Page 52 of The Alpha Wolf Defying Fate

She folded her arms over her chest as she stared back at me.

“The point is, we couldn’t just leave you behind. For one, my wolf would have lost her mind had I even thought to do it. For two, you are the only one of us who fully understands how your uncle’s magic works. It’s come in handy plenty of times already in this place. It’s far more likely we would have gotten lost without you and never found Minerva ever.”

I felt my wolf huff in the back of my head with agreement to what she said. Even if they continued on the path, there was no guarantee that the ground wouldn’t suddenly shift. Not without the grounding magic I used to track our location and check for nearby monsters.

Though, a lot of good it does me with the flying beasts.

“Fine,” I growled. “Is it really necessary to wait any longer?”

“If you think you can move then you have another thing coming,” Aurora piped in at that. “One wrong move and you are popping that wound right back open. Two days was not an over exaggeration, Ayden.”

I rolled my eyes as I slumped back against the bed, ignoring the obvious sting of pain that proved Aurora correct.

“Where is that book that I found?” I asked. “If I’m going to be stuck here in this bed for a couple of days, I’d like to make use of them and be somewhat productive.”

Sasha stood and retrieved my bag from the other room. I watched as she unzipped the main zipper compartment and pulled the book out.

“Here,” she said as she offered it out to me.

I nodded to the table beside me, then looked over at Baer and Aurora.

“If you two are done playing doctor on me, I’d like to talk to my mate for a moment. Privately.”

Baer grinned at Aurora before snatching her by the waist and leaping towards the doorway. “Playing doctor sounds a lot more fun with just the two of us. You two take your time.”

I could hear the both of them laughing as they left the building to give us space to talk. Sasha shifted in her seat, her jaw setting in a defiant line as she seemed to know exactly what I was about to get at.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she blurted out.

“Oh?” I asked. “Well then go ahead and say it so I don’t have to.”

“I froze. I didn’t react at all like the warrior princess you say I am. And because of that, you got hurt. But you don’t know what was going through my head!”

“You don’t think I didn’t get a good sense of the fear you were paralyzed from?” I demanded. “You really think that I didn’t know exactly what was running through your head as that griffin was closing in on you. Who’s the idiot now then, Rigel?”

She let out a growl that came more as a whimper from her lips. “It was targeting me, and that gods damned voice was in my head telling me to kill it like I did the kelpie.”

“And?” I asked, her lips tightening into the straight line as she stared back at me.

“And nothing, I didn’t know what to do.”

“You fight,” I said firmly. “You fight that voice, and you fight the monster that is threatening your life. You don’t just sit there and take it!”

She stood up with enough force to knock her chair over, her eyes glaring down her nose at me.

“You make it sound so fucking easy,” she accused. “I’d like to see how you react to being frozen like that.”

She stormed out of the room before I could respond. I gritted my teeth together to keep from yelling after her out of anger, because it wasn’t really anger.

It was my own fear for her.

It wasn’t that I wanted her to feel bad for freezing up in fear. I could understand that level of fear. I’ve faced that kind of fear myself as a child up on the hill with my uncle during the full moon ritual. But that kind of reaction to fear only gets you hurt. Or worse.

That was where my fear came from. That was the fear that powered me forward to fight the griffin and save her. It was a fear of losing her to the darkness.

‘Her wolf told me something before they ran off,’my wolf told me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

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