Page 232 of Caelum

She stiffened. "Done what? These bastards needed killing."

Considering that was one of the worse curses I'd heard her use, I knew I wasn't the only one taken aback.

"No. Of course not. I meant you should have let us handle the killing. You don't need to be stained with this shit,pui. It's not... this isn't what you're supposed to do."

Though I agreed with him, his speaking Romanian had my eyes widening.

"I've never heard anything more chauvinistic in all my life and I'm mated to Dre!"

"Hey! I'm not a chauvinist!"

"No, you're just a prick," Eve snapped, twisting in Stefan's hold to glower at him.

I knew she was pissed at the way Dre was evading her, and I could empathize. Though being on the boat had been shit, the only bright spot had been the fact that all of us had finally been Chosen, all our souls were declared, and we’d been hanging around as a Pack.

Well, save for Dre who’d hung around with the rest of us but had only allowed himself to hang out when Eve was there every now and then. Like he was rationing his time with her or something.

I wasn't sure what his game was, not when I'd watched him cling to her like she was a pacifier and he was a toddler when we'd escaped the Academy and had slipped into the cave for shelter before we'd been taken to the yacht.

Between then and now, he'd barely been in her presence unless we were all in the same room.

Dre had his issues, we all knew that, but still. This was weirder than usual, and considering our standard for weird had changed since Eve had made an appearance in our world, that was really saying something.

Dre growled under his breath at her statement, though, but she ignored him to glower back up at Stefan. Slamming her hands against his chest, she groused, "I was more than capable of handling the situation."

"And we'd know that how? Hell, since when did you know how to fight like that?" Reed threw in, folding his arms as he glared at her just as hard as she scowled back.

In truth, it would have been funny as fuck if the situation weren't so disconcerting.

"He's got a point, Eve," I inserted softly, not particularly wanting her ire when I wanted her to understand our concerns. She tensed at my words, but I raised a hand to hold her attention. "We've seen your outbursts,meu amor, but they haven’t happened often enough for us to know your skills in a fight." I shrugged. "You froze us in place without even warning us then dealt with a situation that could have gotten you killed. Do you know what that would have done to us? How that would have wrecked us?"

Her eyes widened at that, and she began to gnaw on her bottom lip. She stopped tugging at Stefan's hold and, instead, sagged in his arms. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

Because I hadn't expected an apology, I blinked at her. I wanted to sputter, 'Erm, what?' but I didn't. Couldn't. Because I knew that would irritate her again. Uncertain now, I murmured, "Please, just don't do it again without warning us."

"I'll try." Eve shrugged. "It wasn't really me.”

“Then who the fuck was it?” Dre growled, earning himself another glower from her.

She cleared her throat, on edge at the question, but even uneasier with the answer if my guess was right. “I don’t know. It’s like there are two Eves sometimes.” Her brow puckered. “That’s the only way I can explain it.”

Though she made no sense, equally,it made complete sense. We’d seen enough of Eve’s Jekyll and Hyde nature to realize that something shady was going on, and truth be told, it scared the fuck out of me.

Sure, she hadeightsouls, but did that mean she was more unstable than sane?

What if, when she hit twenty-one, she’d turn Ghoul? What the fuck would happen to us when our woman, the woman who Chose us, turnedinto the monsters we’d been trained to hunt down and slaughter since we were kids?

I’d felt despair several times in my life: when my parents had dumped me at the local priest’s house, when the bastard had put me through another exorcism with no fear for what it was doing to me, and when I’d slit his throat to escape him and, like Stefan, had found myself out on the streets, except being homeless was a thousand times better than living with a man who thought I was infested with demons. Still, none of that matched the terror I felt at the prospect of losing Eve.

But I knew she was right. There were two sides to her, and what was that if not crazy?

Her words shook us all, and I knew I wasn’t the only one unsettled by her revelations since we were silently processing her words. As we broke out of our thoughts, we hustled into action, forcing our minds to focus on anything other than Eve and whatever was going down with her.

Though she was right about it drawing attention, without being able to call in a cleanup team from Caelum’s UK HQ, our options were limited. Setting fire to the corpses felt wrong, considering the women were innocents and deserved a decent burial, but the damage to their bodies had to be hidden. Most Ghoul attacks were covered up, declared serial killings by sick fucks. Sickhumanfucks.

Not just by us either.

Sure, we dealt with the cover-ups, but so did high-ranking Ghouls.

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