Chapter Six
Aksel had an entire Google calendar full of things to do. He had people waiting on him. Expectations weighing on him. Everyone wanted something from him.
Except Melody. She hadn’t one time asked him for something and now, in the middle of the shit show his life had just turned into, when he should be concentrating on tradition and duty more than ever, he kept thinking about the woman asleep on the other side of the door in his room. She’d been stunning that night. Her dress was simpler and less complicated than every other woman in attendance, but she shone bright above the rest from the moment he laid eyes on her. Melody had always been pretty to him but now was stunning.
“You’re different,” Kai had said one morning when they went over plans to rebuild the dock and beef up security. No matter what they did, New Dawn seemed to be two steps ahead of them in terms of exploiting their weaknesses.
“How so?” Aksel asked, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s hard to explain. You’re more focused? Impatient? Demanding?” Kai was laughing as he spoke. “It reminds me of when I finally owned up to the fact that Ember was my mate and that I couldn’t go through life ignoring her anymore.”
Aksel knew where his old friend was going with this and suddenly, he didn’t want to hear it.
“Do you think it’s because Thala is here now? Do you think your vampire has recognized its mate?”
Aksel couldn’t ignore the sense of dread that Kai’s question caused in him. He didn’t know much about vampire mating practices, but he was pretty damn certain that the mention of someone’s mate wasn’t supposed to make them groan awkwardly and look for the nearest exit. Truth be told, he spent as little time around his betrothed as he could possibly get away with.
“It could be,” Aksel responded to Kai’s question with the most generic response he could come up with when, in fact, he knew his vampire was not responding to Thala as his mate. That was all part of the damn problem.
It’d been a week since Thala sucked the air right from the room with her ill-timed revelation. First, he hadn’t planned on the Scandinavians showing up to the meetings—they never interacted much with the Order. And second, he really wasn’t certain Thala was still counting on the betrothal that’d been yoked on them when they were both young. He sure hadn’t. Aksel had assumed that he had plenty of time to get out of it before the issue would ever come up again. They were immortal—what was the hurry?
But damn it if she hadn’t had a look of sadistic pleasure on her face when she announced that they were engaged. And he’d watched her keep her ice blue eyes on Melody with every word she uttered. He wanted nothing more than to reassure Melody that there was more to the story and he wasn’t even sure why he wanted to make the situation clear to her. He just did. Thala was a political alliance that his mother, the queen of the Scandinavian enclave, insisted on. By denying Thala’s family the union they sought, he could single-handedly bring down the tenuous peace in the northern countries that had existed for less than a generation.
He sat up and rubbed his hands over his face. He couldn’t get a clear thought in his head and the fact that Melody had even acted hurt after that shit show of a night made it all the worse. It’d been like a knife through the damn heart watching her pretty little face crumble at Thala’s words. And she’d cut herself off from him entirely. She avoided him and ate by herself when he was stuck in negotiations. He tried to catch her at her familiar haunts around the island but she wasn’t there.
In truth, he hadn’t owed Melody anything and what was between them was two months and half a world behind them. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Needing a quick distraction, Aksel decided at the spur of the moment to go out to the ocean and cool off. The walk was short and before long, he was under the waves and finally feeling somewhat normal. Things would go back to normal for him once Melody got herself on her feet, Aksel reassured himself. They had to.
At the thought of her name, Aksel felt something new. An urging. Alarm. A slight sense of panic that began in the center of his chest and radiated outward.
He couldn’t put a name on what he was feeling—nothing like this had ever happened to him before—but he couldn’t ignore it, either.
In a flash, he was running back to the compound. He raced past people trying to get his attention and when he found his way to their shared hallway, he heard it.
Struggling. Melody’s muffled cries.
He smelled her fear, too.
His muscles reacted before his brain had time to put a plan together. Rounding the corner and gripping the frame to propel him faster, he took in the scene quickly.
He saw Melody, her face mottled red as she hovered a foot or two above the ground, her feet dangling and her back pressed against the wall. A large hand was wrapped around her throat, constricting her airway. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and it looked like she was starting to go limp.
With a roar, Aksel had the assailant by the back of the head and ripped him off of Melody, who slumped to the floor, gasping for breath.
The man with his hands around her neck was large, nearly Aksel’s size. But he didn’t have Aksel’s strength. And he certainly didn’t have Aksel’s rage.
The fight was bloody and ruthless and the man hardly touched the vampire. Aksel mirrored the assailant’s attack by grabbing him by his own throat and throwing him out the door into the hallway. The man, tall with dark hair and an olive complexion—a local likely—understood it was a losing battle and changed tactics. Instead of offensive, he went for the coward route and tried to run down the hallway.
Aksel was too fast for him and tackled him just a few feet away. Security arrived then, and it took three grown men to pull Aksel off of the badly beaten attacker. When he’d finally been brought down from his battle rage, he gave the team a quick rundown of what had happened and told them to lock the man up in a cell downstairs. He’d brief Kai quickly and deal with the man himself when he’d calmed down.
As soon as the team had their orders and had the attacker in custody, Aksel turned and ran to Melody’s room. She was on her feet now, leaning against the wall and struggling to breathe normally.
Aksel let out a small sigh of relief when he saw that her coloring had returned to normal.
“Are you okay?” He asked, grabbing her elbow in his hand and pulling her around so that she faced him. With his other hand, he gently grasped her chin and turned her face toward the ceiling so that he could examine her neck. He sucked in a breath when he saw the angry red marks.
“Your neck will bruise,” he said simply. He wasn’t great at offering comfort—especially not to women.
Melody only nodded in response and pulled gently out of his grasp. Aksel frowned. He didn’t like that she withdrew from him. It didn’t feel natural.
Fighting off his own instincts, he began questioning her instead.
“I was asleep,” she explained. “I heard the door open and I assumed it was Ember. The next thing I knew, the guy had pulled me out of bed and had his hands around my throat. I fought him, but it didn’t help much, obviously.”
Brave girl, Aksel thought. Instead, he asked Melody if she recognized the man.
She shook her head.
“I’ve never seen him before,” she replied. “But whoever he was, he had a key to my room.”
The annoyance building in Aksel’s chest turned to ice at that. One thing was suddenly clear— they had a betrayer among them.