Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals!

Chapter 243: 243. Soren

Soren

I stood by the infirmary’s door, pondering over the words of Councilman Albert.

”This is unsatisfactory. It is clear she needs to be put down. She is a danger to everyone around her. A danger to herself.” His eyes flicked to me. ”Your judgement has clearly been clouded by your affection for us. That woman is a monster.”

The nodded heads, the tight expressions... months of work went down the drain. The decision had been made the moment she leaped on Tessa like that.

I still didn’t understand why. She was doing alright before that. The scars had been helping... my body tightened as my Lycan slithered close to the surface, close to going insane to find who the hell had done that to her.

She had been screaming as she hit her. Goddess, it was the most terrifying sound I’d ever heard. The weeping. There was no mistaking the pain that had been there.

And all the Council had gotten was, ”Mentally unstable.”

Fuck that.

If Maisie lost it, it was for a good reason. While Tessa had been helpful in getting me a seat on the Council by using her father’s influence, it didn’t mean I trusted shit that came out of her mouth. She always did have a way with words.

”Even if she did goad her, nothing she said deserved a beating like that,” Zaytsev had said. ”I will have the Queen know she is unfit to be around others.”

She had touched Jericho’s elbow like she was doing a good deed. ”Maybe not a death sentence, but I could push for a... facility. There have been reports that before her disappearance, she was weak of mind.”

It had taken all of my patience not to cut out her tongue. The only reason why she was pushing for asylum was because she was trying to get Maisie away from Jericho.

Ever since my aunt assigned her to the Council and Maisie’s case, she’s been trying to get into bed with Jericho. She was acting the part of a helpful old friend, while digging Maisie in an even deeper pit.

I was going to need to find a way out of this mess soon, and if I couldn’t, it was a good thing we had put a plan in place months ago to get her some place safe. Far from the Queen. The Council. This life of dangerous games.

”You hit her too hard!” Jericho snarled at Mercer, drawing my attention away from my thoughts.

”Because you fucking told me to!” Mercer snapped. ”You said, and yes, I’m fucking quoting you, Knock. Her. Out!”

”He didn’t say, Crack her skull, you dimwit!” Quinlan yelled.

Mercer whirled, peering Quinlan down his nose. ”Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t see how you’ve contributed to anything so far. At what point were you going to mention she was covered in scars?!” At Quinlan’s silence, Mercer’s green eyes flashed with anger. ”How, exactly, did you fuck her without seeing them?!”

”I was high!” Quinlan spat defensively.

Jericho wrenched Quinlan up by his collar. ”You did what?!”

Quinlan bared his fangs at Jericho. ”Oh, now you care. I thought you were too buried under your Russian girlfriend’s skirts to give a fuck about any of us.”

”She’s not my fucking girlfriend,” Jericho growled, face red with anger.

”Fuck toy, then?”

Jericho’s nostrils flared. ”You damned well know we’ve not touched another woman since...” His breath escaped him in a hiss. ”You fucked her?”

Quinlan smirked smugly. ”Hard. And then, I marked her–”

Jericho’s fist stopped a few inches away from Quinlan’s face before I said, ”That’s enough.”

They halted, chests heaving. Jericho’s jaw ticked, but he took a very measured step away from Quinlan, standing in the infirmary’s hallway beside a still, sulking Mercer.

And then, Quinlan huffed at me, ”And who made you the boss here, walking around with more self-importance than god himself–”

I closed the distance with one step, irritation pouring off me.

”I have put up with your bullshit for months,” I said in a bored tone, as I often did before I lost control. ”The drinking. The drugs. Your disgusting self-pity.”

It wasn’t fair. Of all four of us, Quinlan got the sharper edge of the knife from that letter, and I understood that it had broken something in him. He was either getting himself into situations where he would get beat within an inch of his life or he was trying his best not to stay lucid.

It was one thing to have the woman you were in love with reduce you to nothing, call you broken because of something you were too young to protect yourself from, call you sick and defective, like your mother. And it was another thing to learn she’d gotten rid of a child that could’ve been yours because she didn’t want you to pass on whatever shit ran in your family’s genes to her children.

It was lucky that he was sober enough today for this.

”You want to self-sabotage because you got your little heart broken? Be my fucking guest, Chastain. But you will not take it out on the rest of us like you’re the only one who got hurt. She is our mate. Our. Mate. She belongs to all of us. Your hurt doesn’t get to become the only one that matters. We’ve all bled for her.”

Quinlan’s jaw tightened and his eyes shimmered with anger.

I leaned in, voice lowering. ”I am the one who keeps this bond together. I am the one who has carried the weight while you tried to drink yourself to death, Chastain. And since your shenanigans have been happening in my fucking house, under my roof, I am the boss of you. So when I tell you to shut the fuck up, you shut the fuck up. Without question.”

Quinlan’s Lycan rose to the surface in challenge, clearly not liking the tone, but before we could destroy the hallway in a fight for dominance neither of us would win without breaking each other, he reeled it in.

His lips curled in a sneer. ”I’m moving out.”

We all knew it was bullshit. It didn’t matter how many parties he threw and how many lines he snorted, he couldn’t find peace anywhere else but in Maisie’s bedroom.

”You think they do this all the time? Fight like children?” The Park girl whispered to the red head across the hall from us where they’d been watching us with wide eyes.

Juliette snorted, holding a weird looking cat she must have picked out of the gutter to her chest. It was a strange thing, staring eerily and I couldn’t help the feeling of my skin crawling.

So long as she kept it the fuck away from me, we were good.

”You should’ve seen them when we were children,” she said. ”This is nothing.”

The door creaked and all seven of our gazes swung to the door as the physician, a middle aged woman who had been attending the students for as long as I could remember, stepped out. Beatrice’s brown eyes went round at the crowd. ”Ah... Prince–Mr. Black–”

”Is she alright?” Mercer barked, causing the smaller woman to flinch back.

But she nodded, lips pursed. ”A concussion–”

”See? I fucking told you you broke her skull,” Jericho cursed at Mercer with a scowl.

”Can we see her?” Juliette asked, poking her head between Quinlan and Mercer in the doorway.

”Of course,” Beatrice said, before her gaze flitted back to me. ”But there a few things we should talk about first—”

A beep went off on my cellphone, loud as a siren. It echoed along the hallways on Mercer’s, Jericho’s and Quinlan’s, and I didn’t need to check to know what it meant.

I’d installed the damned tracker myself.

I pushed past Beatrice into the infirmary, slamming the door open.

The bed sat empty within, and the window yawned open. Maisie was gone.

Of course, she had run again, the slippery little coward.