Or…
For a wild moment, he was tempted to stay. Stay with this alpha, help him return home—wherever it was—and then maybe—
Then what? his rational side said. Kerosvarin had no cure. Was he really ready to bind his life to a feral alpha Jules would never even get to know for real? A feral alpha who would never love him for real, for the person he was? Pheromones and great sex didn’t make a relationship; that much Jules knew. Even if by some miracle his Xeus managed to shift back into a man, he would be disappointed to find himself bound to an unattractive omega like Jules. They had no future either way.
So this… this tight feeling in his chest was stupid. Irrational. It was the mating mark’s doing. It wasn’t real.
But it felt so very real.
Swallowing around the tightness in his throat, Jules took one last breath of the alpha’s scent and whispered, “Go.”
The arms around him didn’t loosen.
Jules bit his bottom lip hard. “Go,” he repeated, looking into the Xeus’s glowing eyes.
The alpha stared at him.
“Mine,” he said hoarsely, his arms around Jules tightening. “Come with me.”
No. He’d only slow the alpha down. And he needed to get back home before his absence was noticed. He had to get the aircar back—it would throw them off the scent and win the Xeus more time. His uncle’s men would only be searching the lands around their house if they didn’t find out that Jules had used the aircar to get the Xeus away.
He had to go back.
He had to.
But he also knew the alpha wouldn’t let him leave—unless Jules tricked him.
His stomach in knots, Jules leaned in and kissed the alpha on his furry cheek. He closed his eyes for a moment. Goodbye.
“All right,” he managed. “Let’s go. Just let me grab my bag.”
He waited until the Xeus got out of the car.
Then he locked the door.
His hands shaking, Jules started the engine and took off, quickly gaining altitude so the alpha couldn’t stop him.
The bond lit up with loss and betrayal.
Swallowing, Jules set the course for home.
“It isn’t real,” he whispered determinedly. “It’s just hormones. It’ll pass. Don’t be stupid, Jules.”
If his vision was blurry, it didn’t matter: there were only clouds in the vicinity.
Chapter 5
Jules returned home feeling far more downbeat and exhausted than the situation probably called for. It didn’t help that he had to spend half an hour deleting the flight logs from the aircar’s internal memory and applying a scent neutralizer all over it to eliminate even the barest hint of the Xeus’s scent. Although his uncle didn’t have the aircar keys, Jules didn’t want to leave anything to chance. He wanted his Xeus to get to relative safety, wherever that was. If there was a safe place for a feral Xeus.
“None of your business,” Jules muttered, but the anxiety under his skin didn’t disappear.
The house was mercifully quiet, but instead of calming him down, it only made him more anxious. It felt like the silence before the storm.
After erasing his fingerprints from his uncle’s keys and putting them back, Jules returned to his room. He climbed into his bed and closed his eyes, willing himself to fall asleep. It was going to be a long day tomorrow. When the Xeus’s escape was discovered, he would need to be at his sharpest in order to convince his uncle of his innocence. He needed to stop worrying and sleep.
But no matter how hard he tried to push those concerns away, they kept sneaking back into his mind. The truth was, in their society, Xeus alphas were looked down on. They were a dying breed, a throwback to their species’ primitive past. They were considered too primitive, too irrational, and downright dangerous when shifted. A shifted feral Xeus outside the full moon would be considered a dangerous abomination, and other people could easily shoot him down, citing self-defense. It was just a fact. No one would let a feral Xeus alpha run amok. Sooner or later, he would be captured. The question was, whether he would be captured by the bad guys or the good guys.
Jules sat up in his bed, his mind racing. Then he quickly left his room and darted into Eric’s across from his.
As expected, his baby brother wasn’t asleep. He rarely was at night, instead doing something geeky on his computer.
“I need your help,” Jules said, closing the door.
***
The morning came far too soon for Jules’s liking. He could barely stop himself from yawning as he stood next to Liam and Eric while their uncle paced the room agitatedly.
“And you’re sure you haven’t seen anything?” Uncle Wayne said.
Liam gave him a confused, angelic smile. “I’m not sure what we were supposed to see, Uncle. I thought there was nothing of value in the basement? Was anything stolen?”