Just a Rogue

Evan

I am awakened by a gasp, and the feeling of Corinne sitting bolt upright on the bed next to me. I open my eyes in the early morning light to see her staring around the room in confusion, and also I think in fear.

“Oh no! Oh no!” she gasps, “I must have fallen asleep!”

“Yeah,” I say from the pillow, “me too. Don’t worry, nobody is going to care.”

She leaps off the bed, still wearing the clothes she slept in, and darts back and forth nervously. “I should be downstairs! I shouldn’t be out of my room!”

That gets me up. I stand and try to catch her hand. “Really, it’s fine,” I try to assure her. “The leaders said that you could be out of your room as long as a member of the pack is with you. Remember, we even saw Beta Nolan last night coming in here, it was fine with him.”

Considering that I had to catch her last night trying to run away from the River Moon packhouse, she seems very concerned to make sure that nobody knows she isn’t where she should be. She is standing still at least, but her hand is on her mouth, and she is looking around like she can’t decide what she should be doing.

“Look,” I tell her, “just go in the bathroom and get ready. There’s a spare toothbrush and stuff in the drawer. Then we’ll just go down to breakfast. You’ll see - nobody will even say anything about it. The only person who could possibly notice would be Amelia, and you know she’ll be cool about it.”

She nods nervously and goes into the bathroom. While she’s in there I grab a fresh shirt out of my suitcase to at least make it look like I didn’t sleep in yesterday’s clothes. I’m not exactly worried about having the rogue sleeping in my room overnight, but she’s not wrong that it might raise some eyebrows if everyone found out. She doesn’t need to change - she’s been wearing my sweatshirt every day, so nobody should notice anything different about that.

She comes out of the bathroom looking slightly calmer. “Give me a minute,” I request as I go in.

When I come back out she is standing next to the window, gazing out at the forest behind the packhouse. “Are you ready?” I ask.

She nods, but rather than leading her straight out of the room, I move over to her, and she gazes up at me with her beautiful clear gray eyes. I reach up and brush her long dark hair away from her face. She doesn’t stop me, so I lean down, hesitate a moment, then give her another kiss.

Just because she let me kiss her some last night doesn’t mean that she would be feeling the same way this morning. I’m so happy when she relaxes against me, and even reaches one of her hands up behind me and threads her fingers into my hair. Mmmmm.

I don’t linger, I don’t press the issue. All I say is, “All right? Ready to go?”

She nods again, and we head through the hall and down the stairs.

When we get to the cafeteria, there aren’t too many people eating breakfast yet, and the table at the back we’ve been sharing with Dom and Amelia is vacant. It’s still pretty early. We go through the breakfast buffet with trays to get some food, and head over to our table to sit down.

She eats quietly as usual, her eyes cast down to her plate. It always makes me wonder, what it was like living with the rogues. I know how abusive they were, but I’ll bet I don’t understand the full extent of it. I’ll bet that their leader, Xavier, controlled her food intake as well as every other part of her life. I’ll bet he made her work for it, suffer some abuse before he’d allow her to eat.

I need to stop thinking about it, it’s just making me mad and there’s nothing I can do until the leaders of our two packs make the rest of the plan to take out the rogues. We have explored their territory, now I think it’s time to take action. But I have to wait to see what the Alphas decide.

I see Dom and Amelia come in the door, obviously looking around then seeming relieved to see Corinne already here. I’ll bet Amelia tried to get her out of her room and was worried when she wasn’t inside. I lean down to Corinne and murmur, “There, see, they’ve found you here and everything is fine.”

I glance at her to confirm that she is feeling relieved, but instead she has the strangest expression on her face. She is staring at Dom and Amelia, her eyes huge, her mouth slightly open, as though she is completely astonished by them.

What on earth? I mean, it’s just our friends, we’ve been hanging out with them all week. Is it that they came to the cafeteria at the same time? I look back over at them, and don’t see anything unusual. They are just moving through the buffet line selecting their food, as always making a cutely contrasted couple with his dark skin and her light.

It isn’t until they get back over to us and start sitting down at the table that I realize what Corinne was looking so shocked about.

I see it first on Amelia, and am not sure I’m right about it, so I look at Dom, and sure enough, it’s there too. On both of their throats, big red marks, looking like brands, like the fiery imprints of teeth, like the marks that Alpha Kanen and Luna Janine left on each other’s throats during last night’s mating ceremony.

WTF?