THE SEQUEL TO 'LUNA OF ROGUES.'
Last Haven is scattered to the wind. It has been nineteen years since the castle burned - nineteen years of bitter warfare - and rogues are a dying breed. Defeat is starting to look inevitable.
Every rogue has a choic...
Aaaah look!! more art!! This is our setting for the chapter, brought to life by LittleLoneWriterGirl on some very short notice.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
***
I wasn't avoiding Liam in a nasty way, but I was definitely avoiding him. We'd both been in turmoil ever since he'd marked me. And the closer we were — touching was out of the question now — the worse it got. Neither of us had realised that there would be such a ... free exchange of thoughts.
Liam didn't like the new feeling of exposure. Not one bit. And him getting upset was bouncing across the bond and getting me upset and so on, which was then eternally perpetuated, as far as we could tell. It wasn't ideal.
Because of the openness, I knew why he didn't like it. The problem was, Liam hadn't actually told me that of his own free will. I couldn't help seeing it any more than he could help sharing it now. Tapping ran in Liam's family, so most of his brothers had been able to do it to some extent. And it seemed that Mason had been one of the worst offenders for using the link to inflict pain, so Liam had learnt to keep his walls up at all times.
And now I was getting a front-row seat to several of those inciting incidents on re-play, and I didn't have any choice in the matter. The whole arrangement was very screwed up, in my opinion. The Goddess clearly hadn't been thinking about traumatised people when she'd decided mates should almost share a brain.
"Sorry," he murmured. "The more I try not to think about things, the more I end up thinking about them."
I closed my car door and gave him a half-hearted smile. "You don't need to apologise. I don't mind it ... much. But I know you mind, so we'll just go and see Nia, and she'll fix us. Hopefully."
There was five metres between us, and even that felt dangerously close now. It was hard to read his expression, but I didn't really need to, given that I could feel across the bond that he was even more sceptical than I was. I blinked and looked away, trying to force my walls up, for all the good it did.
Our fighters were also exiting their respective vehicles and gathering in a large, rowdy knot behind us. We weren't the first ones here. The road was filled with cars and minibuses as far as the eye could see. We had quite the walk ahead of us. And this was only two packs' worth, by the smell of things. Ours and the folks from Ember. Hayden and Zach weren't here yet.
"Stay here. Behave yourselves," Liam told the fighters. "I don't want you picking fights with rogues until after they've helped us kill those bastards from Riverside. However tempting it may be. Alright?"
We went onwards alone. Even Mal was left behind — to supervise, I'd imagine. The plan was to keep the flockies as far away from the rogues as physically possible before, during and after the fighting. And besides, I'd rather they didn't see us meeting with our family. It would just be plain weird if we had to pretend to hate them.
