Page 17 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
“My parents put a lot of money and effort into covering up my involvement with it,” Aurela says, and unlike last time, when she was threatening me with her family, there’s a tinge of shame in her voice. “I let the others take the fall for it—let Valerierun off, let Maeve and Phina have to go before Holden Sorel. I should have said something, should have been honest, but I didn’t understand what happened. And I was so, so scared.”
My mind is spinning, making it hard for me to process any of this. Aurela wasbest friendswith Tara, whom I never even saw around school. She was involved with the fires back then.
“Does Lachlan know?” I ask.
Aurela shrugs. “Valerie obviously knows—she was there. So Lach probably knows by now. I just don’t think he would say anything. It’s not like he would want to ruin my reputation.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell Xeran.”
“Maybe he did,” Aurela says, then, to my surprise, she lets out a little laugh. “Or maybe he didn’t. We can’t all be such strict rule followers, Soren.”
“Ha,” I manage, and for a second, it almost feels like it used to between us. Friends, maybe. Something more. Those moments in high school when I felt closer to Aurela than I had with anyone, ever.
“For years,” she says, “there’s been…a pull.”
I raise an eyebrow at her, thinking she’s going to talk about the pull between the two of us, the obvious link from me to her. The thing that has kept me from thinking about any other woman since the night I told her we couldn’t be together. That I didn’t want her.
Since the night she confessed her feelings, and I told her I didn’t feel the same.
“It’s like…” Aurela lets out a breath, her gaze going a little fuzzy, staring out somewhere in the distance. “Somethingwas out in the forest. Begging me to come to it. And I think…I thinkit might have been Tara, after all this time. Maybe the other night, she was finally strong enough to summon me. Or maybe I’m getting weaker, I don’t know. But I woke up with her, the fire already burning, and I have no idea how I got there.”
It’s not much, but it will have to be enough. We’ve been gone for too long, and she’s right—at this point, her family is looking for her. Xeran is looking for me.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” I say, eyes dropping to the wound on her arm. “And in the morning, we’ll go back down to town. You’ll have to talk to Xeran, tell him what you know. I’ll be by your side and do everything I can to make sure he doesn’t follow through on what he said he would do.”
Aurela swallows, shifting in the bed, then nods, sighing and running her hands over her hair. “I should have come clean about everything a long time ago.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Instead, I go to the closet and gather a bedroll, spreading it out on the floor and making myself comfortable.
Tomorrow is going to be hard. We both need all the sleep we can get.
“Good night,” Aurela whispers from her spot on the bed, and it takes everything in me not to get to my knees and climb up onto that mattress with her.
But I don’t, and I won’t. She is engaged to another man.
“Good night, Aur,” I reply.
***
It’s not the crack of thunder that wakes me up, but the little scream and whimper that follows.
I sit up immediately, looking over at Aurela, realizing she’s sitting up in the bed, the blanket pulled up around her chest, balled into her fists.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my voice coming out rough, unformed, still riddled with sleep.
“N-nothing,” she stammers, blinking and looking over at me, her eyes shining like little moons in the light from the storm outside. “Nothing, sorry,” she whispers, seeming to gain some control of herself. “It’s just—”
There’s another deafening boom of thunder, followed by lightning flashing through the window like a crowd of photographers outside, and Aurela’s entire body jerks like she’s been electrocuted.
“Aurela,” I whisper, getting to my knees to look at her over the side of the bed. Her entire body is shaking. “Are you—are you afraid of storms?”
“No,” she insists, but I can see in her eyes that she’s terrified right now.
Even though I know I shouldn’t, I reach out, putting my hand on her knee, trying to offer her a comforting touch. It’s over the blanket, our skin not actually touching, but I still feel the jolt. I feel some of her fear passing over to me, and I take it, dissolving it the best I can.
I grew up on this mountain, hunting this far up in the woods with my grandfather. It storms all the time up here, and I learned a long time ago to accept the boom of the thunder like the gentle rumble of a bus, lulling me to sleep.
“Hey,” I say, squeezing her knee and watching her eyes snap to mine. “It’s going to be okay.”
