THE BED IS TOO toasty warm to want to wake up, but I instantly know that I’ve made it back into my own body once again. I don’t want to open my eyes or exist today, every bone in my body aches, but there’s an oddly temperature-less weight against my back. It takes me a second to realize that Brutus is back in the bed with me.
Which means that North is both awake and no longer in here with me because last night he’d been very firm on the ’no puppies in the bed’ rule, no matter how hard I’d pushed it.
My senses are dulled thanks to how deep I was sleeping, but I know that some of my Bonds are here with me. I can’t tell which ones, which is frustrating, but I’ll take what I can get.
There’s a rustling sound next to me and then Gryphon murmurs into my ear, “Stop frowning, Bonded. It makes me want to murder something for you.”
I squint one eye open in his direction. “What time is it, and do you have food?”
He smirks, his eyes shining at me like I’m being so damn amusing. I hear more movement on the other side of the room, and then North starts ordering food from the kitchens. My stomach rumbles at the list of things he asks for.
I want those goddamn scrambled eggs and waffles, extra bacon, and some hash browns, fuck yes. And coffee, a whole jug of it, with extra whip and sugar.
I move to get up and then realize I went to sleep naked after North had fucked me in his shower. I squint around the room, and while I could totally handle being naked in front of both of my Bonded at the same time, Gabe is sitting in one of the ornate chairs with his phone in his hands, and Nox is arguing with North over building schematics at a desk that has suddenly appeared while I was out cold.
I clutch at the duvet like some scandalized maiden, only to realize that I’m once again wearing silky pinstripe pajamas. North Draven is a sneaky asshole who takes the weirdest liberties while I’m passed out.
Gryphon starts cackling like an asshole and I shove my pillow in his face as I stomp off to the bathroom to pee. No one fusses over me walking, but they all watch me carefully, even Nox, though he’s got his usual, distasteful look on his face.
When I wash up, I take a good look at myself in the mirror, checking my color and the general look of my skin and hair. The silver is even lighter. I swear the color drain there is getting worse. I do a very gentle check-in with my bond, just to see how we’re tracking along there, and though it has a lot of feelings about missing Gabe and Nox, dammit, it doesn’t seem to be getting any new weird tricks or power surges.
Small mercies for now.
I rummage through the drawers until I find one full of very girl-specific shit. I’m very proud of myself when I stay calm, sending him a quick, Whose stuff is this?
His answer is instant and amused, Yours. If you want something that isn’t there, just tell me.
I will not swoon over such basic kindness, dammit. This is enough. Thank you.
I brush out my hair so I no longer look as though North and his shadow tentacles fucked the life out of me and then I throw it into a high ponytail. I feel breathless already from such a small amount of movement, and when I head back into North’s room, I beeline for the bed. Gryphon helps me in, tucking the blankets around me and shooing the shadow puppy away from me until I’m settled in. I’m a little surprised he lets him but the moment he steps back, Brutus covers me again.
Gryphon hands me a glass of water and snaps, “I will get him sent home right the fuck now if he’s too heavy. Davenport will be up later to look at your leg and finish off the healing; let’s not injure it all over again because you’re spoiling the creature.”
I shrug at him and eye Gabe from across the room. He’s wearing a sweater that I want to steal, and when he glances up at me and notices me staring, he grins back at me.
Gryphon waves a hand in front of my face as the knock at the door interrupts us all and I snap, “He’s made out of shadows and smoke, which weighs nothing. Brutus is just fussing with me like you are. Leave him alone.”
He scowls at me as North opens the door, and then his attention is pulled to that situation.
The food smells incredible, but I feel bad for the kitchen staff bringing it in. Every last one of my Bonds that are here turn to watch her every move. When she’s got it set out on the table for North, she turns to the door, only to be stopped by Gryphon.
I open my mouth, ready to defend the poor woman, when he says, “Has anyone but you and the chef touched any of this food?”
She answers straight away, “No, sir.”
“Did you do anything to this food, add anything, or slip anything into it?”
“No, sir. No one has touched or tampered with any of it.”
Jesus freaking Christ. Is this where we’re at now? Questioning everything, even in the damn manor?
As the door swings shut behind the woman, Gryphon answers my very private thoughts, “Yes, that’s exactly where we are now. No one in or out without speaking to me first. No one but your Bonds and select friends are allowed in a room alone with you. No one but the chef is touching your food.”
I have no words, none except, “Get out of my head.”
“Stop thinking so loudly.”
I snap back, “Well, if I knew how I was doing it, I would stop. Buy some earplugs or something!”
I don’t bother trying to get up or picking out what I want. North gets there first and picks everything out for me. He still glares at everything like he’s not so sure that Gryphon’s questioning did enough. It’s crazy, but my heart does a super weird thumping motion over it anyway.
I pull myself up to sit propped up against the pillows and when he hands me the plate, he moves to pour out coffee. There’s two cups, so one must be for me, right? He wouldn’t withhold it from me after that huge glass of water I just gulped down.
Thank the fucking stars, North hands me a coffee and then heads back over to where Nox is still scowling at the papers. They start the same argument as before about security holes and how to ensure occupancy survival. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because it sounds as though they’re arguing over a bomb shelter and that doesn’t seem like the right sort of priority for us all right now.
Gryphon pulls a chair up to sit next to me with a plate of his own, and I get back to the more important questions. “Why are we staying here if we’re so sure there’s about to be another attack? Can we… evacuate? Jesus, what would that even look like?”
North nods and shares a look with Nox. “It’s something we’re looking into. We can’t just leave the lower families behind to be picked off though, and there is a lot that would go into relocating this many Gifted at once, but it has been done before. We can do it again if things continue to get worse.”
It’s been done before? I didn’t know that, but there’s a lot about this community that I don’t know about, so I just nod and nibble at my toast some more, avoiding Gryphon’s grumpy looks because he’s clearly in a mood today. One that has absolutely nothing to do with me because I’ve been asleep for… wait.
“How long did I sleep this time?”
North answers without looking up from the paperwork, “Fourteen hours. We weren’t expecting you to wake up. You seem to be getting better at handling the power usage.”
Huh.
I’ll be happy if I don’t need to use my gift again any time soon, but I guess it’s good to know the three-day naps might be phasing out. The moment that his plate is clean, Gryphon takes my plate to refill it with more fruit and then leans down to kiss me soundly on the lips.
I’ll be in the gym training with some Tac guys. Call me if you need me.
I don’t know why he’s talking just to me, but I nod and let him give me one last peck before he’s out the door without another word. Whatever the hell is going on with him, I hope he beats it out of one of the guys downstairs.
I pick through the fruit and then put the empty plate on the bedside table, settling back down against the pillows to enjoy the last of my coffee with my Bonds around me. Gabe finishes off his plate and then collects mine, putting them back on the food tray and pushing the whole lot back out the door for someone to pick up.
North checks his phone and then walks over to me, kissing me soundly on the lips right here in front of everyone. I mean, Gryphon did too, but it still feels infinitely fucking weird for North to be doing it.
“We’ll be downstairs. Just stay here, or in your room. If you want something, call me. Don’t go wandering.”
I quirk an eyebrow at him but he gives me a very don’t-fuck-with-me look, and I roll my eyes at him. “Fine. But you can’t keep me trapped up here forever. Once I’m back to full health, I’ll get bored and become a nightmare.”
Nox scoffs as he heads for the door. “You’re already there, Poison.”
North’s eyes narrow at his back, and I grab his chin to tilt his head back toward me. “Stay out of it. I can fight my own wars with him.”
He gives me a look that says he definitely won’t be doing that, then straightens up to follow Nox downstairs. I’m sure they’re about to have a lovely trip down in the elevator, but I ignore it.
I have Gabe to myself.
He smirks at me and drawls, “Thank God, I thought we were going to be stuck in a full-blown Draven war for a second. I’d rather go to the gym and have Gryph kill me there instead.”
I giggle at him. “Come here and lie with me. If I’m going to be trapped here, I should at least get a cuddle out of it.”
Gabe stares at me for a second and then climbs up onto the bed carefully, moving as though he’s expecting me to fall apart underneath him or something, and when I scowl and tug him down on top of me, he grumbles back at me. With my legs bracketing either side of his body and his head cradled on my belly, he’s barely even on me. The small amount of weight that is there is comforting rather than… smothering.
I take a long, deep breath and feel whole again.
“No more running off,” Gabe says, his tone almost sulky, and I thread my fingers through his hair.
“I didn’t want to. I knew where Kyrie was going, and I couldn’t leave her to that. I survived. I’m fine, and Keiran will heal. I feel guilty about dragging him along, but we’re all going to be fine, because I went there too.”
Gabe huffs and his hand spans over the side of my thigh, gently brushing it through the duvet like he’s imagining all of the damage that has been wiped away thanks to Felix’s care. There’s still a small ache there, but it’s nothing compared to the blinding pain I’d succumbed to, letting my bond take over and wreak its blood-soaked vengeance on the camps.
Gabe’s fingers are gentle as he strokes over the duvet. “Black is going to wish he’d never woken up that morning by the time Gryphon and North are done with him. They both have some very creative plans of punishment for him.”
Jesus freaking Christ.
Gabe falls asleep on me and we spend most of the afternoon napping with Brutus between us, after he’d slowly inched Gabe away from me and taken his place. I doze off and on, watching the shadows cross the room as we waste away the day. Sometime in the late afternoon, I fall into a much deeper sleep, only to wake and find Gabe missing.
North is sitting at the desk, reading more of his endless paperwork with a glass of whiskey in front of him.
“There’s a sandwich on the nightstand. If you want something more substantial, I’ll call the chef for you.”
I stretch out and struggle to sit up, pushing up until I’m once again drowning in the pillows. I’ve never met a man who enjoyed sleeping with a hundred pillows like a princess, but then there’s no one quite like North out there.
“The sandwich is good. I feel horrible, the napping is only making it worse.”
He glances up to frown at me. “Do you need Felix now? He checked in on you earlier but when he saw you were sleeping, he left you to it. He said sleep is more important right now.”
I shake my head and grab the plate. “No, I just feel like I’m lazing around here, doing nothing, while everyone else is busy… doing things to keep us safe. I’m a liability and I hate that.”
He huffs at me, draining the last of the whiskey in the glass and moving more papers around. “Do you know how many survivors we recover on average from the camps?”
I shake my head, taking another bite of the sandwich. It’s cheese and ham, with the perfect amount of mayonnaise, and I want to marry the chef for it.
North ignores the sandwich-gasm I’m having and continues, “If we can get to the camps in the first twenty-four hours, it’s twenty-two percent. After forty-eight hours, that drops to fifteen. After four days, as in the case of what happened when you went after them? Three percent. Do you know how many survivors you brought home? Because it was all on you, we just came and picked you all up.”
The door opens and Gryphon steps through, not bothering to knock. He’s in his training gear, the full coverage stuff he wears around his team and not the teeny tiny shorts he saves for me. He doesn’t blink at North’s monologue, just comes over to get a look at me and take a seat back at my side.
“Thirty-three people were taken. Thirty-three came home. Only one was injured, and the reports said that thanks to Nox’s creature protecting Kyrie and shutting down the showers, only one woman was assaulted in that time. That has never happened before, Oleander. You’re the farthest thing from a liability.”
Gryphon turns to give me a look, and I shove the last of the sandwich into my mouth to avoid speaking to him about it. There’s a lot I need to say to him and fighting my position on being useless to them all right now isn’t it.
He turns to share a look with North that spells trouble for me.
It finally occurs to me that I don’t know how to do relationships. I barely know how to function as a Central Bond, and having both of my Bonded, very alpha men here together is literally overwhelming for my poor brain. It was fine this morning with Nox and Gabe here too because they felt a little bit like a buffer, stopping any of this stuff from happening.
Now I’m at their mercy, and I already know they’re both more than happy ganging up on me.
But I have to at least try, because if I shut my eyes and think about it hard enough, I can still hear the cracking sound of Kieran snapping his own ankle to save my life and the lives of my Bonds.
So once I swallow, I clear my throat and plead for Black’s life. “Please… don’t take everything that happened out on Kieran. I was the idiot who thought we’d get in and out without Franklin being there. I should’ve known better.”
Gryphon’s eyes narrow at me in a way that I’m so not used to being pointed in my direction. I gulp a little, mostly because he looks like he’s about to give me the same punishment as his second is going to get. I was kind of hoping the leg injury would get me out of the pre-dawn training for at least a week. Two would be better. I guess his terrible mood is still around, which is just great news.
I don’t look in North’s direction.
I’d wager he’s less reasonable about this shit than Gryphon is, so the longer I can keep him out of this, the better.
Gryphon snaps, “Wrong. North has only ever been unreasonable about you. Now that you’re Bonded, he’s probably going to go back to being the good councilman again.”
My cheeks heat but my temper also flares and gets my mouth running. “Get out of my head! I will start avoiding you if you can’t stay out of it.”
He leans forward in his chair and says in a low and dangerous tone, “Try it. I’m about to chip you all over again just to make sure you don’t fucking disappear on me.”
I make a very embarrassing squeaking noise of outrage and snap back at him, “I went after your sister. I didn’t run away. I went after someone you love, because I couldn’t bear the thought of you losing her. Don’t stand there and act like I’m a liability when I was doing it for you. I don’t care about that man or what he did—”
He snarls to interrupt me, “You can’t even say his name! I can see it now. I can see the trauma spots in your mind—”
“Then get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Head. I don’t want you in there. I deserve some goddamn privacy!”
He smirks but before he can open his mouth and ruin me even more, a solid body slides between the bed and the seat, in the tiny amount of space there, and North snaps, “She’s still healing. Walk it off before you say something you regret. Get out of here. Go.”
Gryphon leaves without another word, shutting the door a little harder than required, and I roll my eyes at the sound. North doesn’t move. He just stands there with his back to me and legs pressed against the bed like he’s expecting Gryphon to stomp back in for round two.
It makes me feel like an absolute asshole. “I’m sorry I thought you’d be unreasonable.”
He makes a dismissive noise. “I deserve it. I told your bond I’d regain your trust, and now I’m saying it to you too. I’m under no illusions that Bonding with you was a magic cure, it’ll take some time for me to prove myself to you. Gryphon is… he’s feeling guilty. It’s making him lash out, and he’s going to be sore about it later. I was trying to stop him from really digging himself into his own grave.”
I frown and lean back on the bed, exhaustion still creeping up inside my body even though I’ve barely been awake. Maybe I’m not past the sleeping forever phase like we were hoping. “What does he have to be guilty about? Jesus, he’s got a savior complex, doesn’t he? Typical.”
North carefully rolls his sleeves back up his arms and then starts to loosen the top few buttons, revealing the tanned and smooth skin there. He’s a fucking tease, and thank God Gryphon is no longer here to read all of the dirty thoughts running through my head, because I’m ready to spread out on the bed for him all over again.
“He’s feeling guilty because it was the first time he had to think about the choice between his family and his Bonded. If he had to choose between saving the two of you… He’s never had to think about it before and, like most men in his position, he always assumed he’d be able to stop there ever being a choice. You running after Kyrie made him aware that he’d rather you be safe here. That wasn’t such a terrible thing until she told him about Brutus saving her in the showers. If you weren’t there, she would have been assaulted.”
That cuts into my dirty thoughts a bit. “Well, that’s just stupid. Why worry about ‘what-ifs’ and made-up scenarios when there’s only one situation that did happen? We’re fine. Kyrie is safe and I just… I need a little more rest, but I’m fine.”
He flicks a hand at my leg with a raised eyebrow. “You were hurt badly. You were much closer to death than any of us ever wanted to think about.”
I roll my eyes. Men. Bonds. Bonded men with their heads up their asses. The list goes on. Honestly, my life will never be carefree again, and that has nothing to do with the Resistance chasing me and everything to do with five hot-blooded men that are fated to be tied to me for all of our lives.
North walks around the bed to shove the paperwork into a file and switch off the lamp over on that side of the room. “Do you need anything else? Hungry, thirsty? If you want another shower, I could be persuaded.”
I can’t cope with caring and attentive North Draven. Domineering and commanding North, sure. Asshole North? Not my favorite, but I’ve got him sorted.
This one?
Nope.
I could definitely go for another shower with him, and round three of playtime with his shadows, but the haze in my head still hasn’t lifted. “I think I need more rest, but I’m bored of lying around. Why don’t you have a TV in here so I can distract myself with something stupid on there?”
He looks over at me where I’m splayed out on the bed dramatically and then comes back over over to press a button underneath the lip of the marble-top, very luxurious looking bedside table.
The end of the bed opens and a TV slowly rises up out of freaking nowhere.
“You have too much money. Seriously, that is ridiculous! Why not just have it on the wall like the rest of the bedrooms?”
He shrugs and goes about meticulously stripping out of his suit, firmly distracting me from my outrage. “It would ruin the room. Besides, it’s fun to watch you freak out about simple things.”
