Page 130 of Her Tortured Beasts

“By the Goddess!” Marduk shouts, running a hand through his hair. “What a miracle!” He goes over to Scythe and slaps him on the back. “Who are we killing, friend?”

Everyone in the room turns to look at me.

“We can talk about it later,” I say. “For now, I want to see my friends.”

I can see Scythe and Marduk making the calculations. Lyle and Savage exchange a look. They know the type of mythical strength it would take to wrench a leg clean off. And they knowwhich beasts would have the audacity to even try something like that.

But I don’t want to think about that right now.

I pull Minnie into the TV room, with orders for Savage and Yeti to fetch our anima gang.

Minnie takes my hand again, “I’m not going to call you amazing, or anything like that,” she says quietly, “because you already know I think you are. But that is fucked, Lia. What happened to you is fucked up and awful, and I’m sorry.”

We turn the TV on for background noise, something meaningless and not too cheery. The others arrive before long, and it’s Sabrina who appears first, standing in the doorway. She looks less like a ghost than before, but still wears her favourite black hoodie. It looks clean this time though, and as she wanders through the door, her hand goes to her mouth. I reach for her and she comes to sit next to me. Stacey comes next and squeezes herself between Sabrina’s leg and my left one, holding onto me like she can keep me together.

Sabrina lays her head on my shoulder. “We’ll kill them all, Lia.”

The words echo through time. I rest my head on hers and sigh. “But not today,” I whisper.

“Today,” Stacey sniffs, “we eat junk food and watch sappy regency romance.”

A regency couple appear on TV, staring with great yearning at each other from across a dining room table.

We sit there until our stomachs start to grumble, at which time Lyle pops his head through the door, and using his headmaster’s voice, tells us to come to the dining table as Marduk, Yeti, Blair and Blade bring up hot food.

Stacey and Sabrina give a girly “Yes, sir!” all the while looking at me with suggestive grins.

Around halfway through my burger and chips, a feeling makes me look out the window for a third time. Scythe runs a gentle knuckle down my cheek. “Aurelia.”

I blink slowly at him and his touch. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

His own eyes scan the sky through the glass. “How can you tell?”

I look out the window and it comes out as a whisper. “I just can.”

“I won’t let him near you. He knows to keep his distance. You do not owe him any forgiveness. Even if he rescued you from that place. Even if he…helped heal you. You owe him nothing.”

Something in my stomach twinges. Scythe had surmised the truth. I suppose he knows Xander even better than I do. “I know that. I just….” My hands tremble and I clasp them together.

Savage, who has his arm around me from the other side, nuzzles my mating mark. I want them close to me. All of them. Every time Savage nuzzles me, I feel home. This time, however, I can tell it’s for his own comfort.

The Boneweaver pack remains fractured. When Xander betrayed me, he betrayed them all. Something in me wants to fix that. To mend it and make it whole except for the fact that…

We will never be whole.

Xander created a permanent fissure. One that can never be healed. Somehow, I have to learn to live with that.

Something inside me twists in pain and I double over, clutching at my chest as my vision blurs. My hands tremble where they clutch my body. This is too much. Too much for one person to handle.

“What is it?” Savage says.

Something makes me look at Scythe. Those sky-blue eyes are brimming with pain. As if he knows exactly what I feel. He feels it too.

“What do I do?” I plead.

“I cannot tell you,” my shark whispers. “But the Xander we once knew is gone.”

Chapter 79

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