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“We wait, speak with her parents. If my father finds out about her; he will drag her home himself,” Tobias told Darius.
“Yeah, mine can't know either. He'll force me to mark her.” Darius confirmed.
“So what do we do? What if the others come for her?” Tobias asked him. They both knew why my mark was faded, I was underage, and I, as an awkward teenager, made that even more painfully obvious to them.
“Follow her. We will find out who her parents are. Speak with them, and we cloak her.”
“Cloak her?” Tobias asked, knowing the amount of power that would take to do.
“Yes, I am not about to turn her world upside down and have Kalen and Lycus come for her, we don't know them or what they are willing to do if they find her. She is a child and I won’t let our families take advantage of our mate, we have to keep her safe,” Darius told him. Tobias nods watching me walk down the street to the bus stop worriedly.
* * *
All night, they camped outside my house up the street where the bus dropped me off, waiting for me to go to school. It was odd because I remember being terribly sick that night. They had slept in their car at the end of my street. My house was the last one next to three vacant blocks and almost completely obscured by trees that ran either side of the dirt driveway. The blocks on either side made the place look like a dead end. Until you came to the dirt driveway, you wouldn't even know a house was there.
Watching through Tobias' eyes, had I noticed them, I would have thought it creepy, yet their intentions were anything but. Their only intention was to make sure my other two mates didn't try to come for me. They stayed to keep me safe, unsure of who Lycus and Kalen were.
Yet that day, for some reason, had stayed with me, etched into my brain no matter how much I tried to forget it. My mother forced me to go to school, I had begged and pleaded to go to a real school, and now I was tossing it in her face by saying I wasn't going. Instead, dad drove me and the shock of Tobias and Darius seeing him drive out of the driveway with me was nearly as strong as finding out I was a teenager.
Darius growled and Tobias gripped his arm as he went to start the car to go after my father.
“He is her father, Darius. You're his daughter's mate. He wouldn't hurt his own daughter's future,” Tobias told him. But what they were most confused about was why I was kept a secret, why I was never registered with the council. They figured that out when they tried to go down the driveway.
Nausea washed over both of them, and they had to back out of the driveway. Darius and Tobias both got out to find they had crossed wards, wards my father put in place to hide our house, hide my mother and me from the world. It took them half the day to break through them to find my mother at home. She immediately called my father, who rushed home.
This also was the same day my house burned to the ground. The day I allegedly lost my parents. Only this time, I am reliving it from Tobias' point of view. It dawned on me that they had been telling the truth. They left and only returned when they felt my distress. Tobias suffered severe burns trying to save me, while Darius exhausted a good chunk of magic breaking the wards to get us out. The same day they first laid eyes on me, they were ready to risk their lives to save mine.
Tobias used his magic to heal me instead of himself. Healed some girl he barely knew because I was theirs and they would do anything to keep me, knowing I was their only future, and they were mine.
Darius then cloaked me and they took me to my grandmother and cloaked her too.
Tobias’ memories weren't as dark and twisted as Lycus’ or Kalen's, yet his struggles were just as brutal when he returned home with Darius. Both of their fathers demanded answers from them both. Tobias even endured watching his brother be tortured with magic to extract answers out of him. It was the only time Tobias forced his brother to suffer, refusing to give me up. He knew his father would force him to rape me to complete the bond, force me into a bond I was too young to truly understand.
He refused to give me up despite knowing he was causing his brother pain. He chose me over the one person he spent his entire life protecting, and Thomas, I found, took it without complaint, trusting his brother had good reason. Darius, too, refused to give up my location.
Yet as the last of Tobias' memories fizzled and died out, I learned Darius was the only reliable constant person in Tobias' and Thomas' life; I understood why Darius felt guilty. Darius witnessed Tobias’ grief as he tried to heal Thomas, begging the fates to take him instead.
That was when Tobias turned to the bottle. I watched time pass to years, he held himself together, and all for Thomas, everything he did, he did for his twin. For his other half and Darius unknowingly took him from him, and so did I. Darius loved him just as much, and I now understood the destruction I had caused by running, no wonder Tobias hated me. I took the only person he truly loved from him.
Tobias and Thomas had turned their backs on their family for me, Tobias had his title removed because he took the others as his mates to keep power, and all to keep me safe, to let me grow up, and me running made it look like it was all for nothing. I basically threw it all back in their faces as I felt the agony of Tobias' loss. His brother clutched in his arms, his mutilated body torn to shreds from the hellhounds.
“We need to go,” Darius whispers to him, trying to make him let go of Thomas.
“I hate her, I fucking hate her,” Tobias sobbed as he stared at the letter drawn on the ground in his own blood. However, peering through Tobias' eyes, it wasn't all I noticed, and my heart sputtered in my chest in the waking world.
How had I never noticed it before? How did I not see it in Darius' memories? So caught up in both of their grief as I watched that scene play out on a loop, first through my fragmented memories, then Darius', and now Tobias, yet it was Tobias' memories I noticed.
Thomas clutches the Moonstone in his hand, its pearl-like shine glinting under the moonlight amongst the blood and carnage. Tobias even picks it up. He glances at it, feeling the energy in it, but unable to place it he tosses it aside, thinking his brother had found it, believing the power within it was mine. Yet I recognized the stone as he dropped it, recognized the energy writhing through it because I had the same stone sitting in our bathroom, a stone that I could feel contained remnants of my mother's magic.
Just as that realization dawns on me, the memories fade, and I feel the sting in my thigh, as what must be the devil's bane runs through me. I can tell by the way it feels that it must be a weak dilution of the devil's bane. It wouldn’t necessarily stop my shredding. However, it would give Darius time. For once, though, I am not mad because I have something to confess now.
I unknowingly trusted a woman they warned me about, trusted my own mother, and I had just brought a ward breaker into their castle, our home. The Moonstone was never intended for me to call on her. No, it was intended to break the wards.
Tobias knew the energy felt off and tossed the stone, yet I brought it home with me. I once again endangered my mates. My eyes open to them arguing over Darius drugging me, yet I’m not angry at him. I am angry at myself.
“You promised,” Tobias hisses at him.
“I made no such promises. It's weak, she is still in the shred, but she needs a break, I will complete it, she needs rest though,” Darius snaps back at him, and I sit up.
