Chapter 261-270

Chapter 261
Sasha swallowed hard. “Okay, fine,” she said when she could trust her voice. “I want to stay alive. I want to be with Zev. I want to have his babies—eventually. I want to help the Chimera. I want to get the other females back to Thana so me and Kyelle have more than a handful of girls to hang out with. You tell me how we make those things happen, and I’ll do whatever you want. But I won’t lie to Zev. And I won’t betray them. I didn’t see much of Xar, but what I did see was… fucked up. I’m not taking steroids or whatever they were handing to him. That man was losing his mind.”

“That man was deep in the loss of his mate, terrified of losing his kids, and living with a near-constant sense of inadequacy. We had to juice him just to keep him from falling apart.”

“Why not let him fall apart? Why not let Zev go back—the people love him! All you’ve done by keeping him away was create more conflict for them. Do you just not care?”

“Of course we care—happy people are healthy people. You think we want the Chimera dying after everything we’ve invested in them? No, we don’t. But there’s logistics at play that you won’t understand yet. We had to be utterly certain about Zev. We had to be certain he was truly bonded to you. And that he couldn’t mate with others. That sort of testing takes time, Sasha.”

“Three years?”

“It should have been five.”

Sasha shook her head in disgust. “You people are sick.”