Page 7 of Truth or Lie

“It’s Alex,” I said succinctly, aware that my face probably looked like I’d swallowed a lemon. “Well, also Beckett. But mostly Alex.”

He frowned. “Beckett? Did something happen with the pregnancy?”

“The doctor put him on bed rest,” Leo said.

Jax relaxed a bit. “Ah. Okay. Next question. What did Alex do?”

“Let me guess,” Flynn said. “You tried to pin her down about the mating, and she said she’s fine with it as long as she can stay a million miles away from the whole thing.”

“Wow, it’s like you know her personally or something,” Leo said, laying on the irony.

Jax was giving me one of those piercing looks that saw too much. “There’s more,” he said. “What is it?”

I sighed. “She bailed on Leo’s heat. Apparently, if we don’t need her to keep either of you from biting us, there’s no reason for her to be there—at least, according to her.”

Had that come out sounding bitter? Yeah... it probably had.

Blue eyes peered straight through my skull and into my brain, without the need for a psychic mate-bond.

“I will give you a one hundred percent personal guarantee that she didn’t stop and think how that would sound before she said it aloud,” Jax told me.

“It doesn’t matter.” I gave myself a mental shake. “Maybe it’s for the best if she’s not there.”

Spoiler alert—it was not, in fact, for the best.

“You want us to gang up on her?” Flynn asked. Leo leaned into him, and he rumbled a purr as his arms came around her, settling her body against his.

“No, please don’t,” I said. “We said it’s her choice, and we meant it.”

Jax’s blunt fingers touched my jaw, bringing my face up to meet his eyes again. “It’s not you. It’s not either of you, Kam. You’re worthy of love... worthy of being mated and cherished. But we’re all broken in different ways. This is just the shape of Alex’s jagged edges, and sometimes those jagged edges can be sharp.”

“I know. It’s fine,” I lied.

Now Leo was watching me with a worried gaze as well.Wonderful.

“It’s fine as long as your pack can take the strain,” she clarified. “Alex can run away from us if she wants to. That’s her prerogative. But promise us that you won’t let her run away from you, too.”

Flynn scoffed. “Run away from us? Where would she go?”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Leo said.

“It won’t come to that,” Jax promised, as if he had any way at all of knowing such a thing. “We won’t let it.”

“Nah,” Flynn agreed. “We won’t. It’ll work out, you’ll see.”

And oh, how I envied Flynn’s simple and straightforward view of the world.

“Of course it will,” Jax said. “We’ve still got a war to win and a world to fix, after all. Alex would never shirk her duties when there’s work to do.”

“Things will be better when we’re not stuck rattling around this place day in and day out,” Flynn added. “We’re all going a little stir crazy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Leo said into his chest. “This is the safest I’ve felt since I was fifteen.”

“This is the safest you’vebeensince you were fifteen,” I pointed out. “So that only makes sense.”

“Come on, you two,” Flynn said, throwing a possessive arm around me so I was tucked against his left side, and Leo against his right. “Help us get cleaned up so we can all go and bother Beckett for a bit. He must be bored out of his mind, and I need a distraction from thinking about exactly how I’m going to bite both of you.”

The little frisson that traveled down my spine was irrational. In the end, it didn’t matter whether or not I carried their bite scars over my useless, atrophied mating gland. And yet, that didn’t stop me from craving it with single-minded desperation as my packmate’s heat approached.

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