With his star crystal blade.
Chapter 8:
“What the hell are you doing?” Ledger glared from his perch on the small table, his back pressed against the window overlooking the bustling city below. The twinkle of lights sparked behind him, but he ignored the view like he always did, more interested in interrogating Pavel. “Have you lost your mind?”
Pavel tossed his leather jacket over the back of the beige couch and undid his cufflinks to roll up his sleeves, collecting his thoughts in the process. His brother had unsurprisingly followed him home, but not to talk about this. “Shouldn’t you go check on him?”
Ledger shook his head and drained the contents of his glass before reaching to refill it from the open decanter at his hip. “Nah. He’ll come out once he’s ready. This is called patience, brother, a thing you could afford to learn.”
“I think I’ve been more than patient.” The penthouse at Concealed was large enough Pavel had given his brother a room to use whenever he pleased, but the two didn’t live together. “When are you going back to your place?”
“Kicking us out already?”
It wasn’t that he minded having them here, but now that his timing had moved up, there was no way to put a break on hisplans. There were steps that needed to be taken, and an order in which they needed to happen, to guarantee this ended the way Pavel had always dreamed of it ending.
With Zane Solace on his knees before him, a look of pure adoration in his gaze. The same one he used to—
Ledger snapped his fingers, having clearly said something that Pavel had missed.
Pavel sighed. “I’m going to have company. The kind you can’t be here for. We wouldn’t want to traumatize your boyfriend, now would we?”
“You are vastly underestimating my Niki,” he disagreed, but he left it at that. The two of them shared practically everything. But their proclivities in the bedroom—or in the forest, as it were—weren’t one of them. Sometimes, it was better to have something solely yours, even kept from your best friend.
Zane’s earlier words about liking how they didn’t fight returned to him, and the corner of Pavel’s lips quirked. It hadn’t always been that way between him and Ledger. They’d hated each other in the beginning, when he’d been brought home and Ledger had been told he was no longer going to be an only child.
To put it frankly, Ledger had been a total menace, doing everything his ten-year-old brain could conjure to ruin any chance of Pavel feeling like he belonged in the family. But that hostility hadn’t lasted.
Pavel had been terrified when he’d undergone his first change, his body slipping into the ability without his permission, as was the way of his kind. He’d feared being kicked out by the Undergroves for real, that all of the threats about it Ledger had made would come to fruition once they discovered his secret.
Even in this day and age, people were apprehensive when it came to what they couldn’t control. Shapeshifters were often looked down upon and feared, forced to register their names and locations with the Intergalactic Conference so they could bemonitored if a crime was committed in their area with no known culprit. Most of the planets housing species with those types of abilities had been invaded over the centuries, their kinds slowly but surely wiped out.
Lucky for him, his parents had apparently come from different lines with similar shifting qualities.
And by lucky, he meant the opposite.
It’d taken a long time for him to start appreciating his gifts, though there were still serious downsides attached. When he’d first started changing against his will, he’d vowed to hide it from everyone, especially his adoptive family. That hadn’t lasted long, however.
Ledger had been the one to catch him a few weeks in, during a random burst of his ability at the school gym. But instead of outing him or calling him a freak, Ledger had done the unthinkable.
He’d helped sneak Pavel off school grounds and back home. When Pavel had refused to tell their parents, Ledger had helped him sell the lie that he was sick, insisting on being the one to bring Pavel his medicine and meals. They’d carried on the act for a few days before Ledger finally convinced him to come clean.
Pavel had only ever been that frightened about anything one other time in his life, and that hadn’t gone his way. But he’d trusted Ledger for some reason, despite the bad blood that’d been between them. It hadn’t felt like a trick to get him to confess to their parents to finally get him removed from the family tree, or anything like that.
The Undergroves hadn’t been frightened by him, on the contrary. They’d helped him through his transition and had done thorough research into the subject in order to place exactly what he was, avoiding going to the I.P.F and getting a genetics test done so he wouldn’t have to be registered.
They’d been close ever since, all four of them.
A real family.
A family Pavel intended to make Zane a part of.
A family he wasn’t above dangling about his delectable doctor's head as an added incentive.
“He ended things with Kazimir,” he said.
“So they finally broke up, huh.”
Pavel scowled. “They were never officially together.”
