Broken

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

I slowly stretched, and then turned over and smiled when I found Alec lying on top of the covers.

"Good morning, beautiful." As always his voice sent shivers down my spine.

By the time we'd arrived home, it was ridiculously late, and I'd barely managed to stay awake long enough to bolt down a little dinner after Donovan had helped us unload our haul. I'd then done the single most gutsy thing of my entire existence. I'd quietly followed Alec back to his room and then asked if I could sleep there again.

He'd given me another of those long looks that seemed to say he thought it was as bad idea, but that he couldn't bring himself to deny my request. Not with everything else he couldn't do for me.

"Please, I must look horrid. If you'd known I could look this bad, you'd never have bothered saving me from Simon and Nathanial."

Alec cocked his head to the side, as if trying to decide how to respond to my half-serious jest.

"Actually I was completely serious. You are beautiful."

I waited for the inevitable joke, or backhanded compliment to follow, but he seemed happy to just stop there. For once in my life I managed to be smart and do the same.

"So what's the agenda for today?"

Alec stretched and then shrugged. "School, just like every Monday."

My groan brought a smile to his face. "I can ship pesky parents out of the country, but if you start a wholesale program of cutting class your mom will find out when she gets back."

"So I just go about my day like normal, pretending like I don't know Brandon's a psychopath who just happens to be able to change shape at will and rip big holes in brick walls?"

I finally rolled out of bed, and started picking through the pile of bags from our shopping trip, hoping to find something that wouldn't make it look like I'd just won the lottery or robbed a bank.

"Now you know how Rachel feels. I'm afraid that with the sole exception of a couple of differences, that it'll be business as usual."

I finally settled on a white button up, and headed to the bathroom so I could change.

"So are you going to tell me what the differences are, or is that part of the stuff I'm not allowed to know?"

Alec's chuckle was muffled by the closed door, but still brought a smile to my face. "The biggest difference will be that we're going to have to shuffle some class schedules to make sure Brandon and his pack don't have access to you or Rachel. Everything else is just kind of a corollary to that. At least one pack member will need to be with you whenever you leave the house."

I spit out the toothpaste currently prohibiting me from being able to respond, and swung the door open. "Alec, it's the middle of the semester. We can't just walk into the office and tell them we want to change our schedules. It doesn't work that way."

**

After seeing Vincent's 'accident', and knowing he'd probably been trying to kill or at least seriously injure Ben just for the fun of it, I couldn't really argue with Alec. Rachel seemed relatively unfazed by the idea of bodyguards, but I wasn't especially excited about yet another point of difference between me and everyone else. Still, school was both better and worse than expected. As Alec had intimated, the day started out with a trip to the office. Not just me, not even just me and Alec. The entire pack trooped into the room, filling it with impeccably dressed, mostly gorgeous, shape shifters, who gave off a perceptible tingle of energy if you knew what to look for.