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Chapter Thirteen

Xochil

I heard Aline coming out of the bathroom. I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing to pretend to be asleep. It was a dirty trick, maybe, but I was petrified that she’d changed her mind about me sleeping next to her.

I'd been kicking myself for the way I told her what I was. I should have kept my mouth shut. If I had, I would have spent the night holding and loving my mate. Instead, I felt guilty starting our intimate relationship without the truth. I wanted her so badly, but I wanted all of her. I wanted her to love me. Every part of me.

And I’d almost fucked it all up by blurting it out.

The panic and heartbreak I felt when she asked me to leave were something I never wanted to experience again in my life. So here I was, pretending to be asleep as she climbed into bed. I could feel her body so close to mine, but the foot of distance between us may as well have been the size of the Atlantic, because I couldn’t reach for her.

I knew it wasn’t the most ethical thing to do—using the bond to help convince her to accept me—but I was desperate. I was already halfway in love with Aline. It would kill me to have to let her go. I wouldn’t survive her rejection.

And the secret was out now. I didn’t have to hold back. Now she could see all of me.

I spent the next hour in slow, silent torment as I felt Aline having trouble falling asleep. She was tossing and turning, her arms pressing against mine every now and then, making me swallow the moans as I felt the sparks bloom from where our skin touched. I knew what she needed—an orgasm or two to leave her sleepy, satisfied and relaxed. But I could do nothing until she let me.

Eventually, I heard her breathing even out, and she stopped moving. I breathed out a sigh and, after ensuring she was falling into a deep sleep, I turned to face her, drinking in every feature of her beautiful face and searing it to memory.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but suddenly Erinda was on her feet in the back of my head, her hackles rising.

Did you hear that? she asked.

Hear what?

Let me forward. I heard a noise.

I let her forward and held my breath, as we listened.

Someone’s inside mate’s home, she growled when we heard the slide of the back patio door.

I reached over and placed my hand on Aline’s face, waking her up. Her eyes fluttered open, but I saw her mouth open to talk, so I moved my hand over her mouth to stop her. Her eyes furrowed at my gesture, confused at my actions.

“Someone’s in the house,” I explained as quietly as I could, wishing I could mind-link her.

Her eyes widened, and I could feel her panic through our growing bond. I removed my hand and passed her my phone, whispering in her ear, “Text Miguel. Tell him to get over here. Don’t leave the room. I’ll be back soon.”

I pulled away and began to roll out of bed, but she grabbed my wrist. She shook her head, fear written on her face. I pulled up her hand and kissed it before removing it from my wrist. I wish I had shown her Erinda earlier, so she knew she didn’t have to worry.

“Stay,” I mouthed to her, then pointed at my phone, still clutched in her hand, before walking over to the door and opening it a crack. As I did, I saw a flash of light from a phone flashlight moving across the entrance of the hallway, and with Erinda so close to the surface, I could hear hushed whispers.

My mate didn’t have a stalker; she had several, which meant this wasn’t a romantic stalking. Someone wanted something from her, or they wanted to hurt her for some reason. That was a threat I wasn’t willing to let slide.

I asked her to call Miguel over, not because I wanted his help, but because I might need him to pull me back from killing a human, or in this case, several of them. I waited and listened to see what they were doing, feeling the electricity in my hands trying to come forth.

I inherited one of Dad’s gifts. I was able to produce lighting and direct it to where I needed it. But unlike Dad, who’d had a lot of time to master his gifts, I wasn’t sure if I could stop it from killing the humans with the protectiveness I felt for my mate.

I slipped from the room when I heard them move near the front of the house. I walked quietly toward them and watched them rummaging through Aline’s correspondence.

“It’s not nice to look through other people’s things, you know,” I told them calmly, enjoying the way they jumped in response.

“That’s not the one we want. Are we in the right house?” one whispered to his partner in a strong accent, making me raise an eyebrow while the other raised a gun in my direction.

“This is the right house, I’ve seen her,” the one guy insisted.

“Into the living room.” I was ordered, but I simply crossed my arms and remained in place.

“Put her things down, and then I might be willing to talk,” I answered.

“We’re the ones with the guns, little girl. You don’t give the orders.”

“What do you want from my partner?” I asked them.

“Who’s your partner?”

“The woman you’ve been stalking for the past few months.”

“See. We’re in the right house. No wonder the woman wasn’t affected by me. She likes cadelas(bitches).”

“Stop. Talking,” the only one who seemed to have any sense growled at the other two, before he pulled out his own gun and motioned me to move into the living room with it.

I decided to humor them and walked into the living room. Once I had all three of them in there, I switched the tables on them again.

“I’m giving you one last chance to tell me why you’ve been stalking my girlfriend and why you’ve broken into her home,” I warned.

“Or what?” One asked.

“Or you’re going to be hurting until you tell me.”

That made all of them laugh, and I simply smiled at them, letting my eyes turn black as I let Erinda forward for a moment. Their laughter stopped, and Erinda receded, tickled to see their confusion and smell their fear in the air as they realized I might not be everything I seemed.

I took a small step forward, and was happy to see them take a step back. The guns pointed at me were shaking now, and I continued to walk forward until they were standing together in a corner of the living room.

“One last time. What do you want with my mate?” I asked.

“M-mate?”

“My girlfriend, my partner, my soul mate,” I ground out, losing the last of my patience. “What do you want with Aline?”

“N-nothing.”

“You’ve drawn circles on her house and her restaurant. You’ve broken into her home. It’s not nothing.”

When I was simply greeted by silence, I lost my patience.

“Tell me!” I growled, letting my aura out and Erinda forward. While my alpha aura wouldn’t make humans submit to me, it was still supposed to be stifling and intimidating.

It must have worked, because they began trembling in the corner. I didn’t expect the asshole in front to be so nervous, and only just managed to avoid the full impact of the bullet that left the gun. The bullet stung my shoulder, but as it wasn’t silver, all it did was piss me off.

“Seriously?” I barked, stalking their way to remove the gun from them, but stopped when I heard the bedroom door open. “Stay there, love. I’m alright,” I called out to her.

There was no answer from her, but I sighed with relief when I heard the door click closed. I looked back at the three assholes in front of me. They were still trembling under my aura, and I smelled fresh piss from one of them when I gave them a smile that I knew was anything but friendly.

“What are you?” the man in front whispered the question.

“A woman in love protecting the woman you’re trying to hurt,” I answered.

I took another step forward, but glass-shattering and a scream had me bolting toward the bedroom.

I burst through the door in time to see Aline struggling with someone trying to pull her out the window, and I hurried to them. It took only a moment before I had ripped the man away from my mate, and he was flying across the room, slumping on the ground after hitting the door frame.

“Are you okay?” I asked Aline, trying to figure out where the smell of blood was coming from.

“I cut my arm,” she murmured, and raised her left arm to show me.

I growled as I took in the cut and stalked over to the man on the floor, who was beginning to stir. I grabbed him by the cuff, dragging him into the living room to put him with the rest, but they were all gone. The back door was open, making me growl again, unhappy with the new development. I threw the man dragging from my arm against the wall.

“Tell me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you, right now,” I seethed, closing my hand around his throat, and pulling him up so he was dangling in the air.

The front door burst open at that moment, and I growled its way until I saw it was Miguel with Dad walking behind him, so I turned back to my prisoner.

“Xochil, put him down,” Dad ordered me as he approached.

“He tried to take my mate. He hurt her,” I hissed, turning to my father. “You would let him live?”

“We need to get information from him. We need to protect Aline long term, not short term,” Miguel was the one who answered, baring his neck to me.

“Listen to your beta, Xochil. Let the man go so we can question him. You need to help your mate. She’s injured.”

Dad’s words finally penetrated through Erinda’s and my rage, so I dropped the man, who slumped on the ground, trying to take a deep breath. I hoped it was fucking painful to do so. Miguel walked forward and kicked the man in the stomach, before grabbing him, to ensure he couldn’t get away, and searching him for weapons. I walked over to Aline, who was looking at everything happening with wide eyes while holding onto her arm.

“Let me see,” I told her in a more gentle tone, holding out my hand.

Erinda whimpered in my head when she hesitated, her eyes flickering over to the man who was still trying to take a deep breath. After a moment of consideration, she placed her hand in mine, and I walked her over to the kitchen table.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” Dad asked Aline, while I grabbed and wet a paper towel to see how bad the cut was.

“Under the bathroom sink,” she answered.

Thankfully, the cut wasn’t deep, but it still made my blood boil to see her hurt. Dad brought out the first aid box and I cleaned her wound, putting a few Band Aids over it after I’d disinfected the area.

I was worried about how quiet she was, and the trembling I knew she was trying to keep hidden from me. I wanted to pull her into my arms and assure her that everything would be okay, but I couldn’t. Not with everything that happened earlier.

‘ The mate bond will help her calm down, Xochil. Touch her. Hold her,’ Dad urged me.

‘ I can’t,’ I answered him.

‘ Did something happen?’

‘ I told her... what we are. What I am to her. She didn’t believe me at first. I had to beg for her not to send me away. If something hap—’

‘ It didn’t. You were here, she’s safe, and now that she knows, it will get easier. She didn’t reject you, and that’s a good thing.’

‘That might just be because she doesn’t understand that it’s an option,’ I scoffed .

‘She—’

“You’re bleeding,” Aline suddenly said, her eyes wide as she looked at my shoulder. “You said you were fine.”

“I am fine. It doesn’t even hurt,” I assured her. The wound was already healed, but I hadn’t wiped the blood from it.

“You could just be going into shock. We need to take you to the hosp—”

Sounds from the backyard stopped her mid-sentence, and I stood and placed myself protectively in front of my mate. She grabbed onto my shirt, fear rolling off her. I sighed with relief and relaxed when I saw Chris and Jacob walking in with two of the intruders.

“I thought I told you guys you didn’t have to come out until tomorrow?” I asked them.

“Good thing we came early and were getting a lay of the neighborhood,” Jacob answered.

“Goddess, you really miss your mate, don’t you?” Miguel chuckled, dumping the one prisoner onto the couch and motioning for them to do the same.

“Aline, this is my cousin Jacob, and another of my cousins’ husband, Chris. Guys, this is my mate, Aline.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Luna,” both of them said, making my heart pang a little.

I hadn’t even had a chance to explain what being mated to me meant.

“Aline,” she corrected. “Thank you for coming to help.”

“No worries at all. We’re happy to help,” Chris replied.

“Did you get anything out of them?” I asked, bringing the conversation back to the men on the couch.

“No. One managed to get in the car and drive away. He dropped this on his way out, though,” Chris answered, handing me what looked like a greeting card. I looked at the silly dog on the front and then opened it, only to find the writing in Portuguese.

“Does this mean anything to you?” I asked Aline, handing her the greeting card.

“Avó sends me a birthday card every year with a check. She worries I might not be making ends meet,” she chuckled lovingly as she reread the content inside the card, but then she frowned.

She stood and walked over to the foyer, where her documents had been strewn all over the place when I surprised the intruders. The more she looked, the more panicked she became.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The envelope. Help me find the envelope,” she answered, tears leaving her eyes.

Fuck this, I thought and walked up to my mate, grabbed her hands and pulled her into my arms.

She was hyperventilating and shaking, so I grabbed her chin and made her look at me.

“Breathe, Aline. Breathe for me, baby. Just like I’m doing.” I took in a deep breath and exhaled it, repeating the process over and over until she began to follow along, and I felt her calming down. “Now, tell me why the envelope is important.”

“It has her address. If they know where she lives, they could hurt her.”

“Okay, here. Sit down. I’ll look.”

I guided her to the kitchen again and picked up every piece of correspondence. I brought everything to the table and started looking through it all. I found the envelope for every stray piece of mail except for the birthday card.

I looked at Dad, who was looking a little concerned, and then over to the people on the couch.

“Do you know why they are stalking you?” I asked Aline.

Her hands on the table were shaking, and when she saw me looking at them, she fisted them and placed them under the table. I swallowed the hurt. There was a time to talk about trust. Right now, I needed her to tell me. I couldn’t protect her until I knew what was going on.

“I trusted you with my secret, despite knowing you might reject me for it. I need you to trust me, Aline, because it’s the only way I’m going to be able to protect you. It’ll be much quicker for you to tell me, if you know what they want from you, than it will be for me to beat it out of them.”

Her eyes widened when I mentioned beating the information out of the men, but she finally sighed and nodded.

“They want me,” she stated. “And they will hurt my grandma to get to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m an anomaly,” she answered, looking down. “When I was born, an orixa attached itself to my soul. Orixas are our guiding deities, but we can’t communicate with them. Not really. There are rituals to try to talk to them, to ask for guidance, but it’s all up to interpretation. For me, it’s different. My orixa will tell me when there’s danger, or when I meet a person who’s important to our path. The people who have been looking for me want to use it to expand their power back in Brazil. They’ve been trying since I was young. They’re the ones who killed my parents, and the reason why Avó brought us to the US.”

“Who is looking for you?” I asked.

“I don’t know who the man is. All I know is what Avó told me. I’ve been trying to keep a low profile. It worked… until now.”

I stood and walked over to the men on the couch.

“How did you find her?” I asked them.

“Fuck you, bitch!” he spat.

“I wasn’t giving you a choice,” I growled, lifting the man in the middle with one hand, and letting Erinda forward, so my eyes would turn black again. “Tell me who your boss is.”

“He’ll kill—” he started.

“I’ll kill you if you don’t talk. What gives you better odds of living? Not telling me when I already have you right in front of me, or telling me and having the chance to hide from whoever sent you?”

“I don’t care if you kill me. He will kill my family,” he growled. “He’ll kill all of our families unless we take her to him. Our fathers failed almost twenty years ago. We can’t fail again.”

I turned to Dad, wondering what the fuck to do. I couldn’t, in good conscience, kill men who were forced to do someone’s dirty work.

“I’ll call Theo. If they’re telling the truth, we’ll figure out how to help them,” Dad read the indecision on my face.

Uncle Theo had a handy gift of being able to tell when someone was lying.

“We need to protect Aline and her grandmother, though,” I said, reminding him that we still needed to deal with the current threat.

“We have the address registered to the car that Evie sent us in the email, Alpha,” Miguel pointed out.

“What email? When did we get an email?” I asked.

“We got it before we went to the club.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said, determined to deal with this tonight. I turned to Aline. “Call your grandmother. Tell her to go someplace safe until we deal with the threat.”

“It’s the middle of the night. She won’t answer.”

“Leave her a message, at least.”

“She doesn’t know how to access voicemail,” Aline replied, her lip quivering.

“Let’s talk to Evie. Maybe she has an idea,” Dad suggested.

“Okay. Let’s go. We need to deal with this now. Jacob, take these men to our dungeons. Have them treated with respect until Uncle Theo can question them. Chris, did you bring Violet?” I asked.

Her shield would keep my mate safe.

“No. I was planning on grabbing her tomorrow.”

“Damn, I would have felt better leaving Aline with—”

“I’m coming with you,” Aline interrupted.