Page 17 of The Alpha's Betrayed Mate

And then they were clinging to each other and howling with primal bliss as they finally plunged over the edge, so close it was impossible to tell who, in the end, had tipped over first.

Chapter 10 - Venna

It was dark when Venna walked over to the community center to collect Rylan, freshly showered and changed into yet another borrowed set of clothes. That wasn’t why her whole body was tingling, though. Rylan looked relieved when he looked up to see that it was Venna who’d come to get him, not Belmont, and it was only then that she jolted out of the dreamy, trance-like state she’d been moving in ever since she’d come back to consciousness wrapped in Belmont’s sweaty embrace. He’d looked a lot less icy and remote with his hair a tangled mess and his body covered in scratches from her nails and bruises from her kisses… but as far as Rylan remembered, war had just broken out at home. Venna hastened to ease his worries, telling him that she and Belmont had talked about it. That wasn’t strictly a lie, was it? She was just leaving out the part where they’d … stopped talking.

When they came in, Belmont was sitting at the kitchen table, immaculate as ever in a pristine white shirt that she would have thought was the exact same one he’d been wearing earlier, if she hadn’t torn it asunder with her own two hands. In perhaps the longest conversation the three of them had had in the weeks since she’d been appointed Rylan’s nanny, Belmont offered the boy a stiff apology for having lost his temper about the knives. Venna couldn’t help herself—she pushed him, just a little.

“Why did it make you so angry, do you think?”

For a moment, she wondered if Belmont was going to snap again. Even Rylan shot her a disbelieving look, clearly stunned by how willing she was to poke the bear. But Belmont exhaled in that slow, even way that always made her want to slap him, and answered as evenly as ever.

“I was worried about you, Rylan,” he said. Was that a hint of warmth in his voice? It was better than nothing. “I’ve been worried about the wolves of Kurivon for weeks, and I let that pressure get the best of me. I won’t let it happen again.”

Pressure, Venna thought faintly, remembering the way he’d flattened her against the back door. But she shook that thought off, frowning. “Worried about all of Kurivon? Why?”

“The lorekeepers have been reporting unusual levels of demonic activity,” he said, his expression grave. “Considerably higher than anyone expected, even with the anticipated spike in interest with the new pack moving in. An attack is likely in the next few weeks. We’ve increased patrols, which is partly why you haven’t seen much of me lately.” He directed that to Rylan, who nodded. He was only eight, Venna reasoned—he hadn’t mastered the art of seeing through his dad’s clever little half-truths yet. Partly why. The other part, of course, being that he’d been avoiding her. And now he was even avoiding her while he apologized for avoiding her. .

Well, two could play at that game. They talked a little more about the demonic activity on the island and its repercussions for Rylan’s safety, and when the boy started yawning, Venna took him off to bed without a backwards glance. Once Rylan was tucked in and sleeping soundly, she lingered in the hallway for a moment, annoyed by how much she wanted to go back out there and see if Belmont had waited for her… but instead, she took herself into her own room and shut the door firmly behind her. A few minutes later, she heard Belmont’s bedroom door click shut, too.

Were they really just going to go back to the way things had been, as if the two of them hadn’t torn each other’s clothes off and nearly knocked a hole through Belmont’s wall? If it hadn’t been for the torn clothing she’d quickly collected from where it had been scattered around the house, Venna would have thought she’d dreamed it. Belmont was good, she thought the next morning, watching through narrowed eyes as he sailed like a glacier through the front door and off down the path to perform his Alpha duties. Good enough to fool his whole pack.

But Venna wasn’t part of the pack. And it didn’t take long to find a crack in his armor. Three days later, he came home late, and a whispered argument in the kitchen gave way to a passion that only seemed to have grown more intense since they’d first given into it. She woke up in his bed the next morning, her hair almost as tangled as it had been after eight years in the forest. She could tell he was feigning sleep, and she slipped out of the bed and padded naked to the door, leaving without looking back. She didn’t want to risk him seeing the gleeful smirk on her face.

And so the game continued—a game of patience, a game of wits, a game of maintaining an icy, unruffled demeanor for as long as they possibly could before the tension snapped and they tore into each other like wild creatures. Usually in the evening, usually after Rylan was in bed—they’d gotten adept at silencing the sounds they made, using pillows or each other’s limbs to muffle their cries. Though she didn’t see him do it, Belmont had found a way of securing his bed so it didn’t slam into the wall with the force of their bodies. Every time, they lay exhausted in a silence that felt sacred… and every time, she slipped away without a word or a backwards glance, telling herself it was the last time, already brainstorming the next excuse to pick a fight with him while Rylan was in bed or at the community center with the rest of the pack.

She was stunned when she realized she’d fallen into a routine, almost without her approval. The realization came one afternoon with Syrra, sitting in the sun on the back steps and keeping an eye on Rylan and the twins as they sipped tea and talked. With pressure mounting for the lorekeepers, Syrra had asked a few weeks ago if Venna would mind looking after the twins for an afternoon, and though her knee jerk reaction had been to say no, she knew she owed Syrra more than a few favors. In the end, she’d been surprised by how comfortable she was having them around, and it hadn’t felt strange to offer to take them more regularly. It helped that they got on so well with Rylan, of course. He’d initially been shy, an only child with no siblings, but he’d quickly warmed to the twins, especially once it became clear they were happy to play demon-hunter games with him. Now, Syrra came by regularly with the little ones, and whenever she could she’d stay a little while to chat.

“Wait,” she said, frowning a little. Syrra had been telling her about her plans to build a greenhouse that might allow for a more stable supply of herbs, easing the frustration of running out of essential supplies that grew seasonally. “You said it only grows in summer? It’s summer now.”

“It’s been fall for two weeks,” the lorekeeper said, amused. “I know, I know. The tropical seasons are a little subtler than they are back on Halforst. And don’t expect it to get cold—not like it did back home.”

But Venna wasn’t worried about the climate. “That would mean we’ve been here for—what, two months? Two and a half?”

“It’s around that.” Syrra raised an eyebrow. “Did you really lose track of time? I would’ve thought you’d be counting the days like a prison sentence.”

“Prison sentences have end dates,” Venna said darkly, winning a chuckle from Syrra. The lorekeeper had been a great confidant when it came to venting her frustrations with Belmont, but she’d avoided mentioning the shift in the nature of their relationship. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Syrra, but she knew that if the pack found out about what was happening between her and Belmont, the consequences for both of them would be unthinkable. So she’s simply avoided mentioning it. It wasn’t like she was any less frustrated with him than she had been before. If anything, he’d found a whole new way to drive her completely crazy. But she was still preoccupied with the matter of how long she’d been here, and it wasn’t long before Syrra gave up trying to tell her about the greenhouse plans.

“Sorry,” Venna said, shaking her head. “I just… really didn’t think it had been so long.”

“What’s the worry?” Syrra’s tone only got that light when she was working on a question. It was a subtle tell, but Venna had had time to study it. “Are you late for something?”

Dissemble, her fight-or-fight instinct told her. Lie. End this conversation right now, before it gets away from you. But Syrra was just sitting there, sipping her tea as she watched the kids romp across the yard in the afternoon sun, and Venna felt a long-dormant impulse stir, an impulse she’d lost touch with in eight years of solitude, of dealing with her own problems.

“Syrra,” she said, after making sure Rylan was out of earshot and thoroughly distracted with the antics of the twins. “How early, exactly, can a lorekeeper tell if someone’s pregnant?”

“Ah,” her friend said, looking pointedly out across the backyard.

“Hypothetically.”

“A thought experiment.”

“Exactly.”

“And one with no follow-up questions, I imagine.” Syrra cleared her throat. “In theory of course, many lorekeepers have some knack for the skill of aura reading. A dear friend of mine was one of the best, but I’m middling at it, for example. The aura of someone who’s expecting has a noticeable quality. A kind of doubling.”

“Interesting.” She felt like she was in freefall, like she’d stepped willingly off a cliff she’d only just noticed was there before giving due thought to the consequences of landing. Too late to go back now. “And are auras something all lorekeepers can see all the time?”

“Not all lorekeepers have the talent, and even those who do sometimes don’t bother developing it. Raske, for example, reproached me a few weeks ago for relying on a sick child’s aura to tell me whether they had a fever or not. Some consider it an unreliable source of information.”

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