Kaz would have laughed if he didn’t feel like his throat was being squeezed.Fracture? Kind?
Yes, they were in their own way. Before, he was the only person on Earth who knew that, who appreciated them as people with souls, broken as they might be. It twisted him up inside to know that his mate saw that too.
The truth was that he’d missed them. He worried about them almost as much as he worried about his mate, but had comforted himself with the knowledge that they could take care of themselves for a few weeks.
Standing before them now, knowing that they’d unflinchingly had his back the entire time…
“Thank you,” he rasped. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t leave because I didn’t trust you. I didn’t want you to have to choose between helping me or following orders.”
From her spot crouched by the coffee table, Johanna whispered in her featherlight voice, “And you had a consort to protect. The rules change. We understand, Captain.”
A smile kicked up the corner of his mouth. He only enforced three official rules in Fracture: Never go it alone, always ask for help, and get permission before killing.
But they were all elves, even if they were broken, and so he supposed there was an unofficial fourth rule: Mates come first.
“Besides,” Vesta chimed in, her nose wrinkling as she poked at the rapidly unthawing bag of fries, “you were forgiven when I drew first blood.”
He scowled, but was stopped from arguing the point that an ambush didn’t fucking count when Atria straightened her shoulders and said, “I’m sorry I caused such a mess. I didn’t mean to take him away from you. I know how much he means to you all and how much you mean to him. I never meant to get in the way of that.”
Sloane narrowed his eyes. Biting the words off of the tip of his tongue, he replied, “You’re his consort. Any of us would do far worse than this for ours. Captain took a vacation. I’d burn a city.”
It was to his mate’s credit that she didn’t balk. “If it came to a choice between the two, then I prefer the vacation.”
“So, you’re really our captain’s consort?” Cesare asked, his lilting voice unsure.
Atria gave Kaz’s back a gentle, proprietary pat. “Yes.” She snuck a quick look up at him through her lashes. A steady warmth bled slowly through the tether. In a quiet but unwavering voice, she added, “He’s mine.”
“And what was your plan?” Vesta demanded, her dark eyes locked on Atria with a curious, assessing look. There were no hard feelings about the beating she took there. No doubt she was already wondering if she could coerce his mate into another round. There was not a being on Earth who liked a fight more than Vesta Kincaid.
He was impressed by the way Atria met her gaze squarely, without a hint of apology for their brawl nor fear of the predator she had to know Vesta was. His mate held her own.
“We were planning on going back to the EVP tomorrow morning. We have no way of getting to United Washington safely, and without any leads on who’s hunting us… Well, it just didn’t make any sense to take the risk.”
“You are trying to get to the Natural Phenomena and Development Conference, correct?”
“Yes, to present our work on m-energy that could make m-siphons obsolete and almost completely replace the use of fossil fuels.”
“Those two things don’t seem equal,” Sloane noted. “Isn’t replacing fossil fuels more important than m-siphons?”
Atria sent Sloane a brows-drawn look of complete seriousness. “Saving individual lives is just as important as solving the energy crisis. In fact, I’d say they go hand-in-hand.”
Sloane canted his head to one side. A beast assessing amusingly fearless prey. “Is that why you’ve done all this? To save lives?”
“Helping people has been my life’s work. Going to that conference was my chance to give that work to the world.” She lifted her hands to wrap her fingers around Kaz’s wrist. She gripped him tight, as if she feared he might slip from her grasp. When she stepped partially in front of him, he realized that she wasn’t worried he’d slip away — she was trying to shield him.
“The conference is— was important, but I’m not about to risk my mate’s life for it. Not foranything.”
He wasn’t sure any of the elves blinked for at least a minute. They stared unabashedly at his mate, each one of them assessing, judging her worth, perhaps wondering what it might be like to feel as she felt, to care so openly.
In that moment he was simultaneously intensely proud to be her mate and so full of a throbbing longing he felt like he was moments from bursting at the seams.
He had her. She’d claimed him in front of his family, in front of his team, and yet he wasn’t hers completely. The gap was still there, shrinking smaller every second, yes, butthere.
She hadn’t bonded with him. He wouldn’t earn that honor until he fixed what he’d broken.
Slowly, Vesta turned her attention to Kaz and raised her brows. “Captain, you should know that there was nothing in the sovereign’s orders pertaining to escorting you to United Washington.”
His heart skipped a beat. “There wasn’t, was there.”
