“I’ll go get your lesson plans.” I stand up off the bed. “And some dinner. I bet Mom just put a pot on.”
I throw a hand out and pull a portal in the air. It opens on the cafeteria.
My mother is standing by the tables. Her eyes are on me through the open portal like she’s been waiting for me to show my face.
“Mmhm,” she says.
I feel my stomach drop clean out of my body. “I’ll be right back, honey,” I manage at Mara.
I quickly step through it and close the portal so hard it snaps.
“Ma—“
“You got somenerve,” my mother says. “Coming in here right now. You’ve been ignoring me for weeks.”
“Ma—“
She huffs once, and storms past me into the kitchen.
My mother is about to kill me while my mate is in the suite about to figure it out on her own. And somewhere deep under the noise of all of it, I can feel the thing I’ve been pretending wasn’t real for the past year.
The spell I cast on myself the night I trapped her in that cabin. A block on my seed.
Mara’s voice comes back to me in pieces.I don’t want to have a baby on the community lands.She’d cried it at me right before I lost my shit and sealed her in.I want to be a teacher.
The afternoon she came to my classroom after my students cleared out and said it to me before she said anything else.I want to be a teacher.
And then I sat downstairs in that cabin after she went up to bed, and I decided without her that I was going to give her what I thought she’d asked for.
Except I wasn’t giving my mate anything. I was taking. I took her body’s choice from her the same way Eric took mine when he walked out on my mom.
But I want cubs, a houseful. I thought I was giving her peace. I thought I was taking care of her.
Goddamnit.
In the kitchen, my mother slams the oven door.
5
Mara
My tail slams against the dresser, hard enough to rattle the mirror. My lion paces beneath my skin, shoving me back and forth across the floor of our suite. I can’t stop moving. Can’t settle. The sealed door mocks me from across the room.
Something is wrong. Aaron’s face when I asked him why I can’t make babies—that flinch hadn’t been subtle. It had ripped through his whole shoulder, his scent souring with something acrid and sharp.
My lion, usually reaching for him, pressing against the boundaries of my skin to get closer to her mate, has gone eerily still. She’s pulling back. Retreating.
I bite down harder on my thumbnail until I taste copper. A shimmer catches at the edge of my vision, pulling my attention. The air splits open at the far side of the suite—a portal peeling reality apart, blue-gold light crackling around the edges. The cafeteria rises through the middle of it, tables and chairs appearing in our room as if through a window.
Aaron stands in the center of the rift with a tray in each hand, his mother at his side. He leans down to press his mouth to her cheek.
Angie’s eyes lift to mine over his shoulder, and one corner of her mouth tips up into that smug grin I’ve come to know too well. She lifts her hand in a small wave, her fingers wiggling.
My stomach twists. In the full year I’ve been mated to her son, Angie has never once looked at me with anything but thinly veiled contempt. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it. Aaron has promised he would handle it more times than I can count, but nothing ever changes.
He steps through the portal and snaps his fingers behind him. The portal closes with a soft pop, the cafeteria vanishing.
“Okay.” I fold my arms across my chest, my claws pricking against my biceps. “What’s going on, Aaron?”
