Page 71 of Her Rabid Beasts

Savage sighs like this is a great inconvenience, but his body goes lax and his shoulders droop as he allows Lyle to steer him out. Just when they go out of view, Savage’s tattooed hand grips the doorway and his head appears. He blows me a kiss and says quickly, “I love you, Aurelia,” before Lyle snatches him away once again.

Sabrina snorts as Minnie bats a chiding hand at her.

My own hand flies to my stomach, not because of the nasty, burning wounds etched there, but because my insides are suddenly full with a dainty fluttery feeling.

Minnie takes my hand and leans her pink curls on my shoulder. “I’m so happy for you, Lia.”

And by the Goddess, I think I’m happy too.

Chapter 29

Lyle

“Here’s your list of appointments tomorrow,” Georgia says, sliding the neatly typed A4 sheet of paper across my desk.

“Thank you,” I say, not looking at her but at my computer screen, where I’ve pulled up six security camera feeds from around the school. Five are only there as a pretence, because I’m only interested in one.

Aurelia is sitting between Beak and Eugene in an avian specific class. They’re watching Theresa demonstrate how to check for wing health with one of the bearded vultures sitting patiently on her desk.

Beak leans down from his much taller height to whisper something in Aurelia’s ear. She chuckles under her breath.

I stare at Beak and the minute distance between the two of them. Beak is careful not to get his scent on Aurelia’s skin, but there are barely centimetres between them. The eagle reaches up to stretch his arms, flexing the biceps bulging out of the white T-shirt he’s wearing. The cassowary on the other side of Eugene glances at Aurelia and runs a tattooed hand through his shoulder-length blue-tipped brown hair.

A red coil of anger twists through my chest as I stare at their posturing.

Aurelia, who was absently twirling her pen, loses her grip on the biro and it falls, skittering under her table. Suddenly, all the males in her vicinity dive under the table, beside themselves as they try to be the first to retrieve the pen… and no doubt get a look up her dress while they’re at it.

Aurelia hastily pushes her chair back and shakes her head as the winning hawk proudly presents her the biro, still on his knees before her.

Fucking idiots.

“Pardon?”

With alarm, I come back into my office and realise that I’ve spoken out loud.

I glance at Georgia and hastily point to another camera feed showing the front of the academy grounds and the colony of white birds on the Hunting Games oval. “The cockatoos are back.”

She clears her throat and laughs.

Sitting back in my chair and trying to relax the muscles that were coiled in readiness, I chide myself at my own behaviour. I’ve become addicted to watching Aurelia through the security cameras. I watch her in class; I watch her in the dining hall, and I even find myself watching her walk through campus on the way to her dorms at the end of the day. Even in meetings, my attention wanders and I resort to getting out my phone and bringing up the camera feed. I have her timetable memorised so I always find her quickly.

And if for some reason she’s not where she’s supposed to be, I find myself urgently flicking through each camera, my heart pounding until I lay my eyes on her again. With the closeness with which I stalk her, I should have been able to find out how she’d gotten into my apartment and left her…littlegift.

She played a dangerous game, putting her scent all over my bed like that. I’d been caught out, and I didn’t know how to feel about it. But if she’d thought it would make me embarrassed, she was wrong. It only made me more fixated on her.

Heat gathers in my veins and I crack my neck to try and relieve some of the tension as I stare at Beak’s arm, where it rests on the table, far too close to Aurelia for my liking.

I tear my eyes off them before I punch a hole in my screen.

“I’m going to stay around this weekend,” Georgia says, loitering by the side of my desk. “Might visit my parents next week.”

“Great,” I say faintly. Because we’re a couple of hours out from the city, most of the staff and guards choose to live in accommodations in the small township twenty minutes away during the school week. Most often go home on the weekends.

“What are you getting up to tomorrow night?” she probes.

“Working,” I reply, scrolling through my emails to see five new ones in the last ten minutes. One of them is yet another meeting request from Serpent Court. It’s not until my phone case creaks, threatening to crack, that I consciously loosen my grip.

Georgia laughs and the cadence of it streaks down my spine in all the wrong ways. “You work so hard, Lyle. You should come to the movies with me. There’s that new one?—”

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