“I couldn’t breathe,” I blurted. Quinton’s mouth pinched tight and he scowled at me. Tyson’s brow pinched together and he frowned at me.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Quinton growled at me. “Did someone hurt you? Where the fuck was Marcus?”
“No, no,” I said hurriedly. “Nothing like that. I dreamed I was drowning. I dreamed she-”
I snapped my mouth shut at the sight of the matching scary looks on their faces.
“You, what?” Quinton whispered in a dark voice.
“Have you been… Have you,” Tyson stammered. “Have you been having these dreams this whole time?” He swallowed thickly and looked away from me.
I dropped my gaze to the grass and wrapped my arms around myself tightly.
“I wake up and I can’t breathe,” I whispered without raising my eyes from the ground. I didn’t want to see the pity on their faces. “The room always feels like the walls are closing in and they are going to crush me. I can’t go back to sleep because all I can think about is her hand on my head, shoving me down into dark, icy water. My lungs burn, my chest feels like it’s going to implode. In the dream, I die. When I wake up, it still hurts, I can feel it like it happened in real life. I wake up and it hurts and I can’t breathe.”
I sucked in a great big gust of crispy night air because I could and because it felt good to do so. Talking about the dream brought it back to life and I shivered, not because of the chill in the air but because I remembered the hopelessness, the helplessness I had felt when I drowned.
“Fuck,” Quinton swore harshly. “Ty will go inside with you and he will sleep with you tonight so that you don’t have to be alone. I would do it myself but I don’t think you’d be comfortable with me sleeping with you just yet. And, honestly, when I get you in a bed and it’s just the two of us I have no intention of keeping my hands to myself.”
“I can do that,” Tyson said quickly.
God. Quinton was not to be believed.
“You can’t just demand I sleep with someone,” I snapped, “and expect me to do it. That’s absurd.”
Quinton was suddenly no longer standing three feet away from me but he was there. In my space and in my face. His quick movements and the look on his face frightened me. I stepped back, to get away from him and the look on his face but didn’t get very far because I backed into a hard, hot, male body.
I let out a loud, shrill, terrified shriek as I turned my head to the side and looked back.
Tyson stood behind me with Quinton in front of me. They’d caged me in. I was trapped and I didn’t want to be trapped in between them. Well, maybe I did, but not like this and not with Quinton looking at me like that.
“You do
n’t fucking get it,” Quinton snarled in my face and my breath caught in my throat as I looked into his dark, burning eyes. I had never seen him this intense before.
“Get what?” I squeaked out in a voice three times higher than my normal one.
“You are not alone anymore,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “You don’t ever have to be alone again. In fact, we would prefer it that way. You have got to stop acting like this, like it’s you against the world when that’s absolute bullshit. I’ve told you, Tyson has told you, the goddamn twins have told you. Fuck, Ariel, Julian’s probably said it in front of you. You’re mine. You’re Ty’s. You’re ours. If you were anyone else you would be able to choose your own coven, but you’re not just anyone. You’re you and you’re mine. You’re not going anywhere. I don’t care if you don’t like it, it’s just the way it’s gonna be. You don’t get to choose another coven. You don’t get to walk away, ever. You don’t get to run away and hide anymore. We are through with all of that nonsense. You don’t get to walk away from us, not a single one of us. I don’t give a fuck if you think some of the guys don’t like you. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. It doesn’t fucking matter either way because you’re ours and eventually they will grow to love you, if they don’t already. The point I am trying to make is that your self-imposed isolation has come to an end. You are with us which means you actually need to be with us.”
He raised his hand to silence me because I got over my fear of him and opened my mouth to tell him just how crazy I found him but his raised hand had me snapping my mouth shut.
“I don’t mean sex when I say you need to actually be with us. Sex isn’t everything. Do we want to have sex with you? Yes, absolutely. Is that how this relationship is going to go with you and all of us? Again, yes, absolutely. You can be a prude and young and naïve all you want, knock yourself out. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t only one outcome to this situation. And that’s you with us, all of us.
“You’re a female witch. You’re our female witch. I’m trying to be cool with you because you’re new to this and weren’t raised to know what to expect, but my patience only goes so far. Your time alone is over. Get used to it, babe, and don’t try to fight it. Don’t try to fight me. It won’t do you any good. Nobody walks away from me unless I want them to and I think I already shared with you why you aren’t gonna walk away from me.
“You brought her up before, Annabell. You are not her. You are nothing fucking like her. But, unfortunately for you, you get the us we are after her. It’s not going to be easy, I get that, I even understand it. But, you are gonna have to suck it the fuck up because you are the only girl for the job. Don’t fight it. Now, Tyson is going home with you. If you don’t like it, feel free to pick someone else and I will get them for you.”
He backed off and stared me down, watching my face.
“Yeah,” he said after a few seconds of watching me. “That’s what I thought.”
He turned his back on me, started to walk away, and said over his shoulder, “It’s your night, nephew. Take care of her.”
Chapter Seven
I stood in the middle of my bedroom feeling incredibly awkward. I hated feeling this way. After the horrid first day of school, I hadn’t been anything but comfortable around Tyson. He had the potential to become my best friend. Leave it to Quinton to put a wedge between us while he was actually trying to drag us closer together.
The door clicked shut softly, announcing Tyson’s arrival. He’d gone home to put some clothes on over his underwear. After Quinton’s little speech, the fact that Tyson was so scantily clad had seemed to bother him more than it had bothered me. He’d insisted on going home to change.