The Wrong Roux Brother Slipped Into Me

THE FULL MOON

CHAPTER SEVEN.

THE ELDERS.

MINA’S POINT OF VIEW.

She ran; I’d known she would.

I didn’t need to wait behind to hear her footsteps retreating to know it. I heard it in her thoughts instead, thin and frightened as they slipped down the corridor behind me like water under a door.

Don’t look back, Declan. Do not.

I kept walking, my hand flexed once at my side. All of a sudden, I stopped, the familiar pressing and scent of blood floating in my nostrils before it was followed by a sharp, cold snarl. “You should have marked her, Declan!”

“She’s not ready yet, Vladimir.”

“She is! You’re the one treating her like she’s breakable.” He hissed. “If you let us mark her, she would be safer. She would be ours!”

“Vladimir!” I snapped, glaring at him through our connected mind link. “She’s mine as much as she is yours. If I had let you have your way last night, you’d have marked her. She isn’t ready. I just got her back from Elliot; if she suspects anything, she’ll bolt again.

We can't have that.”

“Especially not after last time?” Soren, my wolf, cut in. “Isn't that what you were about to say, Declan?”

“Good morning to you too, Alpha.” I shot back, sarcasm coating my voice.

“If you were man enough, she would never have left. There would never have been a last time; we could have kept her from leaving.”

“Why? So she could stay in this pack without us, and get bullied? She had to leave; if you ask me, it’s the best thing we could have done for her.”

“She was away! From us! Vladimir grew weaker because he was not so close to her anymore.” The fucker snarled in response, pacing the length of our mind link, his pale skin reddening. “Now, she’s back. She’s right in our grasp, but you want to go to some f****d meeting? You should be in there, sinking your fangs into her so we can make her ours!

You kept her from us throughout the night.”

“How do you think she would have reacted if she knew what we can do…sexually? I already held back as much as I could with you two fools pushing and fighting.”

“She’s our mate too, Declan.” Vladimir cut in. “We want access to her. Give it to us, or watch us take it.”

“I’d like to see you try.” I cut them off before either of them could bite my head off.

My words from earlier haunted me; anytime you want to leave, you may. I will not stop you.

It was a lie, a horrible one. I, Soren, and Vladimir had been separated from her for years now. If she decided to leave, there would be nothing stopping either of these beasts from going after her.

It would just be a matter of time.

I’d said it to her face, and I’d meant it with my mouth. But my wolf hadn’t agreed to anything, neither had Vladimir, the one that was quiet whenever she was near, and very hungry when she wasn’t.

One chance, I’d told her. She didn’t say yes.

She didn’t say no, either.

I’d heard the rest of it, though.

I wanted to say f**k it. I wanted to let him show me everything, and under that, something small, bitter, and honest: I wanted to hurt Elliot.

I’d take it. f**k, I’d take it any way she would give it, as long as she came back. I’d been listening again. Of course I had. It had been less than a day, and I’d broken my promise to myself six times, seven now, and I wasn’t going to pretend it made me anything but what I was. She hadn’t permitted me to live inside her head.

I took it anyway because the alternative was silence, and I had already had nine long years of it.

“Declan.”

My aunt was waiting outside the council chamber, her arms folded, her silver braid over one shoulder. She was the only one in my family I could trust, after my grandmother. Only they looked at me like I was normal, even though I was the very opposite of that word. Right now, her grey eyes trailed my hair, her lips curled with distaste.

“You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep, aunt.” I pressed my lips to her cheek.

“I’m sure.” Her eyes moved over the faint shadow on my collar, the dark bruise mark on my neck Mina had left when I took her for the fifth time. The memory flashed through my mind in a quick blur: both legs hooked to the bedpost, her hands in one of mine, her moans, the sweat on her skin… her scent.

Fuck.

I was hard.

I hadn’t bothered to cover the mark. She said nothing about it. That, more than anything, told me how serious this was. “Before we go in, look at this,” she said through our private mind link. Only the Alpha and anyone he teaches can cut the rest of the pack off from the mind link. She held out a tablet so the video could play.

I’d seen it already, but I took it from her anyway. The courtyard of Roux College, the video played from a student’s shaky phone. Mina was on the screen, on one knee against the stone, one hand against her chest. A low, rolling growl rose out of her, so clear that even through the speaker, my wolf lifted his head.

“It’s been through four packs since dawn, Alpha.” My aunt said. ‘That isn’t the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“The timestamp.” She tapped the corner of the screen. “The first copy didn’t come from any student’s feed. It reached Elder Varric’s private line at midnight. It didn’t get to a single public account until four hours after.” My shoulders tensed; the implication was clear. “Someone filmed it and sent it to him first.”

The corridor seemed to get colder. In my chest, both my beasts stirred, snarling with the urge to protect Mina. “Who?” I growled.

“I don’t know yet.” She laid her hand on my sleeve. “But I am on it, already. The council asked to convene before anyone else could see it; we scrubbed the footage from the internet too. But…Declan, he wants that girl. If she is anything to be wary about, you know he’ll do anything to get her.”

“He can try, Aunt. I won't let him.” I hissed.

Her grey eyes trailed up and down my face, before she nodded. “You lifted her out of the courtyard in front of every witness on campus, Declan. You’ve never done that for anyone before.”

“I’d do it again.”

“I know.” My aunt said, and for the first time, she sounded afraid. “That’s what worries me. Is she your…?”

Before she could finish, a pack guard bowed. “Alpha, Elder Lydia, the elders are waiting.”

The chamber smelled of incense and old men. Seven elders sat across the long table in ceremonial grey, the windows behind them throwing pale light over polished oak wood. I took the chair at the head and put both hands flat on the wood. My wolf paced beneath my ribs, while Vladimir stayed completely still. His eyes bright, blood red.

“Alpha Declan.” Maya, the eldest of the council’s three speakers, slid her fingers along the edge of the table. “I take it you’ve seen the footage.”

“I have.”

“Then you understand our concern. A wolfless girl cannot growl. Either the footage is a fabrication, or the girl is concealing something. The council wishes to examine her.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t a request, Alpha.”

“I never said it was, Elder Maya.” I let a little of the cold from Vladimir into my voice. The table between us shook, along with everything else on it. “She isn’t a specimen.”

“She is evidence, or something at least.” Said a dry voice from another old elder woman sitting three seats down. “This table of elders knows why she needs to be called in for examination. If a wolfless girl can growl, who knows what she really is/

Has she been faking this entire time?”

“Exactly.” One of the men nodded. “The examination worked for you, after all, Alpha.” Krueger glanced at me. “You know how important they are.”

I moved, ready to rip his jugular, but a hand clamped down on mine before I could. My aunt smiled. “Yes, Alpha Declan does know how important and effective these experiments are. However, we think this may be the era for change.

The girl, Mina, is quite young; she may be unable to adjust to the experiments.”

“She is twenty, is she not?” Maya asked. “Alpha’s happened when he was eleven. If he survived it, she can too.”

Survived…? They had no idea how well their experiments worked. Soren hissed underneath me, fangs visible. “I told you we should have marked her! If they know she’s our mate, they wouldn’t dare ask this.”

“Five minutes, Declan,” Vladimir added. “Fix this, or I lose control. You know how I can get when I go hungry.”

“My answer stands, Elders. She isn’t going to be experimented on.”

“Alpha, if I may ask, you carried her from that courtyard yourself. Why?”

I looked at her until she stopped looking back at me, fear coating her features.

Because she's mine. I kept it behind my teeth. Because I’ve known for years, and I was too much of a coward to hold my beasts back and claim her. She stood on that stone, heard my asshole brother say those words, and still, I wasn’t fast enough.

I’d been thirteen when I knew.

A year after the oak tree, since I’d curled up behind my uncle’s house on my twelfth birthday, starving, shaking, and breathing wrong after another week of horrid experiments and examinations.

The cold beast in me had awoken again, and I had no one to tell. Moments before he would have taken over, a girl with a moon cake had found me there.

She’d had exactly one left, and she gave it to me without asking for anything, and it was the first time in my life anybody had.

The following spring, I caught her scent at the pack festival, and everything in me went silent, then roared.

Mate.

She was eleven, I was thirteen. I understood, with a clarity that never left me, that if I stayed, both Soren and Vlad would claim her long before she was ready.

So I left.

I told the pack it was for training. I travelled six territories and learned how to be an alpha, and I came home only twice. Both times I stayed far enough away to keep from doing something I couldn’t take back. I watched her from the edges of different rooms, telling myself that was restraint.

Then Elliot had crawled up beside her at fifteen; by the time I came back, he had taken everything I was too afraid to touch, and turned it into a bet.

The oak table groaned under my hands until I loosened my fingers.

“Alpha,” Maya said carefully. “Your eyes.”

I hadn’t realized they;d changed, yet I didn’t bother fixing it. “My answer remains, no.”

“The council’s authority in matters of unexplained gifts is absolute,” Maya added. ‘If you refuse, we can simply summon her this Friday at the ceremonial hall. With or without your consent.”

“You love the rules so much, do you not?” I chuckled, leaning back in my seat. “I’ll raise you one of them. The luna of the pack may not be subject to anything the alpha does not consent to.”

“Declan.” My aunt warned beside me, but I didn’t glance at her.

‘So, what are you saying?” Varric finally spoke, leaning forward with a bright glint in his eyes. “Care to elaborate?”

I would have answered, but I couldn’t. her thoughts rushed into my head with a stronger force. They were strange, drowned in a sudden rushing sound. Somewhere beyond the border stones and trees, along with three hundred yards of forest, she stepped into a shower.

Too loud. She thought. Everything’s too loud.

I knew that sound. I’d been trying to remember it for years, the first time the world turns its volume and you do not understand how. She’d covered the distance from my room to her hut in under four minutes. I’d felt it, a streak of speed through the bond, impossible for a girl who’d never shifted.

Wolfless girls don’t run like that.

Okay, she whispered in her head. Just breathe, Mina.

All of a sudden, she went quiet, and in the space where her thoughts had been, I felt something I hadn’t felt in twelve years.

My heart.

No longer the slow, barely existent organ it had become since Vladimir, it slammed wildly against my ribs…like I wasn’t part dead. In the hut where she stood with the water running down her back, I felt hers beat for beat.

“Alpha?” Maya said sharply. “You’ve gone pale.”

“You asked me a question earlier, Elder.” I breathed hard, rising slowly. “You asked why I carried her..I have your answer.” I looked right at Varric. “She’s my mate, mine.”

Every window in the room cracked, spiderwebbing the glass so it fractured across every pane at once. The enders flinched as the pitcher toppled. Someone swore underneath their breath; my aunt’s hand closed on my arm. When I looked at her, her face was white.

I knew why.

Vladimir was right at the surface; if anyone knew, he wasn’t dead like their experiments demanded…

“Declan.” She whispered. ‘C-calm down.”

Elder Varric, the oldest of them all, with hands folded and eyes the color of brewed chamomile tea, sat with his fingers beneath his chin. He wasn’t afraid. ‘Well, if it is true, you wouldn’t mind mating and marking her under the full moon within the week, would you?”

"Are you trying to control your alpha, Varric?"

"Never, Alpha Declan. I only think if you do not want the experiment to happen, you can mark and mate her on the full moon next week, or we shift the experiment to next weekend.

The choice is yours."