Accepting My Twin Mates

Chapter 119

Accepting My Twin Mates Chapter 119

Chapter 116 – Home?

Badru

‘How you feeling?’ The wet nose of Evie’s wolf nuzzled into my cheek.

“Like I wanna throw up fire,” I slurred, the moonlit world around me still spinning with a faint chime to it.

No amount of wolfsbane training could have prepared me for the amount coursing through my bloodstream. I didn’t know how many darts I had been hit with, but the number definitely amounted to more than one. Baniti’s voice had all but vanished in my mind, our link separated and cut as the toxin bound itself to my nerve endings.

“Here, chica,” I had heard the echoing voice of Catalina speak from behind my eyelids that had slowly begun to close.

The fur beside me retreated and was replaced with subtle soft skin that I wanted draped across me forever. A tickling trail of light fingers weaved through my short beard and I couldn’t stop the overly dramatic purring growl rippling through my throat. I grasped her palm, running my tongue over the sweet-tasting pulse point of her wrist and did my best to prise my eyes open to meet her stormy blue irises.

A black shirt covered her bare figure, but seeing she was knelt bare in the snow wouldn’t do. Ignoring the bunching tension at my temples and the pounding of my head, I pushed a splayed hand out to prop myself up and pull her by the waist to my lap. The mother of my pup was not about to grow cold in the snow.

“Ru!” She hissed a whisper, pushing at my bare chest. “I’m fine. You’re the one who needs looking after. You took four vials of wolfsbane.”

“I’m not the one pregnant here that’s been locked away for two mont-… Wait,” I interrupted myself, trying to focus my vision on the clearing around us.

Our SUV was pulling into sight, driven by Adrian. Catalina looked as though she was stitching up the wounds on the dark-haired vampire which my foggy brain wanted to remember as Bastiaan. And the others were busy checking if the guards were actually dead or tending to their allies’ injuries. Even through my dissociated vision, I could tell apart the vampires from the wolves. Their eerily pale skin, coupled with the swirling muted colours on its surface, could belong to no other being. Of all the creatures I was expecting to find held here, vampires would have been at the bottom of that list along with wiccans.

The one person I needed to see was nowhere in sight. Scratch that, two people.

A feeble whimper from my wolf tweaked my mind, his form remaining a blur, but at least he was coming back to me.

‘Aste! Where ar-’

‘Don’t worry about me, akhwyaa alsaghir (my little brother),’ I could feel his overprotective relief washing through me. ‘Konstantin and I are coming back… Marceau is dealt with.’

Their two wolves emerged through the scrub line of the trees and my twin made a beeline for me and Evie, sniffing over where I had been hit. I had to do a double take of Konstantin’s wolf, unsure whether the lingering effects of the wolfsbane were messing with my eyesight or whether his wolf really did look more of a beast than Evie’s.

Astennu’s crouched human form shifted at my side, helping our mate stand first and then slinging my arm over his shoulder to haul me to my feet. I grabbed my pants at the waistband from where they had torn to stop them from falling down like a slap-stick gag; my partial shift just as I was hit with the darts had shredded through my boots and shirt and had almost claimed my pants.

‘Come on,’ he supported my weight on one side as Evie steadied me from the other.

‘But you’re hurt, too.’ I could smell the tang of blood on him and I would know his scent anywhere, intermingled or not.

‘It’s already knitting back together. Just a small puncture wound to my shoulder. So quit arguing and let’s get you to the car and figure out our next move.’

Blurrily looking around the clearing, I didn’t even know where to begin. We needed our mate out of here, but the idea of sending her off alone made my skin shiver and growl bubble deep in my chest. After two months apart, she was never leaving my side again. We also had a clearing of at least twenty individuals, I couldn’t see straight yet for a true count, who had no home and missing family that we needed to find. And that was ignoring the dead that needed to be dealt with as the cherry on top.

Next move was an understatement. Tracking Evie down had opened a whole can of worms none of us were prepared for.

“What did you do with Marceau’s body?” Evie asked.

“Left where it fell,” Konstantin grunted, yanking a pair of pants up. “I no waste more effort on that svo lach’.”

“Evie?!” My brother called out, hopping on one leg to pull up his pants. “What are you doing? Get in the car and get warmed up!”

But she completely ignored him, poking around the area where Marceau had shifted. Whatever it was she was after, she must’ve been successful given her adorable little jump and rush to rejoin us. Without a word, Konstantin threw a blanket around her now he was dressed, equally ignoring her protests that she was fine, even though she was barefoot in the snow. Those two were a mirror of one another.

“It’s wolfsbane serum,” she perched on the edge of the SUV backseat, huddled in the thin fleece about her shoulders. “It should help you or Diego.”

“How did you know he had this on him?” Astennu twirled the syringe around, stepping back out of the way as Bastiaan carried over Diego with Catalina supporting his head.

‘He used it once… on my dad,’ Evie’s eyes flickered to him, a glisten of moisture misting them over. ‘It was a guess he’d have more on him.’

“Would you stop heavy lifting, you’ll pull a stitch,” Catalina shooed the vampire away, looking between the syringe in Astennu’s hands and me. Content from NôvelDr(a)ma.Org.

I knew what she was thinking, there was only one dose and her mate was in bad shape. I was at least on my feet and Baniti’s presence was growing steadily from the murky depths.

“It’s ok, give it to him. He looks like he needs it most,” Diego was completely out of it, shivering in a cold sweat and incoherent with his words. “How many did he take?”

“Six,” Catalina tried to stifle her snivel, preparing the injection expertly and administering it to the deltoid muscle of his upper arm. Not a second after the pale yellow liquid was dispensed did his restlessness ease and his breathing evened out.

“Evie?” My brother stood shoulder to shoulder with me in front of our mate, taking her hand. “You’re not gonna like this, but you need to go with Catalina, Adrian and your dad and get out of here. We need to stay and help these men find their families.”

“No!” Her eyes doubled to that of saucers, the deeper blue shades of her irises more prevalent. “I’m not leaving y-”

“I can stay,” Adrian interrupted, the other male wolves gathering behind him, anxious to hear how they would be reunited. “Working with Thiago, I’ve been trained for things like this. Well, maybe not dismantling a secret trafficking ring up a French mountainside per se, but it can’t be any harder than wrangling a group of thirty little pups for tumble play.”

“It’s not just their families we need to find,” Catalina inclined her head to other rogues as she smoothed her mate’s hair back tenderly. “We need to know what Marceau did with any female rogues.”

“But there’s no she-wolves here,” Bastiaan said as the other vampire males at his side shook their heads to confirm. “It’s been almost two decades since the last woman was here before Evie.”

“Do you think it’s just male rogues these people are trading?” Catalina raised a brow in challenge, making a few of the men shrink under her stare. “Female rogues? They do exist. What the f**k do you think men like Marceau do with them? Because I think I know exactly what monsters like him would do with vulnerable women.”

“Then, we’ll find them too,” Adrian argued. “But you should go with them, Catalina, and take your mate, make sure he’s safe too. You’re not gonna concentrate on anything with him laid up, and you know it. I’ll handle things here and we’ll go through what we can find. I managed to get a message through to home, so they’ll be preparing some assistance for us by the time you get there. And hopefully, if we move fast, we can stay ahead of anyone finding out what went down up here. Marceau and all the guards are dead, so they ain’t talking to their buddies. Only a handful of rogues managed to get away past the round-up and I doubt they’ll be contacting anyone to do with the fighting rings.”

“Fine, if you say you can handle it, we’ll head out. But we will come back,” I emphasised when I spotted a few of the wolf males’ agitation.

The last thing they needed to think was that they were abandoned now that my brother and I had what we came for. Whether they were here by Isaac’s ‘graces’ or not, we couldn’t leave them here and wish them luck. And goddess knew what we would discover when we found their families or any female rogues that Catalina had drawn the point to the distinct lack of. None of it was a matter we could morally walk away from.

“Bastiaan,” a battered and bruised red-haired vampire laid a hand on his upper back. “You should go with them. You’re injured and need to recover.”

“Like he’ll go anywhere. He’s as stubborn as his brother,” another vampire spoke, one with deep brown hair and dark purple eyes that I could just about distinguish. I couldn’t quite place his accent; different from Bastiaan’s and, oddly, not too dissimilar from my mother’s.

“Arwel is correct, Barend. I’ve been separated from my coven for too long. I’m not leaving them now.”

“But after, if you want a new start and a home, you’ll be welcome to our pack in the States,” I looked between the vampires to the rogue wolves whose figures were becoming clearer. “All of you.”

Konstantin silently stood over his daughter to prevent her from trying to help us distribute the supplies we were leaving behind. I knew she was capable, but I wouldn’t have my expectant mate traipsing around barefoot in the cold.

There were a few language barriers to contend with, as some of the men didn’t speak a word of English. Like the pair of Portuguese brothers, Rudolfo and Mariano. The latter had a human-chosen mate and pup used against him who he hadn’t seen in four years; his pup, a son, had been a toddler the last time he saw him. Mariano thought he was enlisting to fight and win money for his family, unknowing that he and his brother were signing away their very freedom. While none of us spoke Portuguese, the language was similar to Spanish, so Catalina was able to translate in a roundabout fashion.

One of the male rogues had remained at the far back of the group; silent and looking bereft of any understanding of what was being said. The exposed expression he wore mismatched the tall and robust build of his frame. The two vampire males that had lived in opposite cells to him claimed he hadn’t once spoken in his six-year confinement. The only time a flicker of comprehension twitched his ears was when Konstantin muttered a phrase in Russian.

Their dialects were vastly different, but our father-in-law managed to grasp the basics from him, beginning with his name, Maxim. I had to rack my brain back to high school geography to place where his previous home of Belarus was on the world map, which, given my addled mind, brought me up empty.

In a similar story to those around him, Maxim too had a mate used against him to keep his compliance. Rather than being tricked into this life, he had been sold into it with his she-wolf mate. He had stood accused of a crime – what, precisely, Konstantin didn’t understand to translate – and had been sold off as punishment, his mate also, by association with him.

“I still can’t believe you two…” Evie pointed between Adrian and Catalina, and Astennu and me. “… Worked with you two. How did you not kill each other?”

“There were some close calls and we’ll leave it at that,” I finished sliding Diego’s unconscious body into the large trunk of the SUV, making sure he was stable and kept warm.

“And here I thought we were friends now,” Catalina’s eyes followed my movements like a hawk.

“That’s saying a lot. You’re still annoying as hell.”

“At least I didn’t call you cheesy pet names all night. Right, Aste-bear?”

The glare my brother cut Catalina could have split a glass bottle in two.

“Schmoopsie-pooh, you denying our great love affair already?” Adrian slapped an arm around his shoulder.

“Remove the arm or lose it,” my twin hissed with a twitching jaw.

‘What did I miss?’ Evie looked around her father to me.

‘Cut a long story short, they had to pretend to be mates in the club and Adrian almost lost his teeth because he wouldn’t stop with the pet names.’

Evie snorted a loud burst of laughter into her palm and from the look of daggers my brother switched to me, I knew if others weren’t around I’d be getting pinned to the ground and my ribs jabbed like he used to when we were pups.

“Ok, that’s everything,” Catalina gave her mate one last kiss on his forehead as he began to stir and come around from the wolfsbane’s effects. “Come on, big guy,” she ushered Konstantin to the front passenger seat. “I know a tiny woman who’s waiting for your call on the plane.”

“Lucy?” A tiny smile twitched his beard.

“Hmm-mmm,” she hummed, moving to the driver’s seat. “Once we’re on board, there’s two small bedrooms on the jet where you can talk to her as much as you want with some privacy.”

With a final promise to the vampires and wolves we were forced to leave behind that we would return as soon as we could, Astennu and I slid into the backseat of the SUV next to our mate, subtly pressing her as close to us as possible without incurring the admonishment from her father in the front seat. The distant ring in my ears had begun to retreat and the prickle of my wolf drummed stronger against my temples.

Astennu settled into the crook of her neck, nuzzling the hair he was so obsessed with, while I contemplated the scolding I would receive from Konstantin if I fully snuggled down in between my mate’s breasts.

‘We took a bullet for him, four in fact,’ Baniti’s groggy voice unfurled. ‘How mad could he be?’

‘You finally appear when all the work is done? Typical. And they were darts, not bullets.’

‘Same thing. We’re a hero and I want my reward for good behaviour.’

‘Quit pining and just get in here,’ Evie’s long elegant hands wrapped around my neck and pulled me to her chest, resting her cheek on my forehead. ‘My dad is already out like a light… and if I’m gonna be split apart from you sooner than I want when we get home, I’m taking every moment I can get with my Alphas.’