Page 1 of Accepted Bonds

1

Caden

In the dimly lit living room, I sat beside Mateo.My hand was gripping his thigh that was closest to me like it was a lifeline and my face was turned in his direction as I tried to conceal the agitation I felt by staring at his quiet yet tense form and inhaling his cold mint scent.

If Aurora’s poppy flower scent could make me intoxicated, then Mateo’s had always calmed me.Years of companionship had made him my confidant and my most trusted person.

I sighed as he covered my hand on his thigh with his, gripping my hand tightly.His clammy grip, tense body, and restless feet were the only signs that he was as anxious as Aiden, who kept pacing back and forth in the space between the sitting area and the kitchen counter in Levi’s apartment.

After taking a deep gulp of Mateo’s familiar mint scent, I turned to stare at Levi, who was talking on the phone with his fingers drumming nervously on the arm of the couch.

“Got it.”He said before ending the call and dropping his phone on the table.

The amount of control he had over his emotions amazed me.While I could see that he was as anxious as the rest of us from some of his fidgety movements and restlessness, he wasn’t as bad as Aiden, Mateo, and I.

In the past few days, Aiden had been biting into his nails to the extent that I’d seen him treating one of his fingers the night before.From what I knew of his nail-biting habits, I knew he must have, while deep in thought, bitten off a sizable chunk and hurt himself.

I had been pacing much of the time and Mateo and I had even started sleeping in each other’s rooms again, using our scents to lull each other to sleep.Mateo had also ruined five phones by slamming them down or throwing them across the room in sudden bursts of anger, proving that despite his expression, he wasn’t as calm as he pretended.

“What did they say?”Aiden asked, sitting beside me on the couch opposite Levi’s.

Levi was expressionless as he replied, “They couldn’t recover the CCTV footage.It was deleted on-site by whoever took Aurora.Victoria thinks it’s the same person our colleagues caught standing in your pack observer’s backyard because that person also replaced the footage for the backyard camera.”

Mateo’s grip on my hand tightened before he interrupted Levi.“This seems too much like a coincidence, right?Someone was stalking the pack observer your organization was trying to protect on the same night that Aurora went missing.Could she have been informed and then she got hurt when she went looking for the attacker?”

“No, I was the one who called to tell her about the attack and she didn’t pick up the call.Besides, she wouldn’t do anything so brash.She always keeps us in the loop, it wouldn’t have taken her more than a few minutes to record a voice note or send a text onto the group chat to keep us abreast of what was going on.”Levi’s tone was firm, and it made me envious again to see how much deeper he understood Aurora while we were still trying to figure her out.

“Could the kidnapper have gone after her because everyone knows she is a member of the Supernatural Council?Are they holding her hostage to get something from the Supernatural Council?”I asked, running my fingers over the stubble on my chin, a result of neglecting to shave for the past three days.

“Have there been any ransom demands?Maybe someone wants to use her to take advantage of the Supernatural Council?”Mateo asked.

Levi glanced down at his phone before responding.“None.We’re monitoring all the hotlines they could use to reach us.”

“I still think Angelique’s parents are the culprits.”Aiden insisted.

I reached toward him to pat him on the back and resisted the urge to sigh when he moved away from me like I wasn’t his twin brother and I didn’t have any right to comfort him.

“I think it could be anyone in this pack other than your family and the Davis family.Scratch that, other than Marisa and Jim of the Davis family.There have been a lot of gloating responses to Aurora going missing,” Levi said.

I wanted to deny this possibility, but I couldn’t because he was right.The University forum, alone, was full of secret and open posts discussing Aurora going missing in gloating or schadenfreude tones which were just alarming.

The living room descended into silence as we all fell back into solemn thinking about how to find and rescue our true mate.We weren’t officially mated to her, so we didn’t have the bonds that would allow us to track her down, decipher her current state of mind, or feel what she was feeling.

“And the Supernatural Council technicians weren’t able to recover anything?They didn’t find any clues?”Aiden asked again, even though Levi already answered this question.

Levi sighed and answered again, “None.Whoever wiped the entire day and night’s footage wiped it from inside the hospital.If they’d done it online or tried to damage the footage with any technical means, we could have recovered it, but deleting it the way they did left us no clues.If they’d wiped specific footage, we could have had something to investigate, but they wiped 24 hours’ worth of footage.It’s impossible to retrace everything that happened in the hospital in those 24 hours.”

After hearing Levi’s words, our hopes were dashed yet again and the entire room fell into silence.

“How do we deal with the pack council meeting Aurora is supposed to attend tomorrow?”Aiden asked.

“I’ll go on her behalf,” I said with pursed lips.

“You can’t go.You’re going to be the next Alpha of the pack.You can’t get on the wrong side of your future pack council.You also can’t demonstrate your allegiance to Aurora, a member of the Supernatural Council blatantly.Levi and I can’t go either.Levi is an outsider and, worse, a vampire.Everyone still treats me with distrust because of what my father did.If I go, I will be giving them more things to say to argue with your father.The only logical third party whose presence would be blameless is Aiden.Aiden is not the Alpha of the pack.He is a born Sentinel and no one else in the pack can take on that duty.That’s your leverage Aiden.”As usual, Mateo’s sensitive mind came in handy as he pointed out technicalities that I would have just ignored.

When he wasn’t plotting based on emotions, Mateo could be a decent strategic thinker.It was one of the reasons my dad loved to play chess with him.

Thankfully, Aiden didn’t allow the bad blood between him and Mateo to disrupt his rationality as he nodded in agreement.“Sounds reasonable, but the question now is, what do I do?”

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