Page 66 of Fortune Fae Academy
“How are you feeling?”Rowan asked, his voice hardly above a whisper as he pushed out the words.
The words were innocent, but his gaze was on my collar quietly humming its building control around my neck.
It hadn’t done anything as of yet, but I could feel it charging for something, as if it was waiting for Amell’s directives and was going to absorb all the power it could get in the meantime.
The effect drained me, making me more tired than I cared to admit.
And Rowan noticed. Despite his weakened state, he didn’t miss a thing.
I stared at him, poised with a damp cloth over one of the gashes decorating his chest as I tried to process the ridiculousness of his question. Although, I was relieved he could finally speak. That had to be a good sign.
I’d been treating him all day, frantic that he wasn’t healing and hating the not knowing.
Not knowing why Axel and Seif had needed to go talk without me.
Not knowing where Zeke might be, and why Axel had seemed to be so angry withSeifabout that.
I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, I was exhausted, and yet I was failing my one job to unite my mate-circle. So far I was doing a shit job of it.
“Fine,” I lied, then resumed cleaning his wound.
Only to frown when it began bleeding again.
“Now that you’re awake, can you try to heal?” I asked him, hoping I didn’t sound angry.
Because I was, but not at him.
I was angry with myself. This whole time I had been unsuccessful in healing my Beta. I had plenty of Dust, or at least I thought I did. But nothing I tried worked. He had so many cuts and bites that I didn’t know where to start.
Axel seemed to know something I didn’t, saying that he would heal the “old-fashioned way,” whatever that meant, before he’d left with Seif.
But these bites… Rowan had so many. More than he should have had, really. Sighing, I pressed a bandage to the larger one on his chest, then began fussing with an angry wound on his rib cage I had cleaned multiple times now.
Rowan flinched when I dabbed the cloth against his skin. “Why are you cleaning my claiming bite?” he asked.
I blinked at him. “Because it’s bleeding,” I answered, but I couldn’t register what he was saying.
Claimingbite?
Rowan looked down and gently pushed my hands away. “That’s where Axel bit me when he claimed me,” he explained. “I’m not sure why that one is bleeding.”
A few of his bites had always glowed with the power of Dust, but most Alpha marks did to my eyes. I hadn’t realized that was the same one.
He was still bleeding from old wounds, not necessarily new ones.
He brushed away the blood, and only then did I notice a flicker of Dust come with it.
“What’s going on?” I demanded as worry constricted my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he answered. “I’m changing, Gina, but I don’t know why.” He glanced up, then looked past me as if searching for someone. “Where are Axel and Seifiek? I saw them when—earlier,” he amended.
I doubted that any of us would be able to talk about this for a while. Everything felt too raw.
Rowan had located one of the missing pieces of my soul and risked everything to retrieve it. A piece that was one of my last missing memories when it came to Seifiek. There were a few fragments still out there, but I’d gathered enough of the story.
A story I needed in order to understand Seifiek. He’d done some unforgivable things. While I didn’t excuse him for that, I also recognized that we weren’t human and that he had been a transitioning Alpha battling some pretty heavy instincts.
We were fae—something not many fully understood. It was more than physical differences or the ability to perform magic.
