by May Dawson
Thinking of losing my wolf sent a jolt through my heart. This time, I meant it as I said, “Thank you.”
When Javi had gone too, Clearborn kept watching me. “Are you nervous?”
My first impulse was to lie, but I chewed my lower lip, replaying what he’d said earlier about not being a hero. “Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “You should be. Some nerves will help you stay sharp.”
“I’ve got a question,” I said.
“I’ll answer any question you have.” His lips turned at one corner, as if he realized that was a dangerous offer. The cadets were curious about his personal life and what twisted Clearborn into the man he was. “Any relevant question.”
“How are you going to make sure my men stay on campus?” I asked. He looked at me curiously, and I blundered on, rubbing my tattooed forearms absently even though the burn had faded to a desperate itching now. “They’re my mates—they’ll feel it if I’m in trouble, right?”
“I was planning on dire threats,” he said, “and on your acting abilities. Piper will tell them that you’re home if they call, but that you don’t want to talk to anyone. If you could…”
“Act like a hot-tempered brat? Yes, I think I can manage that.” I forced myself to cross my arms instead of continuing to scratch at myself. “Glad to see my special skill sets are coming into use.”
Clearborn smiled, which surprised me.
“For what it’s worth, Maddie, you’re not a brat at all, or you wouldn’t be risking your wolf, your life, and your relationships to protect the packs.” he said. “When you come back, I’m sure your men will realize that.”
“I hope so.”
Part of me wished I could rewind a week instead of moving forward with this plan. But I raised my chin, stiffening my spine.
As scary as Clearborn could be, I didn’t think his threats alone would keep my men from coming after me if they thought I was in danger. It was up to me to rip out the last bonds between us. Hopefully, they could be restored afterward.
Clearborn must have read my misgivings, because he told me, “I’ve got faith in you.”
“You think this is a bad idea, don’t you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t want to send you because you’re still a student. I’m sure you can handle the mission.”
He was lying to me. He was a good liar, but there was something about the regret in his eyes that tipped me off.
“I’m ready,” I promised.
I was lying right back to him.
Chapter Thirteen
Later that night, I lay on my back on the bed as Penn read our Myths homework out loud, the book tented over his face. When I reached over to rub a thumb across the familiar tattoos that marked his wrist, his eyes flickered to me and his lips turned up in a smile before he resumed reading. Chase held me against his body, his hand resting casually on my hip.
Jensen came in from his study group and paused. “Even when the three of you are doing homework it’s disgustingly cute, you know.”
He threw himself across the foot of the bed, resting his head in my lap. I reached down and absently toyed with his dark hair, knowing he liked my touch.
I was going to miss them so much it was an ache in my chest already.
After midnight, when they were sleeping, I climbed out of bed. Jensen stirred, reaching for me in his sleep, but his fingers curled across the empty space I’d just left behind.
I exhaled a shaky breath. He tossed and turned onto his side, as if he might wake. When he didn’t, I went on into the guys’ bedroom on the other side.
The spell was simple. It seemed anticlimactic, really. Giving up someone’s love should be a weighty thing.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and muttered words in Latin over a handful of ash. I lifted the band-aid to nick my thighs in the same spot for a second time, before mingling my blood with the ash.
That was all it took to rip out my own heart.
Well, not quite. Then I had to climb onto the bed and look at every one of their sleeping faces as I pressed the ash to whatever exposed skin I could find. Just a spot of it, something they could dismiss as a smudge when they woke.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Penn as I slipped my ash-covered finger across the phoenix tattoo that stretched across his shoulders. It blended into his ink. I pressed my lips to his shoulders, kissing him goodbye.
The spell had been light on details like does it last forever?
Part of me wanted to believe we loved each other too much to lose each other, and part of me knew I had to accept that maybe I was giving up their love to protect them. To protect everyone.
Chase always slept without blankets, as if he ran too hot. I brushed my fingers over Chase’s hairy calf, hiding the ash in his dark hair. I smiled to myself, wanting to make a joke about how furry he was, but he wasn’t awake to appreciate it and the smile turned into something else, anyway. I grazed my lips across his temple.
I didn’t dare kiss Jensen goodbye. Whenever I shifted out of bed, he always reached for me. I stroked my soot-streaked finger over his bare shoulder, and he rolled toward me, as if he were looking for me, even though his eyes didn’t open.
My heart lurched. The sense of some chasm opening up beneath me was so visceral that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d looked down and found a gateway to hell rippling across the hardwood floor, but the room was still as quiet and peaceful as it had been a moment before.
I’d written my spell in Latin, in the hopes the words wouldn’t hurt as much in an old, dead language.
“Amor inter nos dedere. Diligis me plus. Ubi autem est misericordia, nihil sentiunt. Ubi cupiditatem, nihil sentiunt.”
I surrender the love between us. I break the bond. Where there was tenderness, let there be nothing. Where there was desire, let there be nothing.
“Nothing,” I repeated, chanting in a whisper, as I backed across the room. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Three to go.
When I knocked on Tyson’s door, it took a while for him to open the door. He swung it open, shirtless, rubbing his hand across his face. When he saw me, something wary came over his face, and he braced himself in the doorway.
“Were you sleeping?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He waited for me to go on, tilting his head to one side.
He’d been sleeping more than he used to lately. It worried me.
“I’m sorry I was so mean to you when I didn’t believe you,” I said.
“You’re awake in the middle of the night thinking you need to apologize to me?” His gaze turned tender. Before, when he looked at me like that way, he would’ve touched my face, pressed his lips to mine. “Don’t be crazy.”
I smiled faintly. “Too late.”
This whole thing felt crazy, but the thought of any of them suffering, being killed because of their urge to protect me, destroyed me. I couldn’t lose another one of them.
Tyson frowned, but before he could ask any questions, I stuck out my hand. “Friends?”
“Always,” he said. His palm met mine, but then he pulled me into another one of those careful hugs. His caution itself made me want to cry, but instead I turned my face into his shoulder and moved my lips soundlessly in the words of my spell as I painted the faintest streak of ash across his naked back.
When I left Tyson, I went back into the guys’ room and closed my eyes as I leaned against the door. I wasn’t sure I could bear to finish this tonight.
But I needed them to sleep on it before the spell worked, and I’d hoped to leave the next day. I raised my hand in front of my eyes. The last of the ash clung to my fingers.
There were voices in the hall, growing louder as they came closer to me down the hall. Familiar voices. Rafe and Lex.
There was a sign from fate, if ever there was one, that I should get over my self-pity and do what I must.
I opened the door and stepped out into the hall, even though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say
.
Rafe and Lex were almost to my door. They were deep in conversation, frowning, and I realized they were irritated with each other. It seemed like such an intimate moment that I almost stepped back. They never showed us the cracks in their friendship.
Lex broke off as he saw me. His voice, which had been tight and angry, changed as he asked, “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Then why are you in the hall close to midnight?” Rafe demanded, his voice harsh. He was not adept at moving out of angry mode.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“I hope you can keep up tomorrow on our run.” Rafe headed down the hall, toward their room.
“I’ve never heard of thinly veiled threats being helpful with insomnia,” I said.
“It wasn’t veiled,” he called over his shoulder.
Despite the banter, his stride seemed agitated, and worry sparked in my chest. God, I couldn’t imagine leaving them behind, not knowing what they were going through in the wake of our fractured relationships.
But I had to.
“Are you two all right?” I asked Lex, when Rafe had closed the door behind him quietly.
Lex’s lips turned up at the corners. “Why do you ask that like Rafe and I are dating?”
“Well...”
“Everything’s fine,” Lex said, as if he didn’t want me to pursue that line of thought. “You?”
“Fine.”
“We’re all fine. Nothing note-worthy.” Lex said it lightly, as if he didn’t believe it was true for either of us for a moment.
“Nothing.” I tilted my head, studying him. “I know I’m just a First Year, and your ex-girlfriend, too. But I’m here, if you want to talk.”
“I don’t,” Lex said. Then, more gently, he said, “Just a First Year? Since when do you act self-deprecating?”
“Maybe my takeaway of the last few months was that I’m not as great as I thought I was.” I smiled at him, saying the words lightly. Hadn’t everyone wanted me to stop being so damn cocky?
Well, here I was.
I didn’t teach Tyson how to control his magic.
I let Silas throw himself off a bridge to protect me.
And I knew, in an intellectual way, that those two things weren’t entirely my fault.
But that didn’t take away the jagged pieces of that failure that bit into my soul.
And even now, I knew I was making another mistake, trying to make things better. I was doing something that was so fucked-up, but I didn’t see another way out. I couldn’t leave them hurting, missing me, and I couldn’t pull them into the danger I was going into. This had to be my mission, not theirs.
Lex’s gaze grew intent as he stared at me. “Maddie. What is it?”
My lips parted. “I don’t want to talk any more than you do. But I’d take a hug.”
When Lex wrapped me in a comforting hug, I brushed my fingers across the back of his neck and cursed him.
“I was a pretty terrible girlfriend, wasn’t I?” I mused. Still am.
I could feel Lex exhale a faint laugh. “I was a pretty terrible boyfriend.”
I pulled away to look up at his face. “No. You really weren’t. You always saw me as your equal. You were sweet. ”
His lips quirked on one side. “I overreacted. Epically. Miserably. We had to break up when you came here, but it didn’t need to be like…that.”
I couldn’t deny that, but at the same time, I understood why far better after our violence-tinged visit to his pack. “I notice you didn’t deny that I was a terrible girlfriend.”
He brushed my hair back from my face, the gesture tender. “You had some growing up to do. So did I… so do I, maybe. But no, you weren’t terrible. You could never be terrible.”
His words struck me with guilt when my curse still burned on my lips.
The door down the hallway swung open, and Lex and I stepped apart in such a smooth gesture anyone would think we had practiced it. Part of me desperately wished I could kiss Lex goodbye before I left. My chest was suddenly tight.
Rafe came out wearing shorts and a t-shirt that clung to his broad shoulders and the lean taper of his waist. His eyes locked on us but he barely paused. Without comment, he headed for the central stairwell. His sword hung down the long line of his back, both stick-straight.
“Why is your roommate going to work out in the middle of the night?” I whispered. Interjecting humor in my voice, I whispered, “What did you do, Lex?”
Lex raked his hand over his head, tousling his sun-streaked brown hair. “I can’t talk about it with you.”
His voice was full of regret, as if he wished he could, but then he managed a smile. “And it’s no big deal. Everything is fine.”
“You and Rafe always make up.”
“Yeah.” Lex’s face was neutral, careful. Fake. He reached out to rifle my hair. He hadn’t done that in a long, long time. “Don’t worry about us, Maddie.”
There was no chance of that.
“Well, good night,” I said. The urge to kiss those sharp cheekbones, that jawline that could cut glass, those lush pink lips that had been mine once, was so strong that it hurt.
In the morning, Lex shouldn’t love me anymore.
“Good night,” he said. He didn’t make any move to kiss me, and I let myself into my room.
I could’ve sworn that I heard Lex sigh in the hall. I wondered if the same fantasies haunted him.
It’ll all be gone in the morning, Lex.
I glanced at the ash across my fingers. There was nothing now but a fine dust that settled into the whorls of my fingerprints, but it was enough to mark one last man.
It was enough for one last goodbye.
Chapter Fourteen
Rafe was in the dojo. I heard him before I saw him: the slash of his sword through the air, the sound of his feet slapping the mat, a soft grunt of effort.
I rested my hand on the doorframe as I watched him, waiting for a chance to interrupt him.
Despite his height and the width of his shoulders, he moved with easy grace. He’d stripped off his shirt. Sweat shone across his olive skin as he went through endless combinations of sword drills, and his muscles rippled with the effort.
“If I didn’t know better,” I said, “I’d think you were punishing yourself in the gym the same way you claimed I do.”
He didn’t falter, as if he’d known I was there, watching him, the whole time. “You should be in bed.”
“So should you,” I reminded him.
He finished his sword drill, then dropped the blade to his side, his chest heaving. His dark eyes glittered as he headed toward me, his bare feet silent on the mats.
He didn’t stop until he towered over me, and I could feel the heat of his body rolling off him in waves. My heart stammered in my chest, waiting for him to touch me.
Then he abruptly knelt right next to me, reaching for the sheath for his sword where it lay on the ground. There was a metallic whisper as he slid his sword home.
“If you’re going to interrupt me,” he said, “you might as well make yourself useful.”
“What am I interrupting?”
He shook his head as he stood again.
“Let’s play the same game we did the first week I came here.” It was hard for me to tear myself away from him when he was so close to me, but I headed across the room for the training swords that hung on the wall. “You pin me, you ask a question. I pin you, you answer my question.”
“What if I don’t have any questions for you?” he asked, crossing his arms over his powerful chest. His hard-on pressed against the front of his shorts, as if he were secretly as weak for me as I was for him.
Not that Rafe ever gave into that weakness, damn him.
I tossed him a sword, and he caught it easily out of the air.
“I know you want to play,” I said, quirking an eyebrow at him. “Almost as much as you want to fight someone tonight.”
“You’re not the one I wa
nt to fight,” he said, and the bitter edge when he said fight made me think that he really meant hurt.
I tilted my head to one side, full of curiosity.
Rafe stepped forward into the ready stance. “Fine. I’ll play your game.”
As if we both hadn’t known he would.
The two of us parried and blocked each other. The solid whap of one wooden sword meeting another stung my palm and sent the shock up into my shoulder, as we circled, looking for a place to slip past each other’s defenses. Rafe wasn’t holding back tonight, and it made me smile.
I wanted to give him what he needed tonight before I left him. But I thought he needed to talk more than he needed to fight, even if he didn’t realize it yet.
“You’ve gotten a lot better this year,” he noted.
“So have you,” I shot back.
When I finally got an opening, I managed to knock his legs out from underneath him. His sword flew out of his hand as he landed with a thump on the mats, and before he could escape, I straddled him, pressing my blade to his throat.
I demanded, “What are you and Lex fighting about?”
“We aren’t fighting.” He studied me, his dark eyes smoldering. “Is this really what you’d do in a fight, Northsea?”
His voice was calm, but every time I shifted, I felt the press of his cock against my thigh. My knees pressed against the lean muscle of his abs.
“Rules of the game. You have to give me an answer.” I ground my hips down subtly, watched his face shift as if he was just as attuned to me as I was to him. “I’ll let you up once you play fair.”
“Playing fair?” He echoed, one dark eyebrow rising, as if he was keenly aware I was grinding against him on purpose. “Is that what we’re doing?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed against the edge of the wooden blade, barely keeping himself under control. Then he sighed.
“Clearborn has only been calling me to the cadre meetings. He’s made it clear that Lex is my second. I want Lex to talk to the dean. Clearborn’s got some kind of grudge against him.”
I nodded, thinking back to the moments that I’d seen Clearborn clearly judging Lex, from the time he’d told Lex make yourself useful for once to how he’d been annoyed by Lex’s flare of temper. Worst of all, Clearborn doubted Lex because of his attachment to me.