrooms and throwing clothes on.
The trees rustled behind us. Twigs cracked and branches swayed.
A few alarmed shouts sounded. Several half-naked guys bolted from the bathrooms and ducked back into their cabins.
The basilisk emerged from the forest.
“Fucking finally,” I muttered.
Elijah slithered along, carving a path through grass, ignoring the gaping of our fellow trainees. His yellow eyes burned brighter as he passed the Crimson Quad, who were filing out of their cabin two doors down from ours.
The basilisk flicked his barbed tail at Ari as he slithered by. Ari shouted in alarm and jumped out of the way. Kellan’s eyes went molten, but Teegan shoved him along.
Elijah melted smoothly back into human form as he reached us. I threw his clothes at him, and he pulled them on while Heath began the interrogation.
“She left for breakfast?”
He nodded. “George is with her. He returned from his nightly adventures about twenty minutes ago.”
“Good. Anything to report?”
Elijah grinned, his canines extra sharp. “Ari tried to knock on her door fifteen minutes before lights out, but he changed his mind when he saw me wrapped around her tree.”
Aiden’s head snapped in the direction of the offending cat’s back as he and his quad made their way down the path. “Sounds like I need to break more fingers.”
“Later, man,” I said. “Let’s go. I want to see her.”
The bear was pushing me harder than he had since the night we discovered Avery was our Fated. Thoughts of her played on loop in my hormone-addled brain, a goddess as she rode my cock and took what her body needed from me.
Warring with those memories were thoughts of her tear-streaked face as she finally wore her heartbreak for us to see.
I was being tortured by my own psyche with both my fantasy and my nightmare.
None of us could do this any longer without losing our fucking minds.
All the cards were on the table. The idea that Avery might’ve agreed to be ours—our central, our bonded mate—had we simply gone with the novel approach of being honest with her about fucking everything last semester?
That had left each of us more devastated than we already were.
But somehow, we also had a renewed determination, and I was so fucking hungry for my girl.
“Right,” Heath said. “No more fucking around. Let’s go.”
We made it to breakfast just in time. Avery was seated in her usual spot in the middle of a table on the Support Squadron side, next to her brother and the cats.
The end of that table was still empty.
I set my tray down at the open seat next to Avery. Elijah sat down across from me, next to Joon the bobcat, who squeaked in alarm and jumped six inches out of his chair. Aiden and Heath filled in next to us.
“Hey, Wildcat,” I said as I slid onto the bench beside her. Fuck, she smelled good. “Sleep okay?”
She stared at me, a forkful of waffle paused in front of her face. “I did,” she said slowly. “Are you guys eating on the white-shirt side of the chow hall now? Cash’s head is going to explode.”
“One can only hope,” Elijah said, smiling fondly at her.
“He can go fuck himself,” Heath added, and then he jerked his chin at Avery’s fork. “Eat, Killer. It’s sprints this morning instead of the long run. You’ll need your fuel.”
She narrowed her gorgeous eyes at him, but she finished her bite without protest.
Heath grinned, the pleased look on his face and the heat blazing in his eyes practically screaming, “Good girl.” Her cheeks flushed the slightest pink as she focused intently on her plate, and then I had to adjust myself in my shorts.
We settled into our meal. The cats struck up their usual energetic chatter, even including Aiden at one point as they debated the finer points of feline battle tactics.
Ian and Elijah exchanged a few cryptic words, which did not go unnoticed by Avery.
She frowned in confusion, but then Ian distracted her by regaling the table with the tale of Joon and Nico’s antics during Avery’s absence at the bar.
Shifters skewed a little slutty, but those two took it to the next level.
By the end of our meal, it dawned on me that something felt different.
Avery was relaxed.
In the weeks we’d been at camp, the open hostility and visceral hatred she’d arrived with had morphed into a sort of rigidity and cool politeness. It’d had to because my dad had forced her to work so closely with us and because she possessed an unwavering dedication to becoming a Guardian.
Her beast was always on the surface, but she’d become an impenetrable wall.
Our mate worked tirelessly day after day, not just rising to meet every physical demand of this program, but to keep her tiger and her emotions locked down.
She wore the strain on her face always, and it made my bear a raging lunatic.
But right now?
Her body lacked the tension our presence had always triggered in her ever since the day we returned to school from spring break and decided to ruin our fucking lives. Her beast was content, and she wore a soft smile on her beautiful face.
Heath’s speculative look said he’d felt it too.
Aiden stared down at his omelette, failing to smother a grin.
And Elijah was about five seconds away from shifting, grabbing our mate, and disappearing into the forest with her.
I let my body relax into the narrow space between us. My thigh brushed against hers.
She sighed, resigned, maybe a little bit annoyed, but she didn’t move away. My bear crept forward and nosed her tiger.
The quiet purr we received in return shot so much dopamine through my body, it was damn near as euphoric as feeling her clench on my cock and drench it with her cum.
I wrapped my hand around her thigh and pressed my lips to her hair. “You’re so fucking perfect, Wildcat,” I murmured against the silky strands.
The purr intensified.
The cats smirked at her. Brody beamed a happy smile, and even Ian seemed weirdly content.
She grabbed my hand, slowly slid it back into my lap, and then she cleared her throat. “I’ll see you guys out on the field,” she said before picking up her tray and striding confidently away.
We watched her go like a bunch of lovesick idiots.
“What the hell is wrong with y’all?” Ian whispered aggressively across the table. “One of you go with her so she isn’t alone, for fuck’s sake.”
Aiden was out of his chair before Ian had finished his sentence. He shot us a smug grin and took off after our girl.
I arched a brow at Ian across the empty bench space Avery had vacated.
He scowled. “I’m warming up to this.”
I clapped him on the shoulder and got to my feet. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”
Cash and Trent ran our asses off like the sadists they were. After forty-five minutes of sprints with our weapons strapped to our backs, we trudged back to the picnic area at the front of the campgrounds to chug water before we moved on to weapons drills.
Avery took her drink and sat down at the table farthest from the rest, as she usually did.
She liked her quiet after a hard workout, and every day we would take up a post nearby—close enough to her table to scare off Crimson and anyone else who wanted to sniff around, but far enough away to give her the space she wanted.
Not anymore.
Heath and I squished ourselves onto the bench on either side of her. Aiden glowered at us before he sat down across the table. Elijah decided to just hop on top of the table right in front of where Avery was sitting.
She took us in with a look of mild surprise, but once again, I could detect nothing from her beast or her body that said she was uncomfortable, angry, or rebuilding her walls.
We all grinned at her and rehydrated in companionable silence.
“You should be nicer to Hank,” she said to me after a minute. “You’d think a bear would have some sympathy for his fellow bears on sprints day.”
“Baby, Hank is lucky I haven’t ripped his entire head off. He managed to check out your ass exactly fifty times while he was huffing and puffing and trying not to pass out during all of that.”
She rolled her eyes. “You can’t kill everyone who looks at my ass.”
“Is that a challenge, Dove?”
Avery looked Elijah right in those slit pupils and pointed a finger in his face. “Behave,” she commanded in a husky voice.
The chill that engulfed the table wasn’t Elijah’s usual sharp prick of ice but more a caress of cool fingers on my skin.
So that was what it felt like when the basilisk was super fucking horny.
Elijah nipped at Avery’s finger and gave her a silky smile. “No.”
During all of this, Heath’s beast radiated primal satisfaction. Our quintet suddenly felt real and whole, with our mate in the center where she belonged.
That cute little bubble burst when my dad stormed up to us.
He slammed his palms on the table and asked in a menacing whisper, “Why the hell is a Council investigator calling me about this quad’s involvement in a death challenge in a fucking bar parking lot?”
Ah, damn it.
Heath cleared his throat. “Well, as I’m sure you were told, Ward, the challenger was an ex-Guardian trainee.”
“Mahoney,” he growled. “Who the investigator seems to be under the impression had a vendetta against this quad that warped his lupine brain so badly that he would challenge Aiden Blackwell to the death.”
“Who knows why a feral Alpha does the insane things he does?” Aiden asked evenly.