OSCAR
When 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 private dining room so we didn’t have to worry about anyone overhearing anything they shouldn’t.
“What about?” Callum’s voice was controlled, but I could hear Ares in there. Ares was fiercely protective of Ava, it comes with the territory of being her fated protector, I guess.
“He’s alive,” Artemis growled.
Oh fuck.
“Elijah is alive. He survived.” She growled again, before pushing Artemis back. “Fuck.”
“How did he survive,” I hissed. “I ripped his stomach out, at the very least, he should have bled out. There’s no way he could have healed on his own.”
Dad’s face was tense. He didn’t like hearing anything Callum or I had to do to get us all through that night, but he understood why we did.
A minute later, Jeremiah and Michael arrived.
“My Queen, my Kings,” he bowed his head, before greeting everyone else too.
“What do you know, Jeremiah?” Ava asked, voice tense.
“One of the members of the Queen’s Guard currently on border duty saw someone that matched his description, my Queen. He’s lost a lot of weight and doesn’t look well, but we believe it was him.”
“I can provide more warriors, my Queen,” Michael added. “You’ve got the twelve of your current Queen’s Guard already, but I can provide a team or two of scouts to search for him.”
“Thank you, Michael,” her voice was almost painfully tense. Of course shit would hit the fan after I jinxed it by saying I’m happy and content. Now, a madman would be threatening my mate again.
“What can we do, Ava?” Jacob asked.
“Can you spare warriors?”
He nodded.
“If you can have a team scout the area around Blood Moon that would be great. We can assume that if he’s alive…” she paused, eyes closed. I knew what she was about to say and did not like it one bit. “He’s going to be trying to find me, so the most likely places are around Blood Moon and Eclipse Mountain.”
“What about Blue Mountain?” Alex asked. “If he doesn’t know we have Matthew locked up, will he not go for him?”
Ava paused, deep in thought. “Perhaps. Eclipse Mountain is easily the largest territory, but between Michael’s warriors and the Queen’s Guard, we can cover that. Jacob, do you think you can cover both Blood Moon and Blue Mountain?”
“Let me talk to Gamma Jamie, I need to catch up with him shortly anyway.”
AVA
I nodded, before dismissing Michael, Jacob, Alex, and the entourage. We had problems to solve and they had people to talk to.
“Jeremiah, can you arrange a team from the Queen’s Guard to scout, please?”
He nodded. “Of course, my Queen. Do you need anything else?”
“Not at the moment, Jeremiah, thank you.”
He bowed, before turning to leave the room.
“Ava… talk to me,” Oscar took my hands as he spoke. “How do you want to play this? Do you want to stay here, or go back to Blood Moon?”
Good question. Not one I necessarily had a good answer to.
“If I was Elijah…” Callum started. “I’d have made a point of working out where you are. I’d be covering the most likely place, and my team would be elsewhere. I’d stay loitering around Eclipse Mountain and I would send my men to scout everywhere else.”
I nodded, sighing. “I agree. But I don’t know if we can sneak out of Eclipse Mountain unnoticed.”
The room was deathly silent.
“We need to try. We can’t shift because we would be too obvious.” Theo paused, downing the rest of his coffee. “We need to get out in some kind of vehicle that isn’t expected. A supply lorry, maybe?”
“That could work,” I whispered, before snorting with laughter. “Michael is going to freak out when we tell him we’re sneaking out of the pack in the back of a supply lorry.”
The four of them laughed, and it was a beautiful sound.
Fortunately, later that night, the five of us, Jeremiah and five more members of my Queen’s Guard snuck out of the pack territory in the back of a planned supply convoy headed for Blood Moon. Jacob, Alex and everyone else had already left, and we just had to wait until we’d laid our false scent trails.
Blood Moon was peaceful when we returned. Unless you knew otherwise, you’d never expect anything strange was going on.
Right up until we reached the packhouse, which was a hubbub of chaotic activity.
“Ava!” Alex shouted as he ran down the stairs towards us. “I’m glad you all made it back okay.”
“What on earth is going on?!” I exclaimed, watching the chaos.
“Matthew escaped.”
For fucks sake!
“How?!” Artemis pushed forward, growling.
“I don’t know, my Queen,” Alex bowed his head as he spoke.
“No scent trail, no clues of any kind?”
He shook his head. “All we have is the back of someone’s head and an incredibly blurry side profile on CCTV, but that’s just on the camera in the cell, we don’t know what happened from there, the rest of the cameras were taken out.”
So, to recap.
In the last twenty four hours, we hosted a ball to announce the five of us are officially ascending the throne. We had lots of hot, explosive sex.
Then, we found out a psychopath that tried to forcibly mark me isn’t actually dead, and another has somehow broken out of his cell. And we have no idea how either of those two things happened.
Spiffing.