Chapter 12 - Aurela
When I come out of the bathroom—hands shaking from the reality that I just told Soren everything—he’s standing right outside the door, clearly waiting for me. My throat feels like a raw bundle of nerves, and I can barely stand to look at him.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his hand twitching like he might reach out to touch me, but he doesn’t. He holds himself very still, like a soldier during inspection.
Soren. My chest tugs toward him, and I try to swallow down the feeling.
“I’m fine,” I whisper, running my shaking hands over my hair. “I just—I think I need to head to bed. Sleep off the wine.”
I start to slip past him, but this time he reaches out and catches my wrist, pulling me back to him. I draw in a dramatic breath, looking up at him and taking in his tortured expression.
“Aurela,” he grits out, swallowing and looking away from me for a moment, his jaw working as he does, and I can practically see him working up whatever he’s planning to say to me next.
Probably something about how he’s going to have to tell Xeran everything. About how he was just being a good person by bringing me here, and he doesn’t want me to look into it. How nothing has changed since back then, when he decided he no longer wanted anything to do with me.
Right after I told him I thought we might be fated.
“Aurela,” he starts again, turning to me suddenly, his eyes so intense that I have to look away, my omega starting to tremble at the touch of his fingers around my wrist. “I—I need you to know something. About what happened back then.”
“Soren, it’s okay—”
“Your parents forced me to break it off with you.”
I stumble back like something has physically shoved me. His hand falls away from my wrist, and when I look up at him, I expect him to be laughing. Telling me a joke. A cruel one, but a nontruth.
But his face is serious.
Of course, he wouldn’t joke about something like that.
“You…” I clear my throat, feeling completely out of control with my body, myself. “What are you saying?”
“Your mother found me a few weeks before prom,” he says, looking down. “After the first time you and I kissed. She told me that I wasn’t good enough for you, that an affiliation with me would ruin your reputation. That if I kept pursuing you…”
He trails off, and I can barely hear him over the frantic, insistent beating of my heart. Over the blood rushing through my ears.
“What?”
“They said they would send you away. To a boarding school or something. Take you away from your friends, from your home, and you’d graduate somewhere across the world.
I think your mom said something about Switzerland?
I don’t even know if that would have been possible just two months from prom, but she sounded very serious about it.
She said you wouldn’t get to see Lach, that you would be given no contact.
That they would do whatever it took to protect your reputation. ”
“What?” The word bursts out of me a little too loudly, and the walls of the cabin around us shake a bit.
I try to rein in my magic, knowing I’m getting too worked up, but finding it hard to control it with the millions of thoughts flying through my head.
“But…but…it’s not like you’re a Winward. You were friends with Xeran—”
“I wasn’t good enough.”
Soren says this with such conviction that I pivot away from my own hurt and focus on his instead.
What it must have felt like for my parents—whom I know he sought approval from—to come to him and not only make it clear that they didn’t approve of him, but that they were going to punish me if he didn’t stay away from me.
“You are good enough,” I seethe, stepping closer to him, raising my hand and cupping the side of his face like I wanted to since the first time I saw him again. “You’re the only man I’ve ever wanted.”
And just like that, I’m pressed against the wall, Soren dipping his head down to take me in the most passionate, mind-numbing kiss of my entire life.
His hands are frantic, moving first to my hips, to squeeze them and pull them against his, then up to my shoulders, then behind my ears, his hand gently tipping me back so he can kiss me deeper.
His tongue is hot and seeking, his breathing erratic, something about him finally seeming to come undone.
When we kissed in high school, it was nothing like this. It was careful, controlled, Soren doing everything he could to maintain himself.
But now, it’s nothing like that.
I loop my arms around his neck and haul myself up closer to him, my magic glowing in little pink dots on my closed eyelids, the taste and scent and feel of him intoxicating.
My breasts press against his chest, and he growls from somewhere low in his throat. When his hands dip back to my hips, his pinky fingers sliding under the waistband of my pants, I think I might just get my wish.
That Soren might take me here, in this cabin, right here and now.
And no matter what happens after that, I would always have had him. If I could just carry that with me for the rest of my life, I might be okay. Happy.
But he doesn’t tug me over to the bed and lay me down on it.
Instead, he pulls back, the cool air rushing into the spot he just occupied, the stark contrast of it making a sob rise to my throat.
“Soren—”
“I want you, Aurela,” he rasps, and when I open my eyes, he looks more tortured than I’ve ever seen him.
My core throbs for him, and I feel the edge of my heat, threatening to come over me right now.
“I want to make that completely clear. I always have, and I always will. But it’s wrong to do this while you’re engaged. ”
That sends a bucket of water right over my head. I’m engaged. To Caspian.
The thought makes me queasy.
But Soren just told me that he broke it off, not because he didn’t want me anymore, but because he was told to. He did it to protect me, to keep me happy.
I want you, Aurela. I want to make that completely clear. I always have, and I always will.
He wants me.
“After we get back to town,” he says, his voice low, “we can…figure out what we want to do. Deal with Xeran and everything else. But not right now. I want to do this right.”
I feel shell-shocked as he crosses the cabin, taking his jacket off the wall and shrugging it on, just like he did that first night.
“Where are you—”
He doesn’t look at me. “I can’t be in here with you. I don’t trust myself. We’ll wait for the morning and find a way down this mountain.”
My heart is in my throat. I’ve never felt so desired, and he can’t even look at me. I don’t want him to go, but there is something intoxicating about the knowledge that his lust for me is this strong.
“Okay,” I rasp, trying to swallow through the thick emotion in my throat.
With that, he nods once and turns, leaving the cabin and shutting the door quietly behind him.
***
Like it always does, that night comes back to me in my dreams in high definition. As clear as the day it first happened.
“I thought you wanted to ruin prom?” Tara turned, her eyes blazing, her blue hair a frizzy halo around her head. Silverville Lake shone behind her, more than a hundred feet directly below us, beyond the ridge.
In all the times I’d come here with Soren, it never occurred to me that someone might fall from this height. That if a bunch of high school girls came out here, they might be emotional enough to cause an accident.
But it started to occur to me the closer Tara got to the edge.
“This will ruin prom!” she promised, gesturing to a spot on the ground where she swore we could summon daemonic energy, if only she and I worked together. “This will ruin the whole town!”
Tara kept getting closer to the ledge. When I tried to grab her, pull her back, it was like touching a live wire.
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted, and the look in her eyes was genuinely terrifying to me in that moment.
“Tara.” Before I met her, I’d wished for her—a best friend for me. Someone bold, fearless. Someone to push me outside my comfort zone and help me be something more than what I was. I’d begged for it, quietly, every night up until the day I met her.
But at that moment, out on the ridge, the only thing I wanted was for her to calm down. I wanted to go back to our meetings at school, playing around with magic. This—all this—was way too far outside my comfort zone. Too much. Too painful.
“We agreed that we were going to do this!” Tara screamed at me as though she could hear my thoughts.
Faintly, I could hear Maeve crying somewhere behind me as Tara stalked through the grass toward me, anger written all over her face.
“No!”
The word burst out of me with a sudden conviction that seemed to surprise both of us. Tara stumbled backward like it had physically affected her, and this time, when I reached out to save her, she didn’t jerk away.
I pulled her back from the ledge, and we tumbled down together into the grass, one of her leather boots banging painfully against my shin.
“Ow,” I groaned, trying to get out from under her weight.
She pulled herself up, pushing her hair out of her face, and when she turned to look at me, I saw nothing but pure hatred in her eyes.
“This is stupid,” she hissed, her eyes straying to the spot in the earth she’d indicated earlier. “And our window is passing.”
“We can think of something else—” I started.
Her hand clamped down on my arm, and I felt the sudden, dizzying pull of what she was doing. Tapping into my magic, taking it away from me. It felt like losing blood, my mouth going cold, my vision going hazy.
“Stop.” I tried to pull my arm away, but she held tight. We grappled to our feet as I tried to get away from her. “Stop.”
“You can’t pull away,” she grinned, and I felt, for the first time, that I didn’t know her that well after all.
Bringing her face closer to mine, so close I could smell something distant and rotten under the light, cloying cover of her perfume, she said, “If you won’t give it to me, I’m going to take it. ”
I gasped, body surging with adrenaline, feeling as if I didn’t pull free from her at that exact moment, I never would.
But I was me. Weak. Frail. Tired and hungry.
Except, after joining the Foods Club with Soren, I’d been getting stronger. And Tara had shown me how to use my magic.
She might have thought I was weak, but I wasn’t.
Tara laughed as the air around us filled with the heavy, leaden weight of daemonic energy.
Then, I snapped my arm away from her, jerking back hard and planting my foot in her side, sending her careening toward the edge of Silverville.
Everything happened in snippets. I fell back. Tara fell away from me.
Then, there was the terrifying sound of rocks cascading away from the ledge. Tara plunged over it, disappearing from view.
“Tara!”
I was afraid of her. I loved her. She was my best friend, and she was gone.
That is, until she reappeared, laughing, hovering just over the cliff’s horizon.
“Really?” she cocked her head, eyes squinting at me. “You thought you could get rid of me that easily?”
“No,” I stammered. “Just—stop—”
But she didn’t stop. She landed heavily in the grass, crossed over to the spot on the earth, and placed her palm on it, calling up a pure stream of daemonic energy.
Then, with a crack like lightning, her entire body went up in a brilliant flash of blue light.