When We Were Mates (Demetra and Emris) novel Chapter 143

Chapter 143

Alpha Emris.

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I can hear the girls downstairs. Not their words… just the sound of them: shrieking, then going quiet, then shrieking again over whatever is playing on the television while I’m alone in the pack library, surrounded by the smell of old leather and older things.

The boys left hours ago.

I’m still here.

Every text I can find on Lycans is spread across the table in front of me. I’m going through all of it. Every recorded account of how Lycans were fought, how they were beaten, across every era civilisation bothered to document. In the early centuries it was crude… silver–edged blades, traps, fire when nothing else worked. As the centuries moved forward, firearms entered the picture.

Then I find the passage that stops me.

There was a hunter….no family name recorded who bit a Lycan. Then let the wound fester, let it rot and spread with whatever poison lived in a hunter’s teeth, and waited. The account reads almost casually about how the Lycan eventually came to the hunter with his head bowed and his knees on the ground, begging for mercy, something deeper than flesh.

I read the passage three times.

The hunter forgave him. Something in a hunter’s biology, when introduced back into the festering wound as an antidote, could regenerate the damaged tissue entirely.

A walking cure and a walking weapon at the same time.

I lean back in the chair and stare at the ceiling.

Why would I ever do that? Why would I bite a Lycan, keep him alive, and then hand him back his life? The moment I get my teeth in one, I’m not thinking about antidotes. I’m thinking about finishing it.

But I mark the page anyway.

I go back through everything…every documented fighting structure, every recorded stance and strategy used by hunters before me. By the time I’ve read it all twice, the clock on the wall reads twelve minutes past midnight, and I’ve run out of text.

I leave the library and take off my shirt in the corridor, feeling the shift in my eyes before I’ve even reached the door…the blue bleeding in at the edges of my vision the moment the moon finds its full exposure through the glass. I break into the woods before I’ve consciously decided to.

Two hours. Maybe a little more. I’m there running rouge and by the time I cross back into the pack house the girls have gone quiet.

I check Demetra’s room first. She’s not there.

15:55 Tue, May 19

Chapter 143

Aren’t they asleep yet? It’s past two in the morning. What the hell are they still doing?

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I leave her room and head to the living room where they were earlier. That’s where I see them….all bundled up across the different couches, sleeping with the TV still playing in the background. Some horror movie is on mute now while the credits rolling silently across the screen.

The larger couches have claimed most of them completely.

Teddy is on the largest couch with one leg hanging off the edge. Tiffany is curled in a ball on the love seat, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. Sabrina is on the chaise, with her hair fanned out across a throw pillow.

And then there’s Demetra.

She’s wedged into the corner of the smaller couch with a frown pulling at her face even in sleep cause the space is too small but she’s too stubborn to wake up and fix it. She’s squeezing herself smaller and looks irritated even unconscious.

I navigate the room carefully, nudging a stray pillow aside with my foot as I move to crouch beside her. With the tips of my fingers… softer than I usually bother being, I move the hair back from her forehead and look at her face properly.

I slide one hand beneath her and lift.

The moment she’s in my arms, her face stops frowning cause her body recognises my scent.

The elevator is silent at this hour as I carry her through it and down the corridor and into her room.

I lay her on the bed as gently as I can, pulling the covers up over her body.

Demetra’s hand finds my shoulder. She snuggles closer, face pressing into the crook of my neck, and she makes a small sound with a look I’ve seen on Amira’s face… it makes me smile.

So, I stay…to keep looking at her.

Two hours. That’s all I get.

My watch buzzes against my wrist and I’m awake immediately, the way I always am…no gradual climb out of it, just: asleep, then not. I remember in the same instant that three structural masters from the Wolf Art Academy are gonna be here. I invited them myself, which is not something I do for ordinary preparation but there’s nothing ordinary about a Black Covenant pack at stake, so I’m not cutting corners on anything.

The moment I open my eyes, I feel Demetra poke into me with her ass in her beauty sleep. On any other day… before this bloody Lycan came into our lives. I know what we would be doing on this bed, in this spooning position.

I resist giving her a kiss on her cheek.

The fear that she might wake up and see me in her bed is precisely why I don’t. I get up and hit the shower, find the energy drink refrigerator downstairs and crack open a Red Bull, and move through the morning dark

15:55 Tue, May 19

Chapter 143

of the pack house.

The training area lights are already on when I get in.

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Jupiter sees me coming and turns to the three figures standing near the rig, giving them the signal. Two men, one woman. I clock all three of them in under a second… it’s habit and while the two men turn to greet me, the woman doesn’t.

She’s looking at the rig.

Not glancing at it. Looking at it. She’s got a puffy jacket on and shoes I’d associate with a recreational football pitch, not a serious training floor for an Alpha like me. Lemon yellow, apparently. I notice them the way I notice anything that doesn’t fit.

“Alpha Emris. A pleasure.”

“Welcome to the Covenant pack,” I say, turning my attention to the two men and giving them the nod that passes for courtesy at this hour. “Five hours in the cold. Couldn’t have been easy for you all to get here.”

They introduce themselves and then my eyes drift back to her, still standing with her back to us.

I scratch the edge of my jaw. “Who’s she?”

“She’s also an instructor at our institute,” one of the men says, and I can tell from the way he says it that the description doesn’t quite cover it. He glances toward her briefly, then back at me. “Eight years in the marine army. Drill training, combat conditioning, species–specific warfare. She’s worked with over five hundred wolf breeds, knows every strength they default to, every power structure they fall back on when they’re cornered. There isn’t a stance she hasn’t seen or broken down.”

I say nothing but when I look at her again, it’s with respect.

She’s still got her back to us, still examining the rig, but something in the set of her shoulders tells me she’s been listening to every word.

“The name is Honey.”

She turns around when she says it. Her hair is in a wolf cut, grown out just enough at the top to have shape but cropped close enough on the sides to mean business. She walks toward me with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes already on mine, and she doesn’t look away.

I give her my full attention because she’s taken it.

“You have a luna?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is she? Is she the type that loves you?” She stops a few feet from me.

I frown because what does that even mean.

“Yeah. She does. She’s asleep right now.”

15:55 Tue, May 19

Chapter 143

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“Then we should leave here and go somewhere further out. Somewhere she won’t hear your howl when we train.” Honey glances toward the other two instructors with a look and they nod like they expected it.

I had brought the structural masters here because they were, by every account the best analysts in the game. But standing here now, watching the way the other two defer to Honey makes me realize she’s the analyst.

I uncross my arms. “What do we need? What’s the plan?”

Honey pulls her jacket tighter at the front.

“How many days before you fight the Lycan?”

“Three.”

“Three days. We don’t have time for what I’d normally do. You paid well and we don’t want your money to waste. Two days….we break you in completely. Leave nothing untested. The third day you rest, you eat, you sleep, you get your head right. Then you go to war.” She glances around the training area again.

“Take us somewhere else. Somewhere open, somewhere no Alpha wants his luna to hear your dying pain.”

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