by Cara E Holt
Merrick squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll let them have some time and then we’ll talk to them.”
FORGIVE AND FORGET
Two hours later I’m sitting fidgeting in my seat beside Cort when they bring them into the room. The cuffs have been removed, and they all looked to have showered and they have changed into standard HDS clothing of cargos and a long-sleeved top.
“Please take a seat,” Merrick tells them, gesturing to the three empty seats around the table. I am sitting beside Merrick with Cort on my other side. Cort has said little since we captured them but I could tell he did not trust them and he was not one bit happy about them being here.
“I have to ask, how you found our compound?” Merrick asks the three of them.
“It wasn’t easy,” Drayce tells him. The sound of his voice makes my heart speed up in response. “You’re difficult to find.”
Merrick half smiles. “That’s the idea.”
“We asked around in the underground fighting and trading rings and eventually we found someone with information. He was a hybrid. We took a blood oath with him that we would not share the HDS location with anyone else.”
“And what were your intentions when you found us?”
Drayce looks from Merrick to me. “My aim was to find my fiancé and make sure she was safe.”
“I’m not leaving here,” I announce. “This is my home now. I belong here.”
Drayce nods. “Where you go, I go raven.”
Cort sniggers at my side and Drayce observes him coldly. Cort meets his gaze and the two of them have some kind of mental standoff. Cort purposefully drapes his arm over the back of my chair and I feel Drayce’s eyes fixated on this gesture.
“We believe that all hybrids should be treated as equals,” Meara says, looking at Rafe and smiling. “We are here to join your cause if you will have us.”
“This is bullshit,” Cort exclaims. “We can’t trust them,” he tells Merrick. “For all we know they are working for the Wiccan council.”
“You can trust them,” I reply. I feel Cort toying with a piece of my hair and Drayce’s eyes glare into his.
Merrick contemplates the situation. “You may stay for now and we will take it day by day.” Merrick turns to me. “I need to speak with you later today about your father, but for now take your friends down to the mess hall and get them some food.”
Merrick leaves the room, taking the guards with him, but Cort stays sitting beside me. He leans into my space and speaks into my ear. “Remember trouble that they can never understand what we face.” He stands and as he passes Drayce, he smirks and shakes his head.
Rafe is on his feet in an instant and sweeps Meara up off her feet. “Gods, I have missed you,” he tells her as he pulls her in for a passionate kiss.
Thorin rolls his eyes. “Can you two not kiss like this in front of me, I find it disturbing.”
Meara laughs and puts a hand in front of their faces as they carry on showering each other with kisses.
I stand to my feet and brush down my pants, feeling awkward under Drayce’s stares. He stands and walks over to me.
“Will you please look at me?” He begs me. I lift my gaze to meet his. Ice-blue eyes study me and he reaches out and cups my face with his hands. “I can’t believe you’re here in front of me.”
“You got engaged to Sereia,” I state, my tone cold.
He smiles. “You jealous raven?” He sighs when my face remains serious. “It was just a ruse to keep my family believing that I had moved on from you, that I wasn’t some hybrid sympathiser. My family were talking of having my memory spelled to forget you raven, and I couldn’t allow that. I have never stopped looking for you.”
“It’s true,” Thorin tells me, he stands to his feet and props himself against the table. “He barely slept while he tried to work out the location for the HDS.”
I return my attention to Drayce, who still holds my face in his hands. “Do you love me?” I ask him. I feel so weak asking him this, but I needed to know.
He smiles. “I love you so much that being apart killed me. I missed your smile, your bad temper and your smart mouth.” He leans in tentatively and his lips are almost touching mine. “There are not enough words to describe how much I missed you.”
My heart soars in my chest at his words. There had been a tiny part of me that thought that maybe he had moved on, that his loyalty to his family meant more than what I did to him. “You know what this means? That you walk away from everything you ever known. Your family, your chance of being a guard, all of it?”
Drayce shakes his head and grins. “None of that matters if you are not by my side, Elara Latimer.” He presses his lips against mine and for a second I hesitate, but then I remember all the times that this man has stood beside me and fought for me and I kiss him back. “I love you.” He whispers against my lips.
“I love you back,” I reply and my heart has never felt so whole. We stand there for a few seconds just smiling at each other like two love-struck teenagers. “I can’t believe you are here.”
“I hate to break up this movie worthy reunion, but I am starving hungry,” Thorin tells me, rubbing his tummy. “Can we please go eat?”
I clasp Drayce’s hand tightly in mine and follow Rafe, Meara and Thorin out of the room. Rafe gives them all a brief tour as we pass places on our way down to the mess hall. They all take it in, looking amazed at how big the place is, much like I did on my first day here.
As we go to enter the mess room, Drayce tugs on my hand and pulls me back out, caging me in against the wall in the corridor. “I’m so not interested in food right now. I just want some time with you.” He leans in and kisses me, making me forget where I am and who I am.
“Later, I promise. Come on.” Pulling myself away from his lips, I tug him into the mess hall and we grab food and find the others. Rafe is feeding Meara fries and they are both staring at each other with big smiles on their faces, whilst Thorin attacks the burger on his plate like he hasn’t eaten for days.
“Someone’s hungry,” I say with a grin as I sit down beside Meara, watching Thorin eat like there’s no tomorrow.
“This place is something else,” Meara comments looking around her at the vast mess hall.
“It is,” I nod. “It’s an old human army base. It is a haven for hybrids. Here we can truly be ourselves and love who we want, pure or hybrid, everyone here is treated the same.”
I catch them all staring at me. “What?”
“You look different,” Meara says. “Happier.”
I smile and shrug. “I feel at home here, accepted.”
Drayce leans in and kisses me. “I’m glad you found your place raven.”
I stare into his eyes for a few seconds, still not quite believing he is here. “I can’t believe you guys are here.”
“You better believe it,” Thorin murmurs around chewing his burger. “It took us a lot to get here.”
“But your families?”
“Our families don’t have the same beliefs and values as us. Until they do then we have to separate ourselves from them. It is wrong what the supe councils are doing. Painting hybrids as the ones doing all the wrongs in our world.” Meara speaks with such passion and Rafe squeezes her hand looking like a proud boyfriend.
I look at the three of them and grin, my eyes glossing over. “I’m so glad you’re here guys.”
“Don’t cry on us Latimer,” Thorin warns wagging his finger and I grab it and laugh when he tugs it out of my grip.
“Eat up and we’ll take you on a tour,” I tell them, excited to show them around the place.
“What’s that guy’s problem?” Thorin asks. I follow his gaze to where Cort is sitting over at the other side of the room, glaring at my friends and Drayce.
“That’s Cort.” I sigh. “He has trust issues.”
Rafe scoffs. “He hates pures. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t believe we should mix with any pures.”
Drayce frowns. “Then
maybe he doesn’t belong here either. Any talk of separation on either side needs to be stopped.”
I nod in agreement. “Cort has been through a lot. He has his reasons not to trust pures easily.”
Drayce studies me intently.
“What?”
“He a friend of yours?”
My eyes look back over at Cort, and his eyes meet mine. I can feel the anger coming off him. “Yeah, Cort has been training me and helping me adjust to life here.”
“Then he can’t be all bad then,” Meara comments as she puts down her empty cup and places her hands on the table. “Now, I’m ready for our tour.”
Rafe and I spend the next half an hour showing them around the compound. I can’t help but smile at their awestruck faces and remember how I’d felt when I first saw this place. The last place we visit is the hospital wing. The place is busy today. All the beds in the bays are full apart from one.
“It’s you,” a girl calls out as we pass by her bed. I look over and recognise the girl from the fae nightclub who we rescued the other week.
“Hey. How are you?” I ask her, coming to a stop at the end of her bed.
“I’m good, thanks to you and your team.” She raises her arm that attached to a drip. “I’m still low on blood so they are feeding me up.” She shakes her head. “I will never forget what you did for me, ever.”
I bat away her comment. “It was nothing. We were just doing our job.”
She shakes her head and smiles. “You saved my life and that of my sisters.”
“Come and see me when you’re discharged.”
“I will,” she replies looking thrilled at the prospect.
As we walk away Drayce puts his hand on my arm. “What happened to her?”
“She was held captive by Fae. They used them as slaves for feeding on and to dance at the bar. They even used some of them in fights to the death. They kept them in cages during the day in the cellars.”
Meara gasps and puts her hand to her heart. “That’s terrible.”
“It’s more comment than you would believe,” Rafe tells her, his face grim and serious.
As we head back up to the main floor, a guard comes over to me. “Merrick would like to see you in the conference room. He has something to show you.”
We find Merrick and a few of his team waiting for us in the conference room.
“Take a seat, all of you.” He picks up a remote off the table. “I thought you’d like to see our first PR video.”
The screen comes to life and you see the outside of the club from the view of my camera on my chest. My voice explains why we are there and then it falls silent as I make my way inside. The video plays out, showing us taking out remaining fae and then finding the prisoners in the cellar. It finishes with images of us loading the rescued hybrids into the hanger of the Chinook, to a shot of them recovering in the medical bay of our compound.
Merrick swivels in his chair to face me. “What do you think? We’d like to add a shot at the end of you talking about how many you saved that day and the life they have been forced to live until you rescued and liberated them.”
“It’s good,” I nod. “Where will we air this?”
“Everywhere,” Grins the geeky looking guys beside Merrick. “We can hack into all the supe television channels and air this over their live news broadcasts.”
“Our message will get out to every supe community. Your face and this story will be everywhere,” Merrick states, with a satisfied smile on his face.
I swallow. The thought of thousands of people seeing my face on the screen scares me no end, but this was important. We needed people to see the truth and not just the lies that the Wiccan community was spouting.
“We’ll get you to film the rest tomorrow,” Merrick tells me. “Now, how are our new guests settling in?”
“Good, thank you,” Drayce says. “This place is amazing and what you are doing here is, well it’s inspiring.”
Merrick nods and leans back in his chair, keeping his eyes on Drayce. “Sounds like you want to join our cause?”
Drayce bobs his head firmly. “I’ll be honest, before I met Elara I held the same bigoted views as most of my community, but I didn’t know any difference. It was only when I met Elara and we discovered her identity and I saw what a kind, loving and wonderful person she was that I realised that the truth about hybrids was not what my parents brought me up to believe.” He pauses and smiles at me. “I want Elara to be free to be herself.”
I sit there in silence, in awe of the man that I love. “Gods, I love you,” I tell him, forgetting all about the other people in the room.
“Back at you raven,” he says with a lazy smile. That smile was the one that always has my stupid heart doing somersaults.
Merrick clears his throat and pulls us back to the room. “Then you are more than welcome to join our cause.”
A snigger from behind me pulls my attention. Cort walks into the room, a deep frown marring his face. “So that’s it? He gushes about his love for Lara and that makes him trustworthy.” Cort drops in to a chair beside Rafe. “What happened to the other fiancée?”
Drayce’s jaw ticks with annoyance. “That was just a ruse to appease my family whilst I was searching for Elara.”
Cort shakes his head and looks at me. “You’re falling for this shit?”
I sigh. “Cort, I know you don’t trust them but I do.”
Cort swears under his breath and stands to his feet. “This is bullshit,” He exclaims before storming out of the room. I go to stand and go after him, but Merrick catches my wrist in his hand as I pass him. “Leave him be. He’ll come around in his own time.”
I stare after the door he just walked through. Would he come around though?
Merrick places three passes on the table. “These are for you all, to allow you to get around the compound. I’ll give you a couple of days to settle in and then we’ll talk about which sector you would like to work in.”
“That’s easy,” Thorin says. “We are trained soldiers.”
“Could you take down a witch that you might know?” Merrick challenges.
“If they were hurting someone I was there to protect, then yes,” Thorin replies without hesitation.
“Let’s discuss it in a couple of days. Now if you’ll excuse me, my team and I have more things to discuss.”
We all stand and leave the room and make our way down to the gym where people are training and take a seat to watch. I watch Drayce watching them with a keen eye.
“You’re dying to be down there, aren’t you?” I ask him.
He smiles and winks, not taking his eyes off the action. “You know me well.”
“Want to spar?” I offer, standing to my feet.
“You’re on.” He grins and eagerly follows me down to the mats.
“Take him down, Elara!” Mears hollers, cupping her hands around her mouth.
Drayce faces me and brings his fists up ready. “Let’s see if you’ve kept up with your training raven.”
I grin wickedly and waggle my brows. “Prepare to go down, Black.”
Drayce makes the first move and I block him. He bounces on his feet and smiles. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed this with him. He hurtles a fire ball my way and I back flip and move out of its path. Using my vampire speed, I land behind him and wrap an arm around his neck.
“Gotcha,” I tease.
“Or have you,” he replies, and he somehow flips me over his shoulder and I land on my back on the mat in front of him. “Where you belong, Latimer. On the floor beneath me.”
I grin remembering him using the same words on me that first day in the training room at the academy although, this time they are definitely loaded with sexual innuendo. I jump to my feet.
“And I thought you liked me on top?”
Drayce winks as he attacks. “I’ll take you any way I can get you Latimer.” He throws a hook and I block him with my lower arm. I use air to push him back but he pushes against
it and thrusts water my way, making me drop my attack and roll to the side. “Looks like we are attracting a crowd.”
I look around us and notice that everyone else has stopped training and is watching us spar. I’d been so caught up in him I had been oblivious to the surrounding people. I am suddenly knocked flat on my back; the air whooshing from my lungs.
“Tsk, tsk,” Drayce admonishes me with a shake of his head. “Never take your eye off your attacker.”
“You distracted me,” I argue in defence.
“Never let your attacker distract you” he replies, his eyes sparkling with amusement as he offers me a hand up and I take it.
“I’ve missed this. Training with you.”
Drayce nods and leans in and kisses my forehead. “Me too, raven.”
I take his feet out from under him with a swift use of air magic and he ends up flat on his back this time. I stand over him with my hands on my hips and shake my head at him. “Never let your opponent distract you, Black.”
Drayce chuckles where he lies on the floor. “I’m always distracted by you raven.”
I offer him my hand and pull him up. He sweeps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him.
“When do I get you alone?” lust glistens in his eyes.
“How about right now?” I ask with a wicked smile on my face. I was more than ready for some alone time with my guy and to show him how much I missed him.
Drayce gestures with his head to where our friends sit watching us. “How do we shake them?”
“That’s easy.” I take his hand and pull him back over to our friends. “Guys we are heading back to my room, okay? We’ll catch you all later.”
Thorin rolls his eyes and Meara smiles knowingly at us. “Yeah, yeah, lovebirds. Go and make up for lost time.”
We reach my dorm room, and both Vellity and Laina are out. I place a do not disturb sign on the door and turn to find Drayce stood before me. We stand in silence for a few seconds and then we dive on each other, kissing and exploring each other with our hands.
“Gods, I’ve missed you,” he says against my lips. I close my eyes and lose myself to the feel of him against my skin. We swiftly remove our clothes until we are standing together naked. My hands explore his chest, memorising the feel of him under my touch in case we are ever separated again. I move my lips down his neck and onto his chest and I pause when I spot something new.
