CHAPTER 7: MINE

Aurora’s POV

“I am fine, Lucas.”

I forced a smile onto my face and pushed his hand gently away from my cheek. “Really. I am not crying anymore.”

And the strange thing was, I wasn’t.

My face was still wet from before, but the tears had stopped. Now that the worst of it had passed, all I felt underneath it was a slow, simmering anger, and most of that anger was pointed straight at myself.

I had cried in front of those girls.

I had stood there in the middle of a school hallway and let them push me around until I was begging them for a pill I did not even need anymore. I had let them see me beg, and then I had let them see me run.

No matter what my mother had done to me, no matter how many years I had spent thinking I was something small and broken, the truth was sitting underneath all of it now. My wolf was an alpha female. A Silver Wolf. We did not bow. We did not cower. We did not let lesser wolves back us into corners and reduce us to tears, because that was simply not in our nature.

It did not matter that I had been dormant all my life. The blood was the same, even if the world had not seen it yet.

Which only made it worse that I had been brought to this.

To a girl on a bathroom floor, getting her tears wiped by a boy.

 I hated that Lucas had seen me like this. I didn’t want his pity, especially when I couldn’t even stand up for myself.

But when I glanced at him, something inside me softened.

He hadn’t laughed at me or asked why I’d let Bianca treat me that way. He’d simply stayed beside me.

For some reason, that made it harder to push him away.

I felt something strange underneath my skin. 

I frowned, pressing a hand against my stomach. For a second, it felt as though something deep inside me wanted to burst open. My anger had nowhere to go, so it was looking for an outlet. 

Then it disappeared.

I barely had time to wonder what it was before Lucas spoke.

“Was that an earthquake?”

Lucas’s voice pulled me out of my own head.

I blinked up at him. “What?”

“Just now.” He was looking around the corridor with a small frown between his brows. “Did you feel that? The floor was moving.”

I stepped out of his hands and stood up, steadying myself with one palm against the lockers.

The hallway was completely still.

Was that me? I waited for my wolf to answer, the way she had been answering me all morning, low and restless and ready to fight.

But she did not.

She had gone completely silent inside my chest. Not gone, exactly. Just curled up and quiet, like something that had used the last of itself and needed to sleep. And now that I noticed her absence, I noticed something else too.

I was tired.

Not just tired. Hollowed out. My arms felt heavy. The hand I was using to hold myself up against the locker was beginning to shake, and my knees did not feel like they belonged to me anymore.

“Come on.” Lucas stepped closer, his voice softer now. “Let me take you home.”

I nodded.

I think I nodded. I am not entirely sure I had control of my own head at that point.

Before I could say a single thing, Lucas bent down and slid one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and then I was off the ground entirely, lifted against his chest like I weighed nothing at all.

“Lucas.” My face went hot. “Put me down. People are staring.”

“Let them.”

He started walking, slow and easy, like carrying a girl out of the school in his arms was the most natural thing in the world to him. We passed two boys near the doors who stopped mid-conversation to stare at us, mouths half open. We passed a group of girls who whispered behind their hands, eyes going wide.

I hid my face against the side of his neck. I could not help it.

“Lucas, seriously.” My voice came out small. “You should not. Everyone is going to talk.”

“Shh.”

He winked down at me, that lazy grin of his pulling back into place, and his arms tightened around me.

“Let them,” he said. “Let them know you are mine.”

My cheeks warmed.

Lucas said things like that so casually, as though he had every right to make my heart behave strangely.

The annoying part was that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to smack him or hide my face against his chest.

Probably both.

But the word mine could not leave my head. 

Somewhere deep inside me, something stirred.

It was the same word my own wolf had been whispering for days, only she had been whispering it about someone else, and the strangeness of hearing it now from the wrong mouth made my whole body go still in his arms.

And for reasons I couldn’t explain, I suddenly thought of Logan.

I opened my mouth to tell him not to say things like that. I do not know what I would have said exactly. Maybe I would have laughed it off. Maybe I would have asked him to be careful with words like that, because girls like me did not know what to do with them.

I do not know, because I never got the words out.

Something warm slid down from my nose and dropped onto the front of his shirt.

I blinked.

I blinked again.

Then I lifted my hand slowly to my face, and when I drew my fingers back, they were red.

My arms suddenly felt heavier.

I tried to lift my hand to wipe away the blood, but even that small movement seemed to take more effort than it should have.

What was happening to me?

My heartbeat thundered in my ears. The hallway seemed to stretch, the faces around me blurring until I could barely distinguish one from another.

“Lucas,” I whispered. “Something’s wrong.”

“What happened? He stopped walking. “Aurora, your nose.”

  

The corridor behind him was starting to tilt sideways. The lights overhead were getting too bright. Somewhere very far away I heard someone gasp, and then someone else, and then a voice that sounded like it might have been a teacher, but none of it was reaching me properly. It was all coming through a long tunnel made of cotton.

“Aurora.” Lucas’s voice was different now. Sharper. Frightened. “Aurora, hey. Look at me.”

I tried to.

His face swam in front of me. Two of him. Then three. Then a brother of his behind both of them with eyes that were not grey but gold, watching us from the far end of the corridor, and I could not tell anymore if Logan was actually standing there or if my own mind was making him up to punish me.

“Lucas.” My voice was a whisper now. “I do not feel good”

“Aurora?”

The world tipped sideways.

The last thing I felt was his arms tightening around me, and the last thing I heard was Lucas shouting my name as if he were calling me from the bottom of a deep, deep well.

Then everything went dark.