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Being in the ballroom among the crowd again left me uneasy. There were whispers and gossip running rampant through the room to the point I was ready to walk out. That was a common thought every single round we’d been in from that first incident. But I held my head high and ignored all the looks the best I could.
The moment Stanley walked into the room he was all smiles. In fact, one of those smiles was thrown directly at me. If I wasn’t worried before, I sure as fuck was now. He should be groveling, apologizing, doing everything he could to salvage his reputation. Yet this felt like a direct threat.
“This is going to be great,” Zath said drily as we watched Stanley walk up to the judges’ table. They spoke for a moment as if he were just trying to raise tensions, but he finally stepped away, sweeping his arm out toward us contestants as he addressed the audience.
“Well, we certainly had a bad day yesterday. We have to readjust the scoring to fit the lack of trials, however we’re going to start today with a bang!” The crowd cheered at his enthusiasm.
“Oh, God,” I breathed out, knowing this was going to be painful.
“Something we’ve never tried before during our competition, but after some deliberation, we think it would really show the character of our contestants.” Again, another look was sent my way.
My fingers were gripping the edge of the bar so hard in front of me that they started to ache as they turned white. I was waiting for the other ball to drop. Competition staff wheeled out a projector and put it in front of the judges’ table, adjusting everything until a blank screen popped up with their logo on it.
“If our secondary team members could step to the front please,” Stanley said, gesturing to the bars. Zathrian gave me a panicked look but didn’t hesitate to join the others as they went to the front of the room.
Someone was using a remote behind the scenes somewhere, the screen coming to life with a random generator of all their names going in a pot. There were five numbers to the side which I assumed represented our teams. They were mixing teams and I had a feeling mine was rigged.
“We’re going to switch up teams today. Whichever number you land on is your temporary team,” he explained before looking back to the screen.
The remote was handed over and he clicked a button, announcing each name as it fell into place. By the time it finished sorting, I watched Stanley tense. When he turned to the crowd, his face was livid. Somehow, I’d gotten El, and neither Zathrian nor Riven were stuck with team one. Overall, we came out on top and he wasnothappy.
It took him several deep breaths to get his face to go from tomato red to its normal shade and the game show host mask to fall back into place.
“Let’s keep in mind that intentionally sabotaging the round is against the rules. If your drink is very clearly made to fail, for example inedible or poorly made, then we will disqualifybothteams involved. The judges know your abilities by now.”
Well, that ups the stakes a bit.
“Each group will be given a theme to follow and you will have thirty minutes to deliberate in a private room, there will be no cameras, no audio, that way it is completely your choice without outside influence. In that time, you will need to come up with an array of drinks; four is the minimum, but with no more than six to fit your theme. Remember, we judge on precision, creativity, and taste.”
Isolation? He was definitely hoping I would have ended up with the wrong person for this. Anything could have happened behind closed doors and I felt queasy just thinking about it. No one could have paid me enough to allow my mates or I to go into a room alone with Lacey.
I had a new support staff member since our original one was likely in jail. The new guy stepped closer to El and I before ordering us to follow. He turned and led us out of the room with no further instruction. At least he was professional and not creepy.
We ended up in a small conference room that was only big enough for a table, two chairs, and a huge white board that took up one wall. There was a stack of markers, pens, and paper waiting on the table as well. They’d given us everything we could need to plan out the challenge.
On the whiteboard the word Halloween. I guess we now had our theme.
At least it was an easy one to work with.
“We will let you know when the time is up, until then get to work,” our support staff told us quickly before he left. El walked over to the door and locked it behind him. He turned and walked back toward me.
Suddenly, I was very aware of the man standing before me. There was a heated look in his eyes that said he had a plan already and I had to squeeze my thighs together as desire slammed into me. Attraction between mates was tenfold and this man had me ready to combust.
“We have thirty minutes. I have two drink ideas for this theme, a vampire’s kiss martini and a witch’s brew cocktail. Any ideas?” I hadn’t expected El to just jump right into ideas and it threw me off for a second, helping me fight the lust fogging my brain.
“Well, my first thought was a blackberry mule. We could call it black magic. We came up with it last Halloween and everyone loved it. In fact it outsold all of our regular drinks by double. We kept it on the menu for a month after that and it stayed a top seller.”
He nodded. “Okay that’s three, we need at least one more, maybe two. We can always throw in like a candy-corn layered shot or something since they seem to like layers here.” El’s easy sarcasm had me chuckling. It was nice to have him around to lighten the mood. That and I just liked being around him. The more time we spent together the more I dreaded going home. I was getting used to being surrounded by strong men who didn’t let the world kick me while I was down. A girl could get used to that.
And the sex. That was definitely a plus to finding your mates. Sure, El and I hadn’t fucked yet, but I had a strong feeling that was about to change.
El quickly wrote down everything we talked about and I just breathed freely. It was nice to be in a private space for a few minutes. Stanley hadn’t even done anything over the top today, but his subtle smiles were getting to me. Just existing in the ballroom lately had been a chore. There were too many bad memories associated with it and honestly, I couldn’t wait for the entire competition to just be over so we could go home, winners or not.
My horse huffed angrily in my head, annoyed at the fact I wanted to just give up and go. She was stubborn enough that she wanted to win and make Stanley watch as our names were called. But I knew damn well that was not going to happen now.
“What is that small smile about?” El questioned me.
“My horse is annoyed because I was just thinking that I just wanted this competition to be over. She doesn’t like that idea. She wants to win to prove to all of them that they can’t break our spirit.”
