Page 6 of Gemini Hunted (Dark Witch Academy #5)

Lucius

To my profound relief, Zara has finally stopped shivering.

My precious mate is buried in the velvet depths of the sectional sofa, her tiny body wrapped in yoga pants and Neo’s oversized Academy sweatshirt, knees drawn tight to her chest and a steaming mug of peppermint cocoa (blazoned with this yacht’s lofty name) gripped in her small hands.

The salon’s subdued lighting, dimmed for comfort as the vessel rocks violently on these sloppy seas, plays over the damp teal ponytail that spills down her shoulder.

I’m relieved beyond measure to see color steal back to her pale cheeks.

And wary beyond measure to see her soft mouth regain its familiar stubborn tilt.

As for myself, I struggle unsuccessfully not to hover—although it’s a cosseting behavior she tolerates from me tonight. For once, she’s letting me express the alpha instinct flooding my overprotective body. Allowing herself to lean into my strength. Still, I don’t want to press my luck.

Merciful Christ.

My queen. My student. My mate.

She’s mine to protect.

Mine.

She nearly died.

The mere notion plunges my sharp shifter incisors from my palate to fill my mouth. I slaver like a mad dog with the rabid need to tear out Nikolai Romanov’s throat.

Of course, Zara downplays the severity of the incident. But I plucked the truth from Ronin’s mind while Neo and I bundled our exhausted mates back to the yacht.

Zara’s clutching that mug I brought her like a talisman, but she isn’t drinking. She’s clearly exhausted, but she isn’t sleeping.

Incandescent with resolve and the eerie glow of psi fire, her turquoise eyes are fixed on the dark rain-washed glass. As though she can peer straight through the storm to wherever that wretched Horn is hiding.

Over the howl of wind around the hull and the hammer of rain against the deck, my keen wolfish senses can barely discern the comforting hiss of the shower from the head below, where Ronin is soaking the chill from his storm-battered bones.

I swallow down my bloodlust. Force my fangs to retract.

I am man, not beast. I am man. I am man.

Trapped in the cage of my human skin, my agitated wolf paces and growls.

Both our mates are safe, I reassure my beast and myself, for at least the dozenth time since we hustled the pair of them—drenched and shivering— from the half-drowned dinghy to the kingly comfort of Senator Mercury’s yacht. Zara and Ronin both. They’re safe.

We will slaughter the sea dragon, my wolf vows darkly. And the human. Him, we will kill slowly.

Now he’s speaking of Nikolai Romanov, who presents his own damnable tangle of problems. Not only is he the complicated father who abandoned his own son for the so-called sin of being queer—the father Vasili both loathes and loves, whether he cares to admit it or not.

Nikolai is also a damned trustee on the Academy board.

We will eat that human’s entrails, my wolf proclaims, untroubled by my academic scruples, while he screams for mercy.

Suffice it to say, my brain is battered by powerful surges of adrenaline and rage.

I’m far too well aware that I won’t be able to keep my intrepid queen—or my dear one, my Ronin, the only other certified diver in our polycule—safely out of the shark and monster-infested seas around Icarus Island for long.

As the silence stretches, a warning frown gathers between Zara’s teal brows.

“Soon as it’s light out, I’m going back in,” she announces firmly, setting her cocoa aside.

Clearly, as a highly acute telepath, she’s following my thoughts.

Thanks to that mating bite she demanded—a forbidden bite, administered to my own student the day of our first fuck, a scandalous indiscretion my wolf and I proved woefully unable to resist—Zara and I are deeply bonded.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Vasili says shortly, appearing at the head of the companionway without warning. “Certainly not until this wretched storm blows itself out. Then we’ll see.”

Until just now, my co-alpha has been below, brooding over Ronin while I hovered over Zara, the two of us dividing our protective strength between our mates without need for discussion.

Over the months we’ve been together—the original four who first joined with Zara to form the nucleus of her harem—we’ve all more or less settled into our roles.

Vasili. Ronin. Neo. Myself.

Once scattered atoms, now we’re locked in place, drawn and soldered irrevocably to Zara’s magnetic pull. We’ve even made room to accommodate Maxim’s disruptive force, the dragon shifter belatedly joining Vasili and myself as Zara’s possessive third alpha.

Zephyr and Ash, in contrast, are free radicals.

The obsessed and twisted Dark Fae King, in particular, is an unstable electron whose erratic orbit has unsettled the balance of power in this harem all over again—

“Yeah, well, you don’t have anything to say about it,” Zara tells Vasili dryly, still a bit hoarse from her prolonged exposure to the elements.

“I need to go back down—this time with nitrox, so I can stay down longer and come up faster—if we’re gonna win this thing.

Except for Ronin and me, no one else in this polycule is a diver. ”

Vasili doesn’t even hum in acknowledgment.

Yet his sharp-edged silence speaks louder than the throb of this vessel’s nine thousand horsepower diesel engines.

Zara’s wary eyes follow Vasili’s graceful progress (graceful despite the yacht’s slow heave and tilt, because he’s always graceful) across the expanse of cream carpet to the shining Art Deco splendor of the liquor cabinet.

Still clad in the black trousers and white shirt of his Academy uniform, collar unbuttoned to expose his slim throat and cuffs rolled back to bare his sinewy forearms, the warlock is tall as a cypress, slender as a whip, and vicious as a spitting cobra.

Deftly Vasili splashes vodka and dry vermouth into the silver cocktail shaker—a procedure which makes it impossible to read his hooded gaze.

“I mean it, Goblin King,” Zara says with a frown. Of course she senses his malevolent fury over her misadventures, just as I do, tightly contained behind his facade of icy calm. “It’s my ass and my call.”

“Is it?” He closes the shaker with a single cruel twist.

Eyes sparking with irritation, she leans forward. “For fuck’s sake, you aren’t even allowed to intervene. These are finals, and you’re faculty. You don’t have a say—”

“Don’t I?” Under a fallen ribbon of silver punk-rock hair, damp from “helping” Ronin in the shower, he slices Zara a vicious glance, crackling with an electric flash of blue ice.

“Try leaving this wretched boat without my complete consent, darling, and we’ll see precisely how much ‘say’ I have. Faculty or no.”

From my wary post near the bow window, straining for any glimpse of Neo or Ash through the deluge, I turn alertly to defuse the impending argument.

“My dears,” I remind the room as gently as I can manage, with my wolf snapping and growling in my ear, “as faculty, neither Vasili nor I are permitted to interfere in the exam. Our role is merely to observe and— very discreetly—to advise. I’m a test proctor, for pity’s sake. I beg that we not be rash—”

“Lucius, pet, we’ve gone well beyond rash into sheer stubborn stupidity.

” Violently agitating the cocktail shaker like he’s snapping someone’s neck, Vasili impales me with a glare.

“Look, I’m hardly that smothery dragon or that fucking tyrannical Fae, both determined to swathe Zara in bubble wrap like she’s a vase that will shatter if she’s dropped. ”

Zara chuffs out a breath that speaks eloquently of her frustration with our possessive alpha drama.

Her frustration is understandable, genetically speaking, since she herself is an alpha. In this way and many others, our polycule is rare—virtually unknown among the arcane races—boasting four strong alphas instead of the typical one.

Our collective strength, and the bond of trust and love that binds us so tightly together, is our greatest advantage.

But if you heed the gossip, that very uniqueness is also our greatest weakness.

According to Zara’s enemies and the witching world airwaves they dominate, our queen and her harem are dangerously unstable.

As for Zara herself? They claim she’s violent.

Vicious.

Even psychotic.

I watched the latest Zara Gemini: Unstable Rebel documentary today on WNN (the Witching News Network) in appalled dismay.

That propaganda piece was a hatchet job.

Admittedly, with witchcraft like hers, Zara certainly can be dangerous—yes, even deadly. But never to anyone she loves. Behind her tabloid notoriety, the terrifying power of her lightning voice, and all that mouthy rebel sass, she’s alarmingly vulnerable.

Even now, my beast longs to fling himself across her lap and smother her in wolf. This is a deeply primal instinct I’m barely holding at bay. Vasili is managing somewhat better…

But not by much.

Very clearly, he’s hiding something.

Of course, he’s always hiding something. He’s Vasili.

Still, now that I think upon it, his demeanor all day has been deeply suspicious. At the very least, he’s more abrasive than usual, by turns malignant and gloating.

Now Vasili slices Zara’s impatient face a narrow look. Subtly, the serrated edge of his tone softens.

“Believe me,” he says to her quietly, “I know what you’re capable of.

While everyone else in this harem was wringing their hands and fussing over your daredevil plan to retrieve that Horn, I was the first to agree you needed to make that dive.

I was the one who persuaded Max— and that Dark Fae tyrant—to fly decoy patrols and throw Cleo’s odious little clique off the scent, while you and Ronin conducted your risky offshore excursion. ”

“Yeah.” Her grim mouth softens in a smile. “That was a good idea, Goblin King.”