Gabe falls asleep on me and we spend most of the afternoon napping with Brutus between us, after he’d slowly inched Gabe away from me and taken his place. I doze off and on, watching the shadows cross the room as we waste away the day. Sometime in the late afternoon, I fall into a much deeper sleep, only to wake and find Gabe missing.
North is sitting at the desk, reading more of his endless paperwork with a glass of whiskey in front of him.
“There’s a sandwich on the nightstand. If you want something more substantial, I’ll call the chef for you.”
I stretch out and struggle to sit up, pushing up until I’m once again drowning in the pillows. I’ve never met a man who enjoyed sleeping with a hundred pillows like a princess, but then there’s no one quite like North out there.
“The sandwich is good. I feel horrible, the napping is only making it worse.”
He glances up to frown at me. “Do you need Felix now? He checked in on you earlier but when he saw you were sleeping, he left you to it. He said sleep is more important right now.”
I shake my head and grab the plate. “No, I just feel like I’m lazing around here, doing nothing, while everyone else is busy… doing things to keep us safe. I’m a liability and I hate that.”
He huffs at me, draining the last of the whiskey in the glass and moving more papers around. “Do you know how many survivors we recover on average from the camps?”
I shake my head, taking another bite of the sandwich. It’s cheese and ham, with the perfect amount of mayonnaise, and I want to marry the chef for it.
North ignores the sandwich-gasm I’m having and continues, “If we can get to the camps in the first twenty-four hours, it’s twenty-two percent. After forty-eight hours, that drops to fifteen. After four days, as in the case of what happened when you went after them? Three percent. Do you know how many survivors you brought home? Because it was all on you, we just came and picked you all up.”
The door opens and Gryphon steps through, not bothering to knock. He’s in his training gear, the full coverage stuff he wears around his team and not the teeny tiny shorts he saves for me. He doesn’t blink at North’s monologue, just comes over to get a look at me and take a seat back at my side.
“Thirty-three people were taken. Thirty-three came home. Only one was injured, and the reports said that thanks to Nox’s creature protecting Kyrie and shutting down the showers, only one woman was assaulted in that time. That has never happened before, Oleander. You’re the farthest thing from a liability.”
Gryphon turns to give me a look, and I shove the last of the sandwich into my mouth to avoid speaking to him about it. There’s a lot I need to say to him and fighting my position on being useless to them all right now isn’t it.
He turns to share a look with North that spells trouble for me.
It finally occurs to me that I don’t know how to do relationships. I barely know how to function as a Central Bond, and having both of my Bonded, very alpha men here together is literally overwhelming for my poor brain. It was fine this morning with Nox and Gabe here too because they felt a little bit like a buffer, stopping any of this stuff from happening.
Now I’m at their mercy, and I already know they’re both more than happy ganging up on me.
But I have to at least try, because if I shut my eyes and think about it hard enough, I can still hear the cracking sound of Kieran snapping his own ankle to save my life and the lives of my Bonds.
So once I swallow, I clear my throat and plead for Black’s life. “Please… don’t take everything that happened out on Kieran. I was the idiot who thought we’d get in and out without Franklin being there. I should’ve known better.”
Gryphon’s eyes narrow at me in a way that I’m so not used to being pointed in my direction. I gulp a little, mostly because he looks like he’s about to give me the same punishment as his second is going to get. I was kind of hoping the leg injury would get me out of the pre-dawn training for at least a week. Two would be better. I guess his terrible mood is still around, which is just great news.
I don’t look in North’s direction.
I’d wager he’s less reasonable about this shit than Gryphon is, so the longer I can keep him out of this, the better.
Gryphon snaps, “Wrong. North has only ever been unreasonable about you. Now that you’re Bonded, he’s probably going to go back to being the good councilman again.”
My cheeks heat but my temper also flares and gets my mouth running. “Get out of my head! I will start avoiding you if you can’t stay out of it.”