Page 47
“I need to get her home,” I say to Zade and Brack. It’s like my mind is only partially working. I have to fight through it and blink rapidly.
They must be able to smell her heat coming, too. The thought of that makes me feel rabid. Makes me feel, for the first time in my life, violent toward my best friends.
Like they can hear those thoughts, they take a step back.
“Okay,” Brack says, nodding. “We will bring Aurora home.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you want me to—?” Zade asks, starting to step toward me, surely offering to come along.
A growl bursts out of me without my permission. Brack grabs his arm, pulls him back, shaking his head at the other alpha.
“No. Aug has got this, right?”
“Right.” The word comes out more growl than communication. I don’t want to be here any longer. I trust my friends to get my sister home safely. I turn and, with Mylah held snugly against my chest, start to head home.
Chapter 21 - Mylah
At first, when I wake up, I feel like I’m floating outside of my body. Everything in my room looks different.
The creamy bedspread is gone, replaced with a darker, more masculine one. The light oak is now dark. The bedside table is stacked high with old, leather-bound books. There are far more things in here now—not the blank canvas of a guest room, but a place that’s lived in. The fireplace on the opposite wall crackles, the flames red, orange, yellow, but I’m still cold.
Cold, and drenched in Augustus’s scent.
It’s all around me. I am rolling in an orange grove on a warm summer’s day that I’ve never experienced in my life. I’m rubbing my cheek against a warm fruit, still connected to the tree, the juice inside so heavy and sticky and sweet—
“Oh no.” I gasp and sit up, breathing hard, realizing exactly what’s happening here.
Well, not exactly. My mind still feels a little fuzzy. But what I can feel, for sure, is the slick starting, wetting my underwear and the insides of my thighs. My breathing comes harder and faster, and I whimper against the feelings—so many feelings. It’s like my nerve endings have become raw, ultra-sensitive to every possible input. The sheets against my skin. The cool air, then the distant warmth of the fire. My hair against the nape of my neck, damp with sweat, my ankles pressing into the mattress.
I am in Augustus’s bed, and I am going into heat. Maybe I’m already in heat. I don’t know exactly when it fully started.
But I’m sweating, and I’m shaking. I feel hungrier than I’ve ever felt, and sick at the same time.
At home, I had a system for this. Supplies, ways to help. An ice bath, aromatherapy, green juice. Everything I heard through gossip and the rare library book could possibly help to ease the symptoms.
Symptoms like a fever, sweating, shaking hands. Symptoms like the impossible, insatiable, body-wracking need. Like nothing you can possibly imagine. The most severe thirst, hunger pangs in the deepest parts of your soul. Cavernous, gaping, a black hole of wanting right in the core of me, filled and satisfied by only one person in the entire world.
One man.
A single shifter.
And I am in his bedroom.
My thoughts are logical. I need to get out of here. Ideally, need to get out of this building.
No—that would be worse. To be in heat out there…that would be terrible.
What I need to do is find Aurora.
I pause in what I’m doing—what am I doing? I realize I’m on my knees in the middle of the bed, roughly pulling up Augustus’s comforter, winding it into a circle around me.
Aurora.
We went to that awful place together. That man was grabbing her, covering her mouth. They took her money and said I was getting the operation whether I wanted it or not.
I gasp again and place a hand on my belly, slide it lower, feeling my hips, thighs, the swell of my vulva as though I could possibly tell if he had done something to me. Wouldn’t I be in pain? Wouldn’t I be bleeding?
