Layla knew she looked insane as she paced the lobby. Her thoughts were becoming less coherent the longer she stayed up.At any other time, she would have thought she was having a mental breakdown because all her crazy thoughts were mixed in with the weird voices that got her into trouble when she was younger. But she knew this wasn’t anything related to the red wolf or her usual delusions. She wasn’t herself just because she was tired.Hell, she’d been walking around in a ‘packhouse’ surrounded by werewolves, and she hadn’t had the good sense to feel afraid. She felt like a zombie, and trying to understand anything around her was futile.Trying to understand how she felt and why she felt it was also futile. It was like she was thinking someone else’s thoughts and feeling someone else’s emotions, as insane as that sounded. She would probably need therapy when she went back home because none of that was normal.Faith had fed her, and she’d felt calmer in the girl’s presence, but her a
Everything hurt.Jax opened his heavy eyelids and winced against the brightness in the room. Even his eyeballs hurt. For the first time in his life, he felt disoriented and weak. His head was swimming, and it felt like someone had hit him continuously with a sledgehammer. His limbs felt too heavy to move, and the bite on his side made his whole body feel like he was burning from the inside. Normally he healed faster than other werewolves because of his royal blood, but that witch must have done something to prevent that. He could feel the dark magic in his blood, trying to get a hold of him again. Whatever spell or poison she had used had to have been very strong because he hadn’t sensed it until seconds before he passed out.Even Diedre, the strongest witch he knew, had not sensed it.He pushed that worry away because he was in no shape to make sense of that. The only thing that soothed him was the weight on his chest and the scent of his mate. Since the day he’d met her, he’d tried
Jax could feel Micah’s worry as he lowered him into the large bathtub.‘I’m healing. I’ll be fine,’ he said through the mind link.His head warrior nodded and then stepped back before looking at Layla standing quietly next to the sinks at the other end of his bathroom. Their bathroom. They had been in physical contact for a week, their bond strengthening even in their sleep. She was his; he couldn’t deny that anymore.“I’ll help him out when he’s ready,” Micah told Layla. “Thank you.”Layla sounded uncertain. She watched Micah leave the room and didn’t move even when he closed the door behind him. It was only when he heard the bedroom door being closed that Layla came forward. It was as if she had heard the door being closed, too.Speed. Check. Better eyesight. Check. Sensitive hearing. Double-check.“Can I trust any of them?” she whispered as she put some toiletries on the side and sat on the edge of the tub.There was no point lying to her about that now. She had to learn how to p
Layla washed quickly and let the water out of the tub. How the hell had she got herself into this mess? There was no trust involved in this place. She wasn't safe. And she was a crazy fool to feel even the slightest bit safe with Jackson.Something had changed. She could feel it even though she couldn’t understand it. Her head was a lot clearer, yet she still wasn’t herself. She couldn’t be, not when she felt like this for Jackson. How could she feel so... attached to him? Her feelings had been wild before she had passed out on top of him, and those feelings seemed to have settled even though she was very well-rested. Madness.She looked back at the man who’d fallen asleep when he had found his release. The image tugged at her heartstrings, something it shouldn’t have done. But he still looked so... defenceless. If he couldn’t trust the people around him, then that meant he expected her to look out for him again. And she felt compelled to because of whatever twisted thing was happeni
Layla swallowed a lump in her throat and took another step back.She’d been told not to trust anyone, but she knew Jackson meant this man in particular.Dylan folded his arms across his expansive chest, and the snarl turned into a sneer. Whatever truce he had called while Jackson had been unconscious was well and truly over. “Well, look who’s walking around the place as if she owns it,” Dylan said. “Did you sleep well, princess? Was it too much for you to give your boyfriend a sponge bath?”Taking care of Jackson required much more than that, and he knew it. His anger wasn’t about that. “I would have thought Jackson wouldn’t have let you out alone. Or has Micah already failed at his babysitting duties?”She recognised that tone. Dylan’s ego had been wounded when Jackson had chosen someone else over him. There was nothing more dangerous than a bully walking around like that—they tended to take their frustrations out on other people. “I only came downstairs to eat. I’ll go back now,”
Jackson forced his eyes to open and immediately searched for Layla’s scent.But it wasn’t her scent that filled his nose. The sickly sweet smell was familiar and too close to him. Way too close. He turned his head to the source and found Dylan’s friend lying in bed next to him, looking down at him with that come-hither smile she’d had on her face when they had been introduced. The buttons of her shirt were undone so her breasts were showing. He'd been right about her intentions, after all.He sat up quickly and regretted it instantly. Sleeping had helped him heal more, but he wasn’t back to his full capabilities yet. He was still too weak to fight this woman off.“Get the fuck out of my bedroom,” he snarled.Just the fact that she was lying down on Layla's side made him fume. Only Layla was meant to be there. They’d have to burn these sheets so he’d never had to smell that scent again.And he knew this was another sign that he was already screwed. Though he could feel his wolf somewh
Maybe she really had gone insane.It had been a week since she had embarrassed herself by pulling such a juvenile move. Everyone knew this was Jackson’s room, and just because he was sleeping with her, it didn’t make him hers. Mine? Seriously? How could she even say that word?Yet that was how she had felt at that moment, driven by insane jealousy that had come out of nowhere. Maybe her mental issues had gone to the next level because she still felt like two people in one body. And when she felt like herself, those emotions still lingered. “You haven’t eaten enough.”She looked up from her food to see Jackson watching her across the balcony table. He had done that a lot since she’d climbed all over him and kissed him in front of Amber. Jackson hadn’t stopped at just looking. She caught him smiling a few times, and she was pretty sure he was fully healed, yet he insisted on being bathed and taken care of every day. He seemed to have undergone a personality transplant of his own.“I
Jackson blocked out the insistent chatter in his head from Dylan and sat on the smooth rock on the edge of his territory that looked over the forest.Things had been quiet the whole week. According to Micah, there were no more sightings of rogues or the red wolf, and his scouts had nothing to report. Whatever issues Dylan had to talk about all had to do with the amount of time he’d spent locked away with Layla, and he wasn’t in the mood for that. Especially since he didn't want to listen to how they had to kill her and how bad it would look when others found out he was shacking up with a half-blood.The past two weeks had put things in perspective. He’d realised he just didn’t give a shit about what they thought, but his biggest realisation was that he wanted to spend his dying days with this woman. Child or no child.How the mighty had fallen. He'd turned into the type of person he had loathed before he'd caught Layla's scent.“I said I wanted to stretch my legs, not tire myself by