I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 15

I Was Only His Backup Mate, His Second Choice Luna Chapter 15

Then Magnus went in after me, swimming like something rabid.

I learned later that he’d come to the Blackwoods‘ at dawn, been told I’d gone to the cemetery, tracked me there by a scent he’d have known anywhere, and followed the tire ruts of three unfamiliar cars down to Frostmere.

Aelia saw him and lost her nerve entirely.

“Magnus, how are you here? Get out of the water, it’s too cold, your leg-

He didn’t hear a word of it. He had his eyes on the place where I was going under.

He reached me and found me barely conscious.

“Estella. Hold on. I’m taking you in. Don’t close your eyes.”

I looked at him. I couldn’t give him anything back.

Something in his chest folded. He got me across his back and started for the bank.

Between the water temperature and the leg, he slowed with every stroke. More than once he thought he was going to take us both down.

His wolf refused. He was not losing his mate twice.

Aelia was on the bank, frightened and furious at the same time.

“Magnus, is that how much you love her? Enough to drown for it?”

He didn’t answer her. He got me onto the mud and it took everything he had.

His thigh had split wide open. He knelt in the wet ground and worked on me and never once looked

at it.

“Estella, open your eyes. Look at me. Please look at me.”

I brought up the water in my lungs and my eyes came open.

Everything went out of him at once. He pulled me in against his chest, both arms locked around me, and his voice shook apart.

“You’re alive. You’re alive.”

He held on to me, and over his shoulder I could see Aelia standing there with pure hatred in her

face.

I said, evenly, “Aelia tried to kill me. I want the police.”

Her expression collapsed.

“You wouldn’t dare. The Blaze family will bury you-”

I didn’t look at her. I looked at Magnus, and I let a little of the old bitterness in.

I was waiting for him to do what he’d always done. Explain her.

He looked back at me and it went through him like a blade.

“You think I’d still protect her.”

My face gave him nothing.

“You did. Every single time.”

That got its claws into his heart and closed. For a second he couldn’t breathe around it.

Because he understood, finally, what I had been living inside. That whatever Aelia did, he would forgive it, for the sake of a childhood and a bloc of council votes.

And he had. Over and over and over.

Aelia was still shouting. He picked me up and carried me back to the Blackwoods‘ at speed.

My phone had drowned. He called 911 himself from the front room.

The deputies were there inside twenty minutes and took Aelia and both men into custody.

At that point she finally understood what was happening to her. She turned to Magnus, sobbing.

“Magnus, drop the complaint. It was one moment, I lost my head. I’ll apologize to her, I’ll pay whatever she wants. I’m young. I can’t go to prison.”

He thought about the surface of that reservoir closing over my head, and there was nothing in his

face at all.

“I’ve let you do as you like for a long time. You nearly killed her. You’ll pay for it.”

That broke the last of her.

“She’s alive. She’s standing right there. Everything I did, I did because I love you.”

His voice went arctic.

“She’s my mate. When she is wrong, I carry it with her. You don’t get to hurt her, and you don’t get

to stand in the same sentence as her.”

Aelia stood frozen. Then she started laughing, high and cracked.

“So you never loved me. Not for a second.” Her eyes glittered. “But Magnus, I wouldn’t have gotten here if you hadn’t let me. Every step of the way, you let me. And you and Estella are never getting

fixed either.”

They put her in the back of a cruiser.

He turned to his Beta.

“Every conflict between Aelia and Estella. All of it. Records, security footage, transfers. I want to see

all of it.”