Page 64 of Gemini Wicked

“I was… vexed to learn of your sister’s passing. As I was vexed to be parted from Zara.” His broody gaze drops to the crown he’s gripping. “Unfortunately, I was given no choice in the matter. Nor was Ash. I have been… most occupied… in Avalon.”

Without even looking, his booted toe gives a careless nudge to the severed head propped against Neo’s stack of textbooks.

I’m a trained fighter and I’ve seen loads worse, so I take a sec to appreciate with a warrior’s eye the clean slice across the cadaver’s gullet.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but that was clearly the killing blow.

The strike’s clean enough to attribute to those crossed swords jutting over Zephyr’s slim shoulders. I know those blades, like I know the supple green dragonscale that encases his lethal frame. I know what he’s capable of.

It’s just the bitter hatred for me that’s lurking in his whisper, poisoning his stare like venom, that’s new.

Well, I’ve bloody well earned that hatred, haven’t I?

I’m the sole reason for that eyepatch he’s sporting.

I clench my jaw and scoot back till my spine hits the high carved headboard of Zara’s bed. At the maneuver, my arse gives a twinge, because Lucius finally gave me that knot of his right before we slept. (Which was epic.) We were still locked when I nodded off.

Even now, hours later, my headmaster’s arm is still wrapped round my thighs. But Lucius is twitching, his steady rhythm of snores dissolving in a wolfish grumble.

Bollocks. He’ll be up any tick now.

I scrub a hand over my face, bristly with morning stubble, and think about popping out for coffee. Gods know, we’ll all need it. But I’m naked under this sheet, and I’m feeling more than a bit self-conscious about flashing my junk—complete with hard-on and a Prince Albert piercing he’s never seen—to my pissed-off first love.

I settle for airing my litany of grievances. “Why the everloving fuck did you stay away so long? If Gwen only knew you survived… if she’d not seen you plummet from Pendragon Tower…”

Fuck me. I can’t even finish. Not out loud.

If he’d answered me in the glass even once, if he’d eased my guilt over killing him for her sake, if he’d done anything but what he did, my twin might still be alive. At least, she would’ve had more petrol in the tank to fuel her fight against Damien Gemini and those witchy bitches who were hazing her.

She might’ve not… hanged herself… in the midst of our troubled freshman year.

Damn it to hell, Gwen.

“Why did I stay away?” Zephyr’s cruel voice cracks through the air like a whip. “Why did you throw the knife?”

I shoot him a tortured look. “You know why. Bleeding hell, Zeph. What else could I have done?”

He flourishes a graceful hand before his ruined socket, over the green eyepatch that hides his only flaw. That’s his souvenir of the night he fell from the roof of the Pendragon family home with my knife buried in his eye.

“Does the sight of me now please you?” His harsh words flay me and claw at the open wound I carry in my chest instead of a beating heart. “To see firsthand what you’ve done to me? To witness the nightmare I’ve become?”

The whiplash snap of his voice shreds the morning hush.

Lucius rolls over to his back with a sluggish grunt. “What…?”

Then a flurry of naked limbs and scrambling bodies erupts from the bedclothes beside us.

“Well, now you’ve bloody done it,” I mutter and wait for the storm to break.

“Oh my God.” Zara emerges, stunned and disheveled in a wild tumble of teal curls, from her sea of alphas. Color floods her riveted face. “Zephyr?”

She flings back the blankets with a happy cry.

Instantly Max dives to cover her naked curves with his naked torso, his dragon eyes flaming, pinning his mate flat to the mattress and growling at this rival male who’s invaded our lair. The pungent scent of leather and brimstone floods the air.

“Jesus, Max, take it easy. It’s Zephyr!” Zara’s simultaneously trying to soothe our possessive alpha dragon and push him aside.

Needless to say, Max is having none of it.

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