Chapter 20 - Aurela
Call me a cliché all you want, but there’s something satisfying about watching the man you love fight for your honor. And there’s something even more endlessly satisfying about watching the man who’s told you you’re nothing for years piss himself while everyone stands in a circle and watches.
“That’s really how he’s been treating you?” Lachlan asks, the first to speak after Felix broke the silence.
Maeve shoves him in the shoulder for it.
“Yes,” I whisper, though what’s been revealed today doesn’t shed light on the times Caspian’s come to the house when I was alone and came into my room.
Forcing me back on the bed, trying to put his hands where I didn’t want them.
It doesn’t show how the staff had to start hanging around just to keep his behavior decent.
And it doesn’t shed light on every nasty thing he’d whisper into my ear when he knew nobody but me could hear him.
“And this is how you feel about my sister?” Lachlan asks, jerking his head toward the general direction of where the fight took place, where Caspian’s bodily fluids are still stinking in the grass.
Lachlan stares at Soren with that unnerving, intense look that seems to run in our family.
Ever since getting with Valerie, Lach has been softer.
Less quick to anger. But it’s like this thing between Soren and me has thrown that out the window, returning him to the angry, impulsive man he was before getting his mate back, before having his first child.
“Yes,” Soren says simply. An explanation, but not a plea. He’s telling Lachlan the truth, not asking for permission. “We are fated. I’ve known that since high school, and would have acted on it then, but your parents forced us apart. Told me they would send her away.”
Lachlan sucks in a breath, turning and burying his hands in his hair. He looks up into the bright sky, his designer sunglasses reflecting the clouds.
I’m fated to him. And he knows what that means.
I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that, of our group, I’m not the only one with a fated connection.
Lach and Val, Xeran and Phina, Maeve and Felix—it seems like there was something in the water for our crop.
Our generation of the pack is rife with these bonds, and I wonder if something more divine knew trouble would come.
Knowing we’d need bonds like these to keep ourselves sane.
“Okay,” Lach says finally, turning to me and his sister. “I don’t—I mean, it’s going to take a long time for me to get used to this.”
“Lach—” I start, but Lachlan holds up a hand to me, the universal sign for just wait.
“It’ll take some time,” he repeats, his face softening. Valerie comes to stand at his side, giving me a soft smile. “But I will. And I’m—I’m happy for you, Aurela. I knew Caspian sucked, but I didn’t know that he was…”
Lachlan trails off, and Valerie takes his hand in hers, saying, “We wish we’d done more for you, Aur. I wish I’d pushed harder.”
“I had to want it for myself,” I say, and for the first time, I realize that’s true. Yes, my parents are awful, and yes, they’re a huge part of the reason I’ve been hiding away for years. Yeah, the thing with Soren cut me to the bone. It made me feel like I was nothing.
But that’s also something I told myself. I was my own biggest enemy, feeding lies into my own head. Keeping myself locked up.
My parents are convincing, and I grew up in a way that made me defer to them. When Declan took power, it started to feel like the pack was an unsafe place for an omega. And I’d been told my entire life that if I wanted to be safe, I needed to find an alpha to take care of me.
But now, I know that I could have made different decisions for myself. I could have pushed back when Soren broke things off with me. I could have asked for the truth. I could have left this town like Maeve did.
I could have come clean about my involvement with the fires, not allowed my parents to cover up the fact that I was there that night.
“You’ll need to come to a dinner,” Lachlan says, his gaze landing on Soren. “If you want a chance at my parents blessing this thing.”
“It would be nice,” Soren says, his hand going around my waist and pulling me in close to him.
“Yeah,” Lachlan agrees. “It would.”
***
“So, something I forgot to mention,” Soren says when we pull up outside his house and he cuts the engine to his vehicle. “I live with my grandfather still.”
I blink. Back in high school, I knew that he lived with his grandfather. His parents died when he was young, and his grandparents took him in, raising him. His grandmother died shortly after that, and it was just him and his grandpa.
“Or, rather,” Soren says, swallowing and getting out of the car, “he lives with me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, sliding out and following him up to the porch. We stand on it together, facing one another, and my heart hammers with the reality of this situation.
I came home with him. I’ve been gone from home for more than a week now, and while my parents know that I’m okay, Lach said he’d handle them. Make sure they didn’t come looking for me before Soren and I were ready to talk to them.
When we step into the house, it’s quiet. Soren walks quietly and carefully, moving with the certainty you have when you know the layout of your home well. He cracks open one of the doors in the hallway and peeks inside.
“He’s asleep,” Soren whispers, turning to face me in the low light, and somehow, he looks even more handsome to me with every passing second.
“That’s okay,” I whisper back. There’s only one thing I want to do with him, now that I’m alone with him. He takes my hand and leads me through the house and to the end of the hall, cracking open the door to a room.
His scent floods toward me at once, and I luxuriate in it for a second. The knowledge that this is his place, and he’s letting me in. Bringing me here.
Just like he brought me to the cabin.
I hate Tara for everything she’s done to this town, and for what she did to us in high school, but there’s a part of me that can’t help but be grateful for all this. Because it led to this moment. Me with him. Soren pulling me into his room and shutting the door so gently, I could cry.
And when he turns around, I’m already stepping into him, my arms around his neck, his lips dipping down to catch mine.
We kiss deeply but quietly, keeping our sounds muffled and careful so as not to wake his grandfather up. At least he’s on the other side of the house, far enough that as long as we’re not loud, he won’t hear a thing.
Soren walks me backward toward the bed, his hands hot and needy over my body, gripping at my hips, sliding down the waistband of my shorts.
I’ll need to get new clothes. Or I’ll need to see if my parents are willing to let me take my things. I still have no grasp on just how angry they’re going to be about all this.
But right now, I don’t care.
All I can focus on is the feeling of Soren’s skin against mine, the intoxicating scent of him in this room. He pulls away to flip on a lamp, and I turn around, shimmying out of my shirt.
Soren returns to me, pressing his chest against my back, moving my hair to the side so he can return his teeth to that tender, aching, lovely spot on my neck. His mating mark.
He skims his teeth over it, breathing hard and shallow, but doesn’t make a move to bite there again.
I know he won’t until I reciprocate. He won’t bite me again until he knows for sure that’s what I want.
It turns out he enjoys being behind me, because he splays his hand over the small of my back, pushing me down, and I reach up for a pillow to cradle to my chest as he positions himself behind me, his hands insistent on my hips, tugging me back into his hardening length.
Part of me worries that doing it like this—against the side of the bed—might be a little too loud.
Another part of me simply doesn’t care. We’ve been reunited for a little more than a week.
I don’t know if this infatuation with him will ever fade, but even if it does, I know it won’t happen for a long, long time.
Our clothes come off, and he slides into me, muffling his moan into my back, his hands gripping impossibly tight on my ample hips.
With him, I feel like each inch of my body is sacred, special.
He takes it slow, steady, thrusting with a quiet desperation that buries him deeper and deeper each time, until I have my mouth open on the pillow to muffle the sounds I can’t help but let out.
When his knot starts to form, I rock back into him, wanting it as deep inside me as I can possibly manage. He growls and chases the feeling, too, until we’re as close as two people can possibly be.
Later, after Soren has shifted us fully onto the bed, his body curled around mine, his breathing soft on the back of my neck, he whispers, gently, “I love you, Aurela.”
I want to bite him, to mark him back, but I can’t in this position. So instead, I lift his hand to my mouth as his knot continues to pump away inside me, releasing him slowly and surely, and place the tiniest bite to the soft part between his thumb and pointer finger.
“I love you, too,” I whisper, my lips against his skin, and I think that this is the happiest I’ve ever been.