Page 69 of Sawyer

“East of the mountains. There won’t be anyone out there.” I roll to my feet, pausing on the pebbled walkway. Every instinct inside of me is yelling at me not to leave Sawyer, not to walk away from her. It’s the strangest feeling, especially since I did just that in the Forbidden Forest years ago.

“I already let Sin know something was up.” Rumor nods at the house. “For what it’s worth, I feel it too. The draw to her. The need to bond and form a pack.” He admits the last in a whisper. “Come on, good ole boy, let’s go so we can be back before sunrise.”

“Don’t start with the good ole boy bullshit.” I nearly groan as I follow him toward the SUV.

“Listen, I’ll call you Mr. Goody Two-Shoes for as long as it fucking suits me because that is exactly who you are,” he jokes as he climbs into the driver’s seat.

“Yeah, well, things changed.”

He waits until I climb in to start the vehicle. Keeping the lights off, he rolls out of the driveway, waiting to turn the headlights on until we’re well past the cottage. It’s a small gesture not to wake up Sawyer, but one he thought of.

“Tell me about it.” He adjusts his seat from my settings. His legs are a little shorter than mine, reminding me that he let me drive his SUV. I know exactly how particular he is with his vehicles.

“Who are you? My therapist?” I try to joke, but it comes out strained, and he damn well knows it.

“You know the monarch’s mate demanded all of us deltas to begin therapy,” he snarls. “All of us. I sat in that room, and in fifteen minutes, the therapist had my entire life ripped to shreds, and I went through an entire box of her tissues.”

“Yeah, I have to see the same girl. She’s a gamma, right?” I ask because a few therapists are currently working with the delta force. One is a beta, another is a gamma, and the last is an alpha. Hell, they even called in a mage. The monarch wanted to make sure we had options with all capable designations so we weren’t stuck with a therapist we didn’t jive with.

“Yeah,” he replies, but it’s strained. “Have you seen her lately?”

“I know what you’re thinking, and she’s located at Bridgeburn. There are hundreds of deltas and alphas there. No one is getting past those walls to kidnap a gamma.” She’s on a base where we don’t just train, but where we also live as we train. Many of us still return there often enough to have a room in the barracks.

“You’re right.” He sighs. “Fuck, this situation has me second-guessing everything.”

“I hate this for the gammas.” I rest my head on the seat, closing my eyes because I can’t allow my true feelings out if they are open. Then, they become too real, and I become too damaged. “Did the mage healer ever say if the bodies we found a little while ago are related?”

“She did. They were all killed brutally by that piece of shit councilman heir,” he sneers.

“So this is new.” That isn’t helpful, not at all, because now we are looking for someone different. It would have been easy to pin these murders on someone who was already dead, and hell, maybe I hoped they were so I could play pack with Sawyer and the others.

“Do you think the rumors are true?” he asks me.

“Which ones?”

“That the Oak Mountains are more haunted than the Forbidden Forest?”

“The forest isn’t treacherous, but it is haunted. Don’t you remember our patrols during camp?” I shudder, remembering those late-night walks around the perimeter of the camp just on the edge of the forest. Laughter would echo through the trees, and lights would randomly shine and dart away.

“I’d prefer not to remember,” he remarks, focusing ahead.

I tilt my head to the side, watching Rumor as he drives through the dark roads, skirting the city’s limits as we head toward the mountains in the distance. “I don’t think they are haunted,” I tell him. Most hauntings are explainable. People just prefer the mystery of lore. “I think there really is something going on there.” Such as feral betas.

“I agree, and I think the dean knows something, which is why he’s barred us from entering the mountain range.”

“That is why we are traveling out there at ten in the evening,” I mutter.

Silence falls between us as he heads north. The drive is about an hour, give or take, and although the sun set, there are still people out on the roads, traveling to and from their destinations. Many are uncaring of the dark world that surrounds them, but maybe if more cared like Sawyer, more would say something.

For years, the citizens of Terra stayed quiet about everything going on beneath their noses. Then the monarch died and his son took over, and Sawyer picked at the threads of society, unraveling them one at a time through her news reports—both from the Central Daily and then through her social media.

I never knew she was the woman we thought would always be a one-night stand, but I knew her. Her face is plastered everywhere. She is the gamma darling of Terra, the one who defied the odds of her designation and dared to be something more.

I worry she’ll never forgive who I was.

“Do you ever regret who we’ve become?” I ask Rumor and close my eyes, unsure if I can face the truth.

“Going to need a little more than that, Bryn.”

---