The Fall

Fury

XAVIER POV

There are a few forms of anger.

One is the quick flash in the pan anger that causes you to snap with an explosion colorful language, but doesn't really have any substance.

Another is the anger from fear. You protect your emotions from the fear of loss by directing anger loudly and violently at something else.

Then there is the silent, simmering, righteous anger of someone who has been truly, irrevocably wronged.

The livid fire of a calm person.

You are burned by the molten lava behind their eyes. You feel the pain you inflicted to cause that anger. You wait for a reaction that might not ever come, because you may have just ruined your chance to ever elicit any form of reaction from them ever again.

That was Claire.

At the very least she realised that she had been allowed to believe she was going crazy, over being shown the respect of being given the truth. What she had believed to be hallucinations were, in fact, a reality she had previously believed belonged in books or concocted by drug addled brains.

To be fair, nobody had actually told her she was hallucinating. But nobody had told her that she hadn't been hallucinating either, and it's not like she had kept any of what she was experiencing a secret.

She turned to Sally. "You aren't freaking out. Why aren't you freaking out?" Claire gasped, an outraged hand flying to her open mouth. "You knew?!"

Diego turned to Sally with wide eyes of shock and relief "You know?!"

"Claire I couldn't say anything..I..." Sally stammered to a retreating Claire, who back off, kicked off her shoes, and ran.

Sally tried to chase Claire, but her forward momentum was thwarted by Diego grabbing her arm. "You know?!"

Making a frustrated hissing noise, Sally twisted out of his hold and ran after her best friend. In the intervening seconds Claire had disappeared around a corner.

Diego went to chase them both, but I held him back with a strong arm and a sharp sentence. "Give her space Diego."

"Yes Sir, or My Lord? What do I call you? Please tell me, what is going on? I have been combing my brains for a good enough reason to ask Alexi if I could bring her into our world. Yet it appears she is more than informed." Diego's furrowed brow was almost cute, and a nice distraction from my current problem.

"Xavier when we are around the ladies, Monarch at all other times. She is aware about shifters existing because of a situation with Claire, but you are not close enough to either of them to learn personal details further than that from me. Is Sally your mate, or just a fling?" I asked curiously. It may seem like a personal question, but it was my place to ask whatever I wanted, and his to answer.

"I'm not sure, Monarch. I feel more strongly towards her than I have ever experienced, but I have been told it can be difficult to tell with normies. They form bonds more slowly, and in different ways to shifters. I think maybe she might have some unactivated shifter DNA buried somewhere, but at this point I just don't know."

His eyes never left Sally, who had stopped at a street corner a few blocks away and was stalking back with a furrowed brow and thunder in her eyes.

"Where do you sit in pack ranking?" I pushed further, watching Sally's determined stride warily. She was about to rain hell down on us.

"My father is beta, and is training me to take his place." Diego said, worry twisting his features as the storm rolled in.

"Second in command of the wolves? So you are definitely strong enough to bring out whatever recessive traits may be lurking there. Do you want to turn her life inside out?"