Page 51 of The Wolf's Bullied Pregnant Mate
I nodded. “I shouldn’t be with you here, Zephyr.”
His smile grew. “I think it’s a little too late for that, isn’t it?”
“Far too late,” I replied. The air was heavy with our confessions and darkest parts of ourselves. I felt the loss of my coven sisters, the ones killed in Zephyr’s rampage, and I understood my hatred of him initially. But underneath that, I understoodwhyhe had done it. I had wanted to kill everything that reminded me of my parents’ killer but couldn’t. Zephyr had given into revenge while I had given into responsibility, taking up the mantle my mother had disowned.
I thought of my grandmother’s words earlier that day:One day, you shall walk in my footsteps. You must know all and everything about our lineage. Including Zephyr’s place within it.
I thought I knew what she meant now. Between Zephyr’s mom’s story, which she had told him about his bloodline and an island, and Gramma’s words, I had an idea of the truth.
Zephyr was from the ancient shifter bloodline that had brought his witch mate with him.
And if that was the case…
We were truly, in a way, reuniting our bloodlines.
My body tensed, and Zephyr noticed.
But instead of asking more questions that would fill the air with more weight, he only turned my face up to kiss me. His hand cupped my face as I shifted closer to him, half straddling him. I let him kiss me—kiss the darkness and the sadness away. Kiss all the worries and trauma and everything I didn’t want to think about yet.
With each swipe of his tongue, Zephyr took it all away.
When we pulled away, I kissed his jaw, mapped my way down to his throat, and ran my finger over his muscled clavicle.
“Zephyr?” I asked.
“Yes, Adalyn?”
“Will you teach me how to defend myself?”
He leaned back, a grin crooking on his face. “Weren’t you the one telling me all this time you can do that?”
“Magically, I can, butphysically,I have no self-defense skills. I want you to teach me.”
Chapter 18 - Zephyr
Another three days passed until it had been a week since the party.
Our civility lasted. We didn’t have any other arguments, and although Adalyn grew quieter at times, retreating into other caverns that we discovered over the next few days, trying to reconnect with herself and her coven, I found that my first instincts towards her weren’t to kill but tohold.
I hadn’t expected to reveal so much of my past to her that night in the stargazing room, but I didn’t regret it. Confessing to killing some of her coven should have given her an excuse to end my life there and then—but she hadn’t. She had listened. And whether she was silently working through those feelings or not, I didn’t know. Maybe that was why she lapsed into a quiet place in her own mind.
But I found that whenever she did, I couldn’t ignore the urge to shift and run through the tunnels, exploring. Not to escape but just to pretend that I might get out. The caves were beautiful, but I was starting to feel claustrophobic.
Yet as soon as I saw Adalyn, each time I spiraled into pacing, restless energy, that riot calmed down in me.
Especially when she came and asked me to start her training.
Although Adalyn was magically powerful, she was right about being physically weak. We started the day after she asked me for help, and I had her run laps around the cavern, making a track for her. After five minutes, she was winded.
“C’mon,” I jeered, on the third day of her laps. “Even Hec can do better than that and he sits on his ass at a computer day in, day out.”
She shot me a seething glare. “He’s also in the military,” she panted as I jogged alongside her. “Don’t you have to pass, like, some physical test?”
“I aced every physical,” I told her with a smirk. “As you can imagine.”
“Asshole,” she muttered without any bite.
“Get those knees up, Adalyn.”
