Page 43 of Owning His Mate

I want to reassure him that I’m okay, but instead, I cling to him desperately.

“Was she shot?” Beck demands.

Kye’s presence probes through the bond, searching for any sign I’m hurt beneath what he can see.

“No. They gave her something,” Kye says. “Only a small amount, but it’s screwing with her.”

“It was a sedative…” I mumble, trying to stand upright on my own without wobbling and failing miserably. “She needed my blood and correctly surmised I wasn’t going to give it without a fight.”

“She wanted your blood?” Kye repeats, horror lacing his words.

That is weird, right? I didn’t think about it at the time, I was too busy trying to save myself, but why did she want my blood?

“For what purpose?” Beck asks the question rolling around my muddled brain.

“Can we debrief this later?” Callum says, shoving Beck toward the van. “We need to get the fuck out of here in case reinforcements are on the way.”

They’re coming…

The human female had said.They. Running far away seems like the best idea.

Callum’s words are enough to get everyone moving, and the last of the group climbs in. Kye lifts Savannah into the van, wincing against his own pain, and when he turns to me, I climb in without his help. I don’t want to add to his injury. Bodies are pressed tightly, and I try to find a small space for us.

Kye sits against the paneling and pulls me between his legs, my back to his chest. I position Savannah in front of me as he wraps his arms around us both. All that fear and terror leaches out of me as I let myself relax into his hold.

“We’re safe,” I murmur against Savannah’s hair. “I told you I’d get you somewhere safe.”

“You’re safe too,” Kye whispers against the shell of my ear.

It didn’t seem possible, but as the van rumbles to life and we drive away from that evil place, I know we’re going to be okay. My eyes drift closed, and I let the pull of the drugs finally take hold. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my entire life, and as I drift away safe in the arms of my mate, I know Kye will always be my protector, just as I’ll be his.

Chapter 11

Kye

My body is a ball of pain as I relax my spine against the metal behind me. I push through it, ignoring every ache, and focus on the fact that my world is sitting in front of me, alive and whole. There were a few times when that didn’t seem likely. I wasn’t sure we’d make it out.

The racing of my pulse is only just slowing, and my breath draws in a little easier as the van races along whatever road we’re hurtling down. I can’t see anything but bodies pressed together in this small space, though a strip of light from the windows at the front casts long shadows where it doesn’t reach.

I hold Apryle tighter against me, listening to her deep, soft snores as she sleeps off the effects of whatever she was given. Seeing her strapped to that table took ten years off my life. I’ve never felt fear like it. Even with my insides held together with stitches, I would have torn that place apart brick by brick to get her out of there, or died trying. In the end, she’d been the one to save me.

And the little girl curled up against her.

I don’t know how Apryle found Savannah or what her story is, but the way her white dress clings to her protruding bones tells me enough. Her filthy skin and lank, dirty hair has my jawflexing. Those assholes don’t see us as living beings. We’re just some fucked-up magic experiment to them, and as long as they view us as nothing, they’ll always treat us like dirt.

Savannah’s eyes open, and even in the darkened light, I can’t miss the trauma dancing behind them. I can’t even imagine what they did to a little girl to give her that look, but it makes me wish I’d killed them slower than I did. They deserve a special kind of hell for this, and it makes me more determined than ever to obliterate any threat to Apryle, to Savannah, to the rest of their kind—and mine.

“You good?” Beck asks.

He’s sitting opposite me, his back against the side panel of the van, and I have to bite back that increasingly familiar possessive jealousy I feel around him. Apryle doesn’t want him, not like that, and yet the fact Apryle shared things with him before me has me seeing red every time he opens his mouth.

“You took your time finding us,” I bite out instead of what I should be saying, which would be a thank you for risking his ass to save us.

Beck’s eyes harden even as someone snickers to the side of us—Ayden, I think.

“We did what we could.”

“We were ambushed,” Archie says, defending his brother as I would expect. “They hit us hard and fast. By the time we were able to overpower them, you guys were already gone.”

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