Page 9 of Cursed Heirs

Alena:Haven’t seen Elliot because my mom says he’s in recovery from his battle earlier with the acolytes, but he’s herestaying and recuperating in our home so my mom’s ward can protect him while he’s incapacitated.

Talon:All right, I hear you. You should stay with X until Elliot’s conscious and able to. Don’t leave him there alone.

Alena:I promise I won’t.

Talon:There’s our girl.

Alena:Got to protect my men.

Talon:Your men, huh? Loving that.

Alena:Me too. XOXO.

Talon:Shit, worst patient known to man is waking up. I’ll TTYL, firecracker, okay?

Alena:Promise.

I smiled at the messages, then stowed my phone in the back pocket of my wide leg jeans, and looked out at Xavier lying prone in the bed in one of the many spare rooms in my childhood home, my mom’s palatial estate. Only the best for her.

I caught myself there. That was a bit bitter. I guess I was a little hurt that she’d just taken off so quickly after pulling me out of there.

She’d barely checked that I was okay physically and she hadn’t at all paid any mind to my mental state, which hadn’t been—and wasn’t—the best, honestly.

And taking me away from my men like that, and a place that I’d found stability in of Electi Academy against what I’d asked her to do, that hadn’t been the greatest either.

I’d only gone along with it and hadn’t put up more of a fight because of the state of Xavier.

Just… being split up right now wasn’t good for any of us. We’d become a unit, a close-knit one at that and we’d just endured that nightmare together, we needed to stay together and handle it as a foursome. But that had been taken away from us.

I knew it wasn’t for my safety because my mom had put up a ward that matched the one around the house at the Academy too. I hadn’t mentioned my reason for wanting to stay being mostly about the guys, but I had a feeling that she already knew, and that had something to do with why she’d gone this way. She wanted me away from them. Well, Talon and Orpheus. Xavier was different in her mind because of Elliot Sabre, and because Xavier had no ill will toward her and she’d never had any issues with him. In fact, he was a big supporter—mostly in secret when it came to Orpheus and Talon—of her policies, especially the one regarding putting Constantine down without killing him.

I knew my mom had an emergency on her hands right now and I also knew that she was all about work, even without an urgent situation in play.

But this time it bothered me more than it ever had before.

Maybe it had something to do with the guys rubbing off on me, their animosity toward her. Or maybe it had opened my eyes in a way that I hadn’t allowed before, a way I’d been closed to before when I’d been running from all of this, this whole world.

There was also the fact that the four of us had battled Constantine. We had intel. Valuable intel. Especially with the things he’d said to us. Fucked-up things. So why hadn’t it been one of my mom’s first priorities to debrief us? Or me, at the very least?

Something was definitely off.

I had a stake in this now.

My men had a stake in it.

And we’d basically been cast aside.

Memories of what Orpheus had shown me during theCataclysmwhen my mom had confronted Saryan Hart played on my mind.

It must have been how he’d felt.

All this time, in fact.

Cast aside.

Ignored.

Treated like less than.

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