Page 35 of Siren’s Secret

Chapter 19 – Marc

Marc eyed the grin on Jarred’s face and then looked at the massive hickey at the side of his neck. He didn’t need to ask who had put it there, and he wanted to punch Jarred’s lights out, but Sinister stood in the way.

“Had a good day?” Marc took a step closer to Jarred, who just smirked at him.

“Yeah.”

“So you’re good with—”

“Let me stop you there,” Jarred said evenly. “You and Hellion are hell-bent, pun not intended, on screwing up things with Wayla and that’s your prerogative. Don’t pull me into that crap. I never wanted to break things off with her. She did that after you threw her into a fucking wall, so shut it.”

“We all helped with her little power meltdown,” Marc argued back.

“Which she repaid by saving Zahir’s fucking life,” Jarred argued. “Without her there, he would have been toast.”

“She could have told us—”

“What? That she’s basically an elemental crown princess but doesn’t want to be? At what fucking point should she have divulged that tidbit? When Hellion shared his parentage? Or when we all went off on her for talking to Irishen?”

“Well, no, but I took her to see my folks—”

Jarred growled and, for a moment, it looked like he was going to shift. “You took her there to spite Hatty. You thought her poor background was something to flaunt in front of your stuck-up family.”

That stung, so Marc lashed back. “And when she goes back to Irishen? What then, Jarred? You’ll be left behind licking your big kitty paws.”

The gloating smile that spread over Jarred’s face should have warned Marc, but he was too much in his head to read it correctly.

“Who do you think held her for me when I bit the hell out of her, too?”

With that, Jarred spun on his heels and walked out of the room, leaving a stupefied Marc behind. He considered marching after Jarred but couldn’t make his feet move. Slowly, he slumped down on the couch, the same one he had sat on with Wayla.

“Well, that was interesting,” Sinister hummed and portaled straight out of the living room.

Marc slumped deeper into the couch. How the hell had everything gotten so twisted up? He wanted to claim that he was over Wayla, but he couldn’t quite lie to himself that convincingly. He had absolutely hated seeing her hurt. And he despised himself for losing control and blasting her too hard in training.

He had worried when she had been held by the Council Force and he had spent hours looking over precedents in heir apparent power cases. Some way to argue that she wasn’t responsible, or even if she had used the heir apparent powers, it wasn’t her fault. He hadn’t found anything, but he had looked.

The thing that kept tripping him up was the easy way Wayla interacted with the angel-boy. He was always there and, dammit, he had gotten jealous of the time she spent with him. Not one of his proudest moments.

There was something about the way Wayla leaned on Salis that grated on him. She never asked for help. But Marc wanted her to lean on him. Ask him for help, anything. He needed to be needed. And somehow, she always seemed to need Salis more than him.

Fuck.

Marc rubbed at his temples. Why couldn’t he just shrug and move on? It wasn’t like he had ever thought he would share the woman he would end up with. And Wayla definitely wasn’t looking for a monogamous relationship.

Multiple partners in a bond wasn’t done among mages. Negotiating a binding contract that both parties agreed was equally beneficial and fair was hard enough between two people. No one wanted to add a third or, heaven forbid, fourth person to complicate things.

Of course, it wasn’t mandatory to be bonded to have a relationship or family, but those magic-confirmed ties held a lot more weight than the ones without a binding. He had kind of expected to end up with some nice girl his family arranged for him once he got tired of the single life.

But then things had changed. He, Hellion, and Jarred had just… worked. And Wayla had never made him feel less than them. The jealousy had hit him hard again when the rumors about Salis surfaced. He was hanging all over her, protective and shit, like he had the right. And she had been wearing his fucking shirt.

If he was honest with himself, there was that small part of him that said he wasn’t enough for her. That the angel-boy had something with Wayla that he didn’t. She seemed to trust him. Marc had never seen her look at Salis with wariness or sadness flickering in her eyes. She often had that look in her eyes when she looked at him, Hellion, or Jarred. There and gone quickly, but he had seen it too many times to dismiss.

The timing had been shit. He had meant to talk to her. Ask what was going on, but once again his mouth had run away from him and then Hellion blew up over Irishen and it just went to, well, hell.

The more they had tried to push her, the more she’d pushed back. Like with the shielding, she just didn’t work like they did.

Marc’s mind blanked for a second. That’s what she said. The shielding she had learned was different than the way he taught it. She was operating from a completely different starting point than he was.