Page 11 of Savagely Mated

I still have enough sense to take the back routes, rushing into the poorest areas of the city where there is no surveillance because any drone or camera would be immediately stolen and stripped for parts.

There, when I am absolutely certain I am not observed, or followed, I nose around until I find some laundry being hung out to dry off one of the balconies. I feel bad about stealing clothes from a person who almost certainly can’t afford them, but there’s no choice. If I get caught going back into the academy in my wolf form—and I will be caught—there will be hell to pay. Shifting is strictly illegal if it’s not being done to protect the king.It’s so rare that a lot of the citizens of Eclipse don’t believe it’s actually real.

I take my human form, I put the clothes on, and I go as fast as I can back to the academy, trying to push the image of the dying man out of my mind. I am shaking from head to toe, feeling hot and nauseous with disgust at what I just did. Every time I take a breath or blink, he’s there, dying in front of me all over again.

“Darcy! What are you doing out here!”

A tutor from the academy snaps my name. I look up. It’s Mr. Bracken. He teaches first aid. Ironic. He’s looking at me with simple annoyance. We’re still several blocks from the academy, which means I am well and truly caught for the crime of being out of school. That really doesn’t feel like a big deal right now.

“Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.” I don’t bother to make up an excuse. My brain isn’t working well enough to fabricate one. I want to scream and cry, but I can’t because that would be suspicious as fuck, and I don’t want anybody to know I just killed a cardinal’s guard.

The only small bit of comfort is that I won’t be tracked back to the academy. My presence here is a secret. Female shifters all belong up at the castle. So if anything, they’ll be looking in the king’s harem for a secret shifter female fighter. Crazy.

“You were supposed to be in class, and then in detention. You’ve been missing all day. Don’t think we don’t notice. We do.”

God. Detention. I wish I had been in detention, instead of making the memory of what it feels like to have someone’s lifeblood spatter across my face.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have gone. I forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” he says. “You did what you always do—whatever you wanted to do. It’s not good enough.”

I lower my head and I let him lecture me all the way back to the academy.

I feel terribly guilty for what I did, and for getting myself into the situation, and now I even feel bad for running. I just roached out of that fight, scuttled for my life like a cowardly invertebrate. I exposed my face, and my shifter form, and everything else in front of three strange men and a whole unit of cardinal’s guards, assuming any of them survived the fight.

I have done something terrible today. Something that can never be undone. I’ve stained my soul, and given my mind a memory it will never be able to release.

“Do you want me to go to detention?” I ask the question as we get back to the academy.

“You can go to your room and to bed without dinner. I will inform the director that you have been located, and I am sure she will deal with you tomorrow,” Mr. Bracken says. “Go. Now.”

I have never been so pleased to be sent to my room. But when I get there, it doesn’t feel like the same place it was when I left this morning. It’s not the same, because I’m not the same.

The bed seems smaller. The books seem pointless. All that information I thought I knew and understood, it meant nothing when push really came to shove. There’s nothing in any of those pages about what to do when you kill someone and realize, really know to your core that you’re a fucking monster now.

I get into the scratchy, awful bed, I close my eyes, and I will for sleep to take me. I pray that I am exhausted enough, but every time I close my eyes, he’s there again, the dying man. He’s looking at me with a fading gaze, blood oozing from places it shouldn’t. He’s telling me he’ll never go home again, never breathe air again, never taste food, or hug someone, or even know what an awful scratchy bed feels like. He’s telling me I took something from him that wasn’t mine to take. I’m not a soldier. I’m a life thief.

It was self-defense. He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him.

A little part of my brain tries to argue back, but it doesn’t work. They were trying to get us to surrender. I was the one who decided to fight like it was an academy drill. I was the one who plunged my sword inside him.

Eventually, I fall asleep, but that just makes the images even more real. Asleep, or awake, I am tormented late into the night.

CHAPTER 3

Darcy

At one o’clock in the morning, consequences start catching up to me. I’m asleep; well, as close to sleep as I can get. I keep waking up every few minutes from the same nightmare over and over again. The same mental picture, the same sounds.

I’m restless, hot, and guilty. My stomach is twisted into knots, physically hurting. I want to be sick, but there’s nothing in there. I want to go to the toilet, but I can’t bring myself to move. I’ve done something horribly wrong, and the worst part is I’m being trained to do that horrible, wrong thing again and again.

Why didn’t anybody tell us that killing people feels bad? I feel like that should have been covered in just one of our classes. Somewhere in between the military history of Eclipse, the general excellence of the king…

Somewhere in my freaking out, I fall asleep for a few minutes.

Big mistake.

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