The Hidden Princess At All-Boys Alpha Academy novel Chapter 870

Jesse stares at his little mate for a moment and then huffs out a laugh, shaking his head and taking her hand. “All right, Mids. Do your work.”

Everyone else again shuffles around and holds hands or otherwise makes contact with their neighbor so they can all travel together, quietly waiting, expectant.

Jesse watches closely as Midnight exhales a long breath, looking around at the Land of Darkness as if she’s saying goodbye to it. Jesse squeezes her hand and she looks up at him.

“You promise?” she whispers, a great deal of trepidation in her voice.

He gives her a soft smile in return, leaning close to press a kiss to her hair, knowing that she’s asking if he means it – everything he promised her. That his family will be kind, that Ariel won’t take her magic away unless Midnight asks, that she will have a wonderful life.

“I promise, Mids,” he says, nearly a whisper. “Every word.”

Midnight exhales slowly and the entire crowd of twenty-four instantly disappears, nothing but their footprints left behind.

The Land of Darkness returns to its eternal state. Quiet, and dark, and peaceful beneath the sky lit by three moons.

I rest my cheek against the expanse of Jackson’s back, feeling mildly miserable physically, even if my wolf sings for joy in my soul. The ATV rumbles as Jackson drives it through the darkness of the Atalaxian night. My body moves and shifts along with it, jolting this way and that as we go, Jackson’s backpack shifting distractingly on my back as well. But even if I am not in the most comfortable sleeping position, I doze.

I slip in and out of sleep, my body exhausted from whipping from the extreme of a new mark to the rejection of a mate. All the while my left arm throbs, pain radiating from my wrist. Not for the first time in the past week I wish for my mother. God, having a magical healer in the family sure didn’t inculcate a very strong sense of pain tolerance in me, did it?

I lift my head slightly when the ATV begins to slow, blinking back to the present.

Jackson has been all business from the moment he started striding out of those cages in the Land of Darkness, me in his arms. There wasn’t a great deal of small talk or conversation as he carried me across that wasteland and far enough outside the cages that when he shifted us back to our world we couldn’t be seen from the Castle. Instead, Jackson concentrated singularly on finding his little campsite again, getting that packed up in under two minutes and then driving us hastily away.

“How are you?” he murmurs, bringing the ATV to a stop and then turning to me from his spot ahead of me, his long legs straddled on either side of the machine.