CALLUM
I was beyond grateful that I didn’t have to give a speech.
Ava didn’t even expect us to stand behind her, she knew the four of us were really uncomfortable with the whole thing. As soon as Michael finished his speech and Ava stepped forwards to give hers, the faces of the crowd were… varied. A lot of people were looking forward to hearing what she had to say, but there were definitely a few that still weren’t best impressed that she would be taking the throne.
And those faces that already weren’t happy looked like they’d been slapped when she announced some of the laws she was planning to revoke to better protect young girls who were in similar situations to the one she was in, but didn’t have the chance to get out of it.
The younger audience
AVAThat moment I kicked off my heels when we got back to our suite was one of pure elation. I hadn’t realised just how uptight I was until I made it back to our happy place.I made a beeline straight for my dressing room, needing, more than anything, to get out of the dress and crown. They both seemed to have gotten really heavy over the last hour.Noah followed me in, standing behind me, my back against his chest whilst he teased what felt like hundreds of hair pins out of my hair, until finally, it tumbled down my back in much more defined curls than I would normally go for.I let my head fall back against his ch
OSCARWhen I woke up the next morning, the five of us tangled together in a pile of sated limbs, I felt content. Yes, things were a bit crazy, and yes, in five weeks time, someone would be putting a crown on my head… but I was happy. The five of us were happy.Even my dad and Alpha Jacob pulling knowing faces at us over breakfast because of the noise last night couldn’t put a dampener on my mood. I didn’t think anything could.Right up until something did.Ava’s eyes glazed over as someone linked her, her expression moving through various degrees of shock before settling on anger. When she met our eyes again, Artemis was staring back at us.“We were right,” she hissed, voice low. Fortunately we were in our priv
AVAThe next week dragged by in a mess of patrols, problems, and absolutely no solutions for anything at all. No one found anything useful that would point us in remotely the right direction, or even just a direction that wasn’t wrong. We had no idea where Matthew was hiding. No idea where Elijah was hiding. We hadn't even found any of Elijah's rogues in a while, and we had absolutely no idea if Matthew was working on his own or if he had an army behind him.We had nothing.We were trying to make an effort to carry on like normal, at least as much as possible. We had to try because today was Callum and Oscar’s eighteenth birthday.Normally, today would be the day that their wolves would identify their mate for the first time. Of course, we’d known for much longer. Desp
AVAWe all needed to unwind with the party, but of course, we were still caught up in the middle of an absolute shitfest, so the happiness and chill-vibes were never going to last forever.I sat at the desk in my office, staring at the map of the Kingdom I had pinned to my whiteboard. My Kings, Jacob, Alex and Jeremiah were all with me, and we had extra guards on both my office and the packhouse door. I refused to get caught short again.Jeremiah and Alex between them were marking all the locations where there had been known rogue attacks and where there had been encounters with either Matthew or Elijah over the last few months so we could try to work out where either of them would be hiding. Was it going well? No.
AVAThe next morning, I made a point of distracting myself from as many problems as I could. I went for a run with Alex, swam in the lake with my Kings, and made cookies with Paula.I needed to clear my mind of nonsense to give myself a chance to solve some of the pressing questions that were floating around my mind. What better way to solve a problem than to not think about the problem?It was shortly after the cookies went in the oven that I realised something. Something… big.Why wasn’t I pregnant?I had been having a lot of sex, unprotected sex, with four men for months. I had my usual monthly cycles, and everything seemed normal. But sure
CALLUM“Paula. Paula let Matthew out,” I growled. “Ava trusts her.”“I know,” dad replied, his voice pained as he winced under the weight of my aura. Realising that… I forced Ares to tone it back, but he was not calm, and he really wanted me to know that.“We need to talk to Ava’s parents.” Noah sounded just as pissed as I felt.I nodded. “You’re right. They’re close to Paula too.” I linked Jeremiah and then Ava’s parents, bringing them all to Jacob’s office as quickly as possible.
AVAProblems are like buses.For a while, everything is all hunky dory and there are no problems for anyone to worry about (apart from Paula being MIA, which she now had been for a week). But they are like buses. So after a period of calm… three come at once.We were woken up in the middle of the night by an emergency alert across the pack. Rogues.“Ava, you need to get to the safe room,” Jacob insisted. “They’re here for you, you know that.”“I’m not hiding, Jacob,” I replied as I ran around pulling shorts and a t-shirt on, before sprinting out of the room with my Kings behind me, the six members of my Queen’s Guard who were on duty quickly catching up. The other six were out look
AVAMy stress levels were still through the roof the next morning. We had an appointment with the doctor to talk about the chemicals that he’d found in my bloodstream, to see if we could work out what the long term effects might be.My four Kings made a point of truly worshipping my body… but it didn’t help, not really. No amount of explosive orgasms was going to distract me for that long.When we reached the hospital, it was crystal clear from the doctor’s face that it wasn’t good news.Once we’d all sat down and exchanged pleasantries, he ran off a list of chemicals and compounds that were used to make this poison that was in my blood. It was a long list.“We have people running simulations, my Queen, a