Page 107 of The Stone Initiation
“Did you speak to the Aziza cadet?”
“Yes, she’s informed the academy that Walker is unwell. They’ll believe it because Cameron is a halfblood.”
We’re playing a dangerous game. “If anyone finds out—”
“They won’t. We won’t let them.” He looks over my head, into the room where Serath and Cameron are-face-to-face and entwined in sleep. His breathing is even and regular, and there’s more color to his cheeks. “What if he takes too much?”
I’m surprised at his concern for the female considering his prickly attitude to date. “He won’t. His instinct is to protect her. His beast won’t let him take more than she can handle.”
“She’s a halfblood, Selas, does his beast even know how to deal with that?”
“She’s his mate for a reason. We’ve got no choice but to trust that their primal sides will know what to do. You saw how she stripped and lay with him. She knew what he needed.”
He exhales and shakes his head. “If their bond is this powerful without being consummated then…”
“I know.” It’ll only get stronger. Harder for them to control.
“It’s unfair. After everything he’s been through…”
Serath has a painful past filled with holes and uncertainty—one he rarely speaks of—but we all know and understand how it’s shaped him. There’s been too much loss in his life, so much pain that he’s learned to fly solo. Part of the team, yet apart from the team. No deep connections. No promises, and then she comes along. Validation from the universe, a promise that he’s not allowed to keep because to do so would drive him insane.
“It might not be like that for Serath,” Orix says replying to my thoughts as if I’ve spoken out loud, reminding me of the bond we share. One that could have deepened and become so much more had I allowed it.
But although alpha females can love, we rarely get to keep the males we give our hearts to, and with Orix it would have been too painful to have him, only for him to be ultimately taken by an omega.
“You heard what happened to Dharius from outpost four.” I look up at his face and imagine his beautiful features. Features I once tracked and memorized with my fingers. “They say he was frothing at the mouth when the Stone Guard took him away.”
“The Stone Guard…” Derision drips from his tone. “Lackeys, nothing more.”
Silence settles between us, thick and heavy with possibilities. His hand comes to rest on my shoulder, and my pulse skips a beat.
His sigh tells me he hears my reaction, hears the stutter in my heart and understands.
“I wish it could be different for Serath,” he says. “I wish he could have this. Her.”
Me too. “After this, he’ll feel closer to her than ever, you know that right?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll have to be there to make sure that they don’t consummate.”
“They won’t,” he says it with such confidence that it makes me smile. “Three more weeks and she’ll either be relegated to admin or scrape through to general forces and be posted far from here. We just need to get them through the next three weeks.”
It sounds simple enough, but there’s one huge problem.
A lot could happen in the span of three weeks.
CHAPTER46
CAMERON
It was warm and perfectly cozy, and then it wasn’t. I was being moved away from the warm place.
This was wrong.
This was bad.
The soft buzz of voices got loud and insistent before stopping altogether.
