Only once Cael’s erection grew too rigid for him to bear did he physically pull away. She offered him a very feline-sounding hiss, but didn’t drag him back to her.
She’d sobered. Maybe she realized what he was about to ask her.
“Tell me what happened,” he demanded.
When she did, Cael wanted to alternately yell at her for risking so much for him—she’d been damned lucky Hugh was so inept, or she’d be dead now—and hold her, kissing and loving her until she couldn’t breathe. The sheer joy greatly overpowered his anger, and it wasn’t because he wasn’t a killer. He would always mourn for Ava’s lost life, no matter who caused it to happen.
No, he was brimming with hope because he could take Aiyanna as his. He had no doubt they’d be mated, and after wishing he could be with her for five long years filled with gritted teeth and cold showers, he was ready to give her everything.
It was almost wrong, allowing the floodgates of his mind to open, his head filling with images of what he and Aiyanna could be, could do together, while Sean O’Malley was most likely planning for his last living sibling’s relocation to a clan prohibitum. That was, if Sean didn’t simply kill Hugh.
Doubt crept through his thoughts, the residue of believing himself guilty of murder for so many years. For a minute fraction of a second, he considered pushing Aiyanna away for her own safety.
No. It wasn’t me.
The truth hit him, hard enough to barrel through his shock. Hugh O’Malley wouldn’t admit to a crime he didn’t commit. A High Witch didn’t mistake criminals for innocents.
I won’t hurt Aiyanna. Ever.
There was nothing stopping him from making her his.
Only he couldn’t now, because that sort of physicality would hurt her. If he had his way, she wouldn’t move from this spot until she was completely healed, save for necessities.
He greatly doubted Aiyanna would obey him. He smiled. He liked that she didn’t always listen to him and questioned him every time she felt the need to.
She was strong. Soon, she’d be whole.
“I love you,” he told her, his thumb moving across her narrow jaw, which dropped the moment he spoke. Her dumbfounded expression drew a hoarse laugh from him.
“Say that again,” she whispered. Were there tears gathering in her eyes? Wetness dipped onto his outstretched fingers.
“I love you.” He didn’t know what to do other than kiss her, looking up only to wipe away her tears.
“That’s why you kept yourself away from me all these years, isn’t it?” she said in a hushed voice. “You rejected me to protect me.”
He nodded.
“Oh, I could kill that Hugh O’Malley with my bare hands.” She gripped his shirt, pulling him closer. “We could’ve been together for years now! I’ve loved you for so long…” she trailed off, watching him with the same wary expression she always kept when he used to remind her he wasn’t her boyfriend or couldn’t be her date.
If he never saw that look on her face again, he’d die happy.
“Say it again,” he murmured with a small smile, mimicking her awed tone. And he was in awe of her…her patience with him, her unwavering belief that he hadn’t hurt Ava after all.
This woman knew him better than he knew himself, and despite his attempts to keep her away, he’d learned her just as well. If he would have stopped and attempted rational thought before leaving her back in San Francisco, he would’ve realized where she would go.
Her faith in the goodness of others, her love for every living being, was why he found her so beautiful. That’s what lit up her dark skin like illuminated gold and what made her infectious smile so bright.
“I love you.” She shook her head. “It’s going to take a while to get used to this,” she murmured. Too quickly, she reached up to flick him on the nose. “Don’t you reject me again.”
Still in shock over the news about the O’Malley brothers, news that would forever change his life, Cael took a moment to process what she said. Guilt, similar to what he’d felt earlier for allowing her to get hurt in Belfast, tore through him. Had he been standing, he would have staggered.
“Never,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss her softly.
Wishing to hold her, he climbed in the bed behind her and held her against his chest, breathing in the cloves and vanilla of her scent. It was strange, how he could be furious at Hugh for killing Ava and hurting Aiyanna, angry with the Elders for imprisoning him for a crime he didn’t commit…all while he was utterly at peace.
He reasoned it was because of the woman he held, the same woman he’d keep safe at all costs. She was everything to him, and now he finally told her so, releasing everything he’d kept inside of himself for so many years in a purge of honesty and love.
She turned to kiss him, tears in her eyes once again, but cringed from the movement. Hope, joy and love radiated from her, but her fatigue was equally clear.
Cael held her tighter against him.
“Go ahead and rest.” His hand found hers, and he held tight. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I’ll be here every time you wake up, if you’ll let me.
* * * *
When Raphael received the news, he went into a rage.
He was glad only Mary was here to see him like this—he felt veins in his face throbbing, and he would break something in the loft his wife had painstakingly made into a home for them. That was the sole problem with living in such a place with a woman he cared for so much: he couldn’t simply put his hand through a wall like he used to whenever he became this worked up.
Mary wasn’t oblivious to his dilemma. She handed him a large pillow covered in a fabric that had iconic New Orleans establishments printed onto it. It was one of her favorites, but from the way it was made, it wouldn’t be all too easy for him to rip it into shreds if he kept his claws in his hands.
“Go ahead,” she urged. “I can always buy another from Mrs. Ryan.”
He didn’t hesitate any longer. With a loud bellow that had traces of banshee powers—through their mating, he’d received a portion of Mary’s banshee capabilities, just as she’d gotten some of his elemental abilities—he tore into the hapless pillow, sending feathers and fluff flying into the air, where it fell down over their heads.
Less than a minute later, Raphael held shreds of what had once been a perfectly nice pillow, but his rage abated.
He was tired because, for all that he’d fought the Elders—and won—for his pack, it still wasn’t enough.
“They’ve had Cael here, imprisoned, for one hundred and four years, and they didn’t think to enlist a witch’s expertise before giving him such a sentence? Heath was here for six hundred years for something so stupid, if they gave me another case like him I’d refuse to keep him in a clan prohibitum at all.”
Mary’s green eyes were sympathetic, but not surprised. “The way I see it, these Elders have failed you too many times to count.” She put one hand in his, while the other rubbed soothing circles onto his back. “They let Jeremiah watch over you, for God’s sake! And he was being paid off to keep you all imprisoned.”
It was an effort to keep his claws from making an appearance, but if Raphael’s control slipped for one moment, he’d cut his wife’s hand open. That was something he’d never let himself do.
“They’re not this stupid,” he murmured. “To let us be falsely imprisoned or punished for some stupid ‘crime’ like Heath and Sebastian were. Hell, the only ones who deserved to be here were Alexandre and me.”
Hands shoved at his chest. “No, you didn’t deserve to be here for five hundred years, either,” Mary cried angrily. She closed her eyes and blew out a breath, lifting the white-blonde hair that had fallen into her face.
“And we still don’t know what the hell happened with Alex…” she trailed off, guilt marring her delicate features.
Raphael hated to watch her battle with her guilt every day, hated lis
tening to her thinking aloud about how horrible they were for lying to Leila about Alex being dead. Some days she persuaded herself to tell her sister the truth, only to pick up her phone and throw it before immersing herself into a new painting.
They couldn’t tell Leila. He knew it, and so did Mary. If they betrayed their deal with Alexandre, he could kill them all. Part of him hoped Alexandre wouldn’t be able to bring himself to do the deed, but after he up and joined a float of warlocks, he lost his certainty of what the other werewolf was capable of. When Leila finally found out—and she would, Raphael had no doubt—she’d understand.
It was her misery in the place of countless lives because when the warlocks struck, they would try and destroy not only the pack and their friends, but all creatures.
Raphael pressed a kiss to Mary’s temple. She blinked, coming out of her reverie.
“Find out,” she urged, placing a hand on his jaw. “You’re right—they’ve made too many mistakes for it to have been a coincidence.”
It took about twenty minutes of rifling through his papers as well as some of Mary’s textbooks for the semester—after taking a few classes at Tulane, she would graduate in May with Leila—for him to find what he was looking for. When he first became the lupus dux for this pack, the Elders had given him texts, both ancient and modern, to help him in his position as Alpha for the pack as well as liaison between the “criminals” and the Elders.
One of those books, one of the smaller, plainer ones, had the names and contact information for every other lupus dux in the world. There weren’t as many as Raphael would have guessed, but there were more than enough werewolves for him to get in touch with. He only wanted a basic idea of what the typical clan prohibitum was like.
He had a feeling his wasn’t normal, and once he confirmed it, he planned to demand an explanation. The more he thought about it, he realized how purposeful the Elders had been about keeping him from others in his position. Shouldn’t there be lupus dux meetings, or some regular communication between them?
I just don’t know.
Across the room, Mary blew him a kiss. It warmed him, paring down the icy anger that ran through his veins. He dialed the first lupus dux in the book, a woman named Rachel who lived with the pack in Hawaii.
She answered on the third ring. “I don’t know anyone in New Orleans,” she said in way of greeting.
Raphael explained who he was, not giving her a chance to speak before he asked her the question burning into his psyche.
“What are your convicts in the clan prohibitum there for?”
There was a long pause, undoubtedly from Rachel deciding whether she should share these details. She might be another lupus dux, but he was admittedly green in his position, and she had no reason to trust him.
Right when he decided she was about to hang up on him, she spoke in a low voice.
“I have four weres here, two females and two males. One man killed his ex-wife and her mate after she left him. The other male,”—she huffed loudly, angrily—“he raped three women in his old pack, threatened their lives if they turned him in. We’re lucky he wasn’t successful with the fourth attempt, or he never would have been caught.”
The crimes continued, most of them so terrible they made the men of Raphael’s pack look like Boy Scouts. One of the women in Hawaii had refused to lock herself up during the full moon, hurting and killing the countless humans and creatures who’d tried to subdue her every month.
It was exactly what Raphael had expected: crimes that actually merited such severe punishments as hundreds of years without their abilities, under the watchful eye of a lupus dux. The only difference was they weren’t confined to a city.
“They can’t leave the island,” Rachel said. “I live with the pack in Honolulu, and I travel to the convicts every day.” She paused. “Are your weres allowed to traipse around New Orleans as they please? I always assumed your men were kept somewhere in the bayou, isolated.”
Raphael didn’t answer. Her clan prohibitum lived on a small island northwest of Hawaii, an island the Elders owned. No humans or creatures ventured there. After he thanked her, hung up and called a few more of those listed in his book, it all became clear to him: his wasn’t a normal clan prohibitum, and his men had not deserved their confinement.
All the time wasted, the injustice given to them all…
“Just freak out.” Mary had heard enough bits and pieces of his conversations, along with his clipped comments between calls, to have a good idea of why he wanted to kill each and every Elder.
How could they have done this to them? Why had they done it? Jeremiah had been paid off to keep them there, sure—but that didn’t excuse their initial sentences, or the way they turned a blind eye to Jeremiah’s actions. They had to know something strange was going on with their clan, and Raphael suspected they were behind the entire operation.
Maybe, without knowing it, Jeremiah had been a pawn to the Elders’ plans.
“No.” He didn’t want to tear apart their loft, even if Mary didn’t mind. Sitting on this couch reminded him of the countless times they’d simply held each other here, watching something silly on television or listening to music. Their small bar was reminiscent of every time she’d bounded out of bed to demand breakfast, laughing at Raphael’s grumbles.
He wouldn’t mar this space for them. No, he would mar the Elders’ faces, no matter their wizened ages. They deserved some sort of retribution for what they did to his friends, the time they’d taken away, the shame they had rained down upon all of their heads.
Seeming to know what he was about to do, Mary sat next to him again, wrapping her arms around his waist and laying her head on his shoulder.
“I love you, ülikena,” he told her.
She kissed him, her own love in her eyes, and he dialed the number for one of five people who could have him executed without anyone questioning them.
It’s time someone called these bastards on their shit.
“How are you, Raphael?” Nathaniel said when he answered. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“I know Cael’s been innocent of the crime you sentenced him to over a century of imprisonment for. We need to talk, in person, now.”
Raphael didn’t know what to expect of Nathaniel’s response. No one spoke that way to an Elder…and that was precisely the problem. The other man kept silent for a moment.
“I’m in Metairie,” he finally said, his voice revealing nothing. His tone wasn’t chiding, and neither was it pleased. Nathaniel was used to thousands of years of both creatures and werewolves kissing his ass.
He wouldn’t get that from Raphael. As far as he was concerned, Nathaniel hadn’t earned his respect, not after everything he’d just discovered.
Nathaniel told him an address, and Raphael held out his hand for a pen and the pad of star-shaped sticky notes Mary liked to keep around. Using air, he made the notes rush toward him before he quickly jotted down the Elder’s location.
He was about to press the red button on his phone when Nathaniel spoke again, “You’ll regret hurting me,” he warned. “There are things you should know, now that you understand how unique your pack is. I’ll tell you everything.”
Raphael grunted before he hung up. That earned Nathaniel a few seconds before he would deck the man.
Since Mary didn’t have werewolf hearing, he quickly relayed what Nathaniel said for her. She disappeared into their bedroom and came back out holding both of their jackets.
“Let’s go,” she said grimly.
They left their loft hand in hand, a united front against those who’d so wronged Raphael and his family. His grip on Mary’s fingers was the only thing that kept Raphael from accidentally tearing off the steering wheel during the drive.
There was nothing Nathaniel could say to justify the Elders’ actions against his pack.
Chapter 14
NIGHT fell, and Aiyanna didn’t know how she felt
about it. First off, her sleep schedule was lost. After napping for a good portion of the afternoon and early evening, she was wide-awake. Cael was too; although, she didn’t think he slept at all. He just held her quietly, seemingly content to listen to her breathe.
She was still waiting for him to change his mind or shove her away, another reason they shouldn’t be together poised on his tongue. Only he’d been here with her for hours, and he merely held her closer whenever she moved.
It was a stark reminder of why she’d never really understand men, no matter how many years her immortality took her into.
“I’m getting up.” She gestured to the bathroom, and Cael instantly released her from his hold.
Pecking him on the corner of his frown, she crawled out of bed, pleasantly surprised at how little pain she felt. Briony’s herbs had worked wonders on her body, even though they didn’t heal. Before Cael came in, Briony had warned her that their purpose was to dull the pain so she rested enough to heal a little on her own.
In the bathroom mirror, she could see that, finally, she had healed. She wasn’t going to run a marathon tonight, but she wouldn’t be bedridden. Good. Aiyanna didn’t want to be a liability for her friends. More than that, she wanted to help. She hadn’t forgotten the vampires that hurt her to begin with.
They’d have to be stopped. Pureblood. What kind of neo-Nazi-sounding bullshit was that? History didn’t have a great track record for quickly squelching down those types of groups—if they did, her old tribe wouldn’t be living in Oklahoma, of all places—but things had changed a lot in the past century or so.
Once Pureblood became more well-known among creatures, they’d be brought to an end. Probably a violent end, at that, but if it was necessary to save innocent lives she wouldn’t hesitate to lift the blade herself.
While she splashed water on her face and swirled a bit in her mouth, her thoughts drifted to Cael. With so much going on, how could he process his innocence? Would the guilt he’d felt for so long simply melt away?
Healed Page 17