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“To be fair, the two of them should be back by now,” he muttered, though his eyes were on me. “Guess that means what Nyx gave you is working nicely.”
“What did Nyx give me?” I inquired more out of curiosity than worry about the effects it may have on me.
Good or bad.
“Some sort of balancer supplement,” he announced and looked as if he wasn’t even paying attention when this Nyx woman explained the details about this supplement. “She reassured me it would not only increase your energy levels after summoning a goddess but would ensure your body wouldn’t go partially numb with Juniper’s absence.”
“Fascinating.” I was genuinely intrigued. “Why do I feel as though there was a lot more detail about what this Nyx woman was going to do but you weren’t listening at all?”
“I was listening.”
“What were my vitals before she gave me the supplement?”
“What?’
“Vitals,” I repeated. “The numbers on the machine that medical people always check before giving us shifters anything.”
I wasn’t sure if he was angry that I was calling him out or angry at the reality that he clearly slipped in his observation skills whenever he thought I was on the verge of death.
“You sure talk a lot these days,” he grumbled, and I actually laughed.
“I’ve talked a shit ton since you’ve met me, but I will give some credit to the rise in comfortability around you matched with our physical, emotional, spiritual, soul-binding mate bond, which makes me want to talk your head off. But you’re avoiding the question, meaning you weren’t paying attention, which isn’t something you normally do, which means you weren’t in fact listening.”
Poor Alpha wasn’t going to win this argument, which left him staring at me once more.
“I’ll accept that as a sign of defeat,” I concluded. “In payment of batteries and…wait! With everything going on…”
He noticed my shift in mode as I frowned at the realization.
“We’re not going back to North Syndicate, are we?”
His silence only confirmed the inevitable, which made me feel kind of dumb for not realizing it sooner. I’d been so into the reality of remembering Zed was my pack and father’s murder as well as excited about entering the shadow realm, being proposed to, and leaving the syndicate to get tousled in that mess of confrontation, that it finally dawned on me.
“Why does that make me sad?” I questioned to myself.
Asher sighed and got up to slide next to me on the medical bed like it was a common occurrence.Kissing my forehead, he held me tightly against him.“Sometimes in life, we have to say goodbye to things we’ve worked super hard to build,” he admitted, and I wondered if he was trying to encourage himself.
“But…” I wanted to cheer him up or even offer similar words of growth, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around Alpha Asher no longer being the Alpha of North Syndicate. “You worked so hard to build its foundation and encourage its growth. I don’t know. It just…just seems unfair. Like we’re being forced to leave what we deemed home. Our salvation. I know I wasn’t present in North Syndicate for long, but thanks to you, Axel, Azu, and everyone else who assisted my growth, I was able to work on myself and enjoy the thrill of it all.”
Closing my eyes, I inhaled his myrrh aroma and sighed.
“Sorry if I worried you again,” I finally apologized. “I didn’t mean to go all Celestial and go against your orders earlier. It just…kind of happened, and I couldn’t control anything.”
“I’m not mad at you for that,” he admitted and I felt like he meant it. “It’s just hard for me to simply trust that Mother Moon will protect you when on the battlefield. I knew you had no intention of being dragged into your Celestial duties, and I have to learn to understand that your calling maybe even bigger than what I can control. There’s nothing wrong with that, Selene. Nothing wrong with you responding to your mission that Mother Moon is calling your soul to commit to.”
He sighed again.
“I just dislike losing control and being the protected one,” he confessed. “I’m getting an understanding of how you sometimes feel at times when you’re forced to let us Alphas handle situations that have gotten way out of hand. It’s frustrating…and frightening, and I guess it just takes me back to losing my parents and feeling utterly helpless to fix it.”
“Did your pack not have a Celestial?” I inquired quietly. I wasn’t sure if we could speak on it here, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to ask.
“We did have one, but she’d been kidnapped prior to everything that went down. Maybe it was on purpose…which I wouldn’t have understood as a boy. It had to be to ensure they wouldn’t be able to rise after falling into the hands of death.”
“Meaning…” I was scared to say it. “I can bring them back?”
“You most certainly can, Sweet Shadowling.”
We both glanced over to the door where the voice came from, and my eyes widened to take in the powerful woman standing at the doorway.
