Lincoln let out an exaggerated groan as Andrei graced me with a toothy grin. “Yes, I’ve been able to confirm that he does actually love me—his buttercup. We’re besties now.”
Lincoln scoffed as he glared at his buttercup. “Dream on, kid.” Turning his gaze back to me as I pushed from the bed and stretched out completely, he continued, “I told him about the new bond between all of us and how that came to be.”
Andrei let out a huff as his eyebrows inched up his forehead, “That’s seriously crazy, by the way. I’ve never heard of it before, but I can see how it can come in handy.”
Lincoln made a choking noise as the two of them shared a look. Andrei looked like a child that had come up with a devious plan and was in the middle of trying to convince his sibling to help with it. No doubt they were talking about something, but for some reason I couldn’t hear it.
Was I unable to hear a one-on-one conversation between them? I attempted to speak into their minds but was met with a wall.
What the hell?
As Andrei’s smile turned into a wolfish, predatory thing, I watched Lincoln turn contemplative with a scrunched brow before it flattened out and he nodded, saying out loud, “I could see the perks of that, buttercup, but don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.”
Well color me real fucking intrigued.
Exasperation at being left out filled me, and I huffed out, “Why can I not hear the conversation?”
“Oh, we talked about that as well,” Andrei offered as he tucked his hands into his front pockets and shrugged. “He didn’t hear any of the conversation we had earlier, and if you can’t hear ours now, it confirms what we thought. It’s like a built-in privacy wall it seems. The bond only allows one-on-one chats between each of us, not group talks.”
Huh. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing, but I suppose only time would tell.
“Thank the fates for that,” Lincoln murmured before walking into the bathroom and turning on the faucet. “I wouldn’t be able to handle the endless stream of chatter.”
While I could sense the sarcasm and humor to his words, they also lacked their usual zing.
Tuning into our bond, I felt his desire to curl up with me in the bed like Andrei and I had been. I watched him splash water on his face, and it hit me again how tired he looked. Part of me felt guilty for napping while he handled everything going on at the school.
Glancing at the clock on his nightstand to see how much time we had before needing to meet Drake and Lo, I found we only had about twenty minutes.
Padding over to him, I stopped just behind him and ran my hands up and down his back. “Hey, is there anything we can do to help whatever is going on with the security of the school?”
Letting out a heavy breath, he grabbed the hand towel and patted his face dry. “It’s such a shit show. The witches won’t stop talking about a lunar witch being a possible culprit, but they haven’t even canceled the classes in their sector, despite a student being hurt there. Meanwhile, the Queen of Hell threatened to pull all of the kids in the demon sector back to them. Oh, and the shifter royals fled yesterday, leaving the rest of the students in their sector scared about what that means for their safety.”
I already knew that about Bex and the royals, but the rest was news to me.
We hadn’t gotten to the section of Praeditus 101 that discussed the witches yet, so I wasn’t quite sure what a lunar witch was. Nevertheless, I was shocked that they were conducting business as usual over there.
Part of me really wanted Queen Ama to pull Alexandra and her roommate Alora down to the safety of Hell. But I knew if they were anything like me, which I sensed they were, they wouldn’t run from this, even if their queen demanded it.
I had to clear my throat, indecision plaguing me. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to help when everything sounded like a cluster fuck. “What does Estrid think needs to happen? I know she offered for students to leave if they didn’t feel safe, but what about those who want to stay?”
Just the thought had my heart pounding and my stomach dropping. What if they shut the Academy down for now? Once again, I’d be without a home, with nowhere of my own to go. I knew Drake would tell me to move into his castle, but then how would I see Andrei and Lincoln?
Fates, please don’t let that happen.
It hit me hard, the desire to have a house of my own that no one could ever take away from me. I wanted to build a life that couldn’t be altered at the drop of a hat like this. One where each of my men would feel welcomed and never like they were intruding on someone else’s turf, so to speak.
But without a dime to my name now that I couldn’t access my family’s trust, I wasn’t sure how exactly to make that happen. Where would I even build it if I could find the money? Sanguis? Nowhere felt safe right now.
Lincoln placed his hands on either side of the sink, leaning forward as he looked at me in the mirror. I continued to scratch his back gently as he answered, “We’ve done everything we can for security. We paid the highest-ranking witches to come and triple the wards around the school. It would quite literally take an act of a god or goddess to break through that—or at least, that’s what the witches told us.”
As if that meant shit.
I couldn’t help but let out a huff of laughter before I said, “Yeah, I remember them telling my parents that as well, with the ward we paid for yearly maintenance on, and yet enough vampires were let in to slaughter my family. Also, I saw no sign of the ward being torn when I was forced to flee. Sound familiar?”
Chills crawled up my spine at the similarities.
Andrei’s voice pulled our attention toward where he paced through the room, “So there’s a corrupt witch. Whoever it is has to either be the one putting the wards up or someone powerful enough to create cracks in them to let enemies through while not unraveling, or destroying, the ward.”
