Page 122 of Her Feral Beasts

Scythe puts his arm around me. “I’ll never let anyone hurt you, pup.”

My big brother always means what he says. I turn to look at him and it’s then that I see the mark on the side of his neck for the first time. A mark made by a divine hand, made of light that does not come from this world.

A skull with five beams of light curling from it.

We both gasp, reaching for one another.

We are not only bound in blood, but in soul, too. Brothers of the same mating group.

“When we find our regina,” I breathe in wonder, touching his neck, “we’ll take over the world.”

Out there is a girl just like us, made for us, who will love us. Will she be a shark or a wolf? I hope a wolf.

But Scythe doesn’t look so sure, and I know it because that muscle in his square jaw pulses like a heartbeat.

“First,” he says seriously, “we’re going to kill everyone who ever hurt us.”

Chapter53

Aurelia

Ijerk awake with a start, only resting my head when I remember I’m in the car with Lyle and not in front of a burning house with Savage and Scythe. I’ve come to accept that these are not just dreams I’m having. That every time I’ve been physically intimate with Savage, I see his memories in my sleep.

And this last one sends my heart racing.

Henry clucks softly against my ear and I lean into his tiny warmth for comfort.

The rest of the car ride back to Animus Academy is just as quiet as the ride to court, only there’s a dark undercurrent that creeps all over my body—as if I’m already locked away. As if my father’s jaws are already fixed around my neck. The tether that I have around myself groans under the strain of my emotion.

I’d thought I was loopy back when I was running and starving. But that seems like child’s play compared to this. Compared to certain doom. I clasp my hands to stop them from tembling.

Lyle’s hands are clenched on the wheel, making his knuckles bone white. I wonder if he’s angry or embarrassed about the trial. Maybe he thinks I wasted his time.

He likely believes what he’s heard today, and it affirms what he thought he knew about me all along.

I want to cry. I want to tear my hair out. I want to scream at the top of my lungs.

My father will win this case. He structured the entire thing so carefully. Brought out my dirty old laundry and aired it for all to see in the worst way. I was sixteen when I had sex with Theo Krait, a quiet boy who was kind and gentle with me. We met at Aunt Charlotte’s store and he bought a packet of gummy bears and cigarettes and I was enamoured by the tattoo on his neck.

My father marks the most venomous snakes of Serpent Court, and the Common Krait is the most venomous snake in the world. But they are also the least aggressive. Perhaps that’s what lured me towards him. Both the inherent danger and the lack of it. He was a contradiction, just like me.

I made him read smutty scenes in my favourite paranormal romances. We ate badly made spaghetti and had sex like rabbits for weeks. He was clumsy, but a fast learner, and we had orgasms aplenty together.

It makes my stomach turn now, to think of how he was executed in front of our entire court. Father used his own venom, as was tradition. He made me watch, as was tradition.

Just for a moment, it occurs to me that I deserve my fate. I knew my father and what the consequences of getting found out were. But the attention of one boy had been impossible for me to toss away. For those six weeks, I wasn’t alone in the world.

* * *

When we get to the academy, it surprises me the relief I feel at seeing those massive, curling black and gold gates. The two dragons rearing up on either side, the animus crest in the centre. This has been home for a little over a month, and I will remember these weeks for the rest of my life.

We pull to a stop in the driveway and it feels like an age before Lyle walks to my door and lets me out. I don’t look at him or the guards who loiter around us before we walk back to the anima dorm. There is the fate my father would have for me and the fate I would give myself, and those twin threads weave about me like snakes, swaying to the sound of my heartbeat.

Dun-dun.

Dun-dun.

Dun-dun.

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