“Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t joke about this.” Zack jumps up and stalks over to her, grabbing her shoulder, but then he stops, panic flashing over his face as he glances at Spence and me. He shakes his head. Yeah, she’s not kidding.
Cyra furiously pushes his hand off her shoulder, glaring at him and then at us. “I said that I was going to take care of this myself. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll manage.” Then she looks at me directly, fury in her eyes. “And that’s exactly why I don’t want an Alpha in my life. That. You doing that.” She turns around and stalks down the hallway, slamming the door to her bedroom closed and loudly locking it.
Fuck.
Zack comes over, putting his phone on the table. “I guess this is a bad moment to announce that her parents have said something that could make things a lot more complicated?”
“What is it?” I stand up, about to take a long walk, just to get this frustration out of me.
“They’ve announced that...” He sighs. “It seems they’re playing the ‘we didn’t want to say this, but we feel that we have to, she’s been promised to someone for years’ card now.”
I stop. Of course. This is what we’d been worried about. If they do this, things could turn nasty fast and I really don’t like the feeling of that. Fuck.
I glance in the direction Cyra just disappeared in. “They’re going to go as low as they can, won’t they?”
Because from here on out, there’s only one way that they’re going to try to get Cyra back and that’s by trying to get us arrested... Break us away from Cyra so they’ve got free reign to do whatever they want with her while the whole world sympathizes with them and supports them the whole way. We’ll be the bad guys and they will be the ones people feel sorry for and will try to help.
Hell. What kind of twisted world are we living in?
30 Liam
Was I being childish by teasing Max and the others with those hickeys on Cyra’s neck and then running away? Maybe a little.
But I couldn’t stay to see how they would react, that didn’t feel like a safe plan. Cyra had been so out of it, in her post-orgasm bliss, that she didn’t even notice me making them. I couldn’t help myself. I know that when I really mate her, I’ll mark her with a bite, which will stay visible for the rest of her life, but for now, I couldn’t resist marking her like this, just temporarily.
Hell. Watching her as she came, holding her in my arms. That was the best feeling in the world and I loved it. But, of course, our little bubble of bliss couldn’t last and we had to return to the real world. We had to return to the real world, filled with horrible things.
I sit in the dunes, not too far from the house. Close enough that I can still see the back of the place, but I’m hiding in the dune grass, so it’ll be hard for anyone to spot me.
When Max, or one of the others, doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to hunt me down, I get up. I’d like to take a shower and put on some clean clothes, get rid of this sand all up my ass. Hugging and rolling around in the sand is all fun and games, unless you’re doing it naked and it gets all up in your asscrack and into sensitive places it really shouldn’t be going... Ugh.
When I reach the house, the curtains of Cyra’s room are closed. They weren’t before... Then I glance inside the living area of the house and find Max, Zack and Spence sitting at the table. Silent, but looking decidedly unhappy.
I quickly grab my clothes from the ground and walk through the door into the living area, somehow hoping they won’t stop me before I reach the stairs.
“Cyra is about to run out of her pheromone suppressants, she doesn’t have any heat suppressants less than two weeks before mating season starts and her parents have just announced that they’ve got a more worthy mate lined up for her.” Zack’s voice is deadpan and I still, my heart going from zero to sixty in moments.
Fuck. No. “I’m not handing her over.” I’m almost surprised by the growl in my voice, but when I glance at the others, it’s obvious that they’re thinking the same.
Sighing, I go over to the table, putting my clothes on the chair first, remembering Max’ comment from before. Then I unlock my laptop and click on the program where I’m keeping track of any mentions of Cyra.
Yep. It’s right here. Her parents have announced that they’ve had a mate picked out for her for years, they supposedly ‘just didn’t know where she was’ so they couldn’t tell her. That’s... That’s total bull. Why are people accepting these lies so easily? Why aren’t they questioning it?
The thing about already having a mate for Cyra is a pile of shit so big you can see it from space.
I sit down, the sand not really getting any more comfortable, but I ignore it. “How did she react?”
Zack makes a sound, like a snort. “We didn’t get that far. She got...” He eyes Max. “Someone got into a fight with her before we could tell her.”
I eye Max. I know that he was about to rip me another one when he’d seen the hickey on her before, but why did he get into a fight with Cyra? That makes little sense.
Max shrugs. “I might have been on edge.” Aren’t we all?
Spence sits up straight. “Two weeks. She said she had enough medication left for two weeks. But that doesn’t include heat suppressants yet.” He looks to each of us. “Anyone know where we can get her meds on such short notice?”
I shake
