5. Kellen

Chapter 5

Kellen

Kellen knew he was living in a rut of experiencing the same day every day, but he didn’t entirely mind when he had a female easing up and down his cock.

Today’s willing subject—Oliviana Bryan, the Meteoro instructor. She hovered above him, straddling his torso, her emaciated thighs squeezing his hips in a way that felt like metal pipes were digging into his sides. Wine-red tendrils spilled down her sternum to shroud her bare chest. Though the two of them had been fucking in secret since they returned to Delmarth in September, they were not exclusive—they weren’t even friends as far as Kellen was concerned. Kellen didn’t subscribe to the concept of friendship, or forming any deep connections with those who didn’t share the same blood as him. There were people he’d learned how to tolerate for the sake of enduring the day, but they were considered a means to an end, temporary padding to be shed when it no longer suited him. He didn’t think of this as cruel. He never pretended to give more than he could. He possessed a certain amount of spoons to give out, and he reserved all of them for his siblings.

Anyone who knew him, who really knew him, understood that. It wasn’t his fault if Oliviana pretended to forget.

Oliviana tossed her head back with a strident moan, threading her fingers in her hair, and grinded her pelvis over his cock. Kellen felt nothing. Usually, he experienced at least a miniscule wave of pleasure, but today, he was so distracted, his mind so far away that it wasn’t even in the room, that he held no connection to his cock or the current moment. When she spoke to him, he almost didn’t hear her.

“Tell me again what you did.” She’d asked this three times already.

“I manipulated her mind and sent the illusion of a sea monster after her.”

“Was she scared?” Her moans grew more breathy and louder, saturating the floors and walls.

“She looked scared.” Yet, she also didn’t. Kellen remembered how Noella had scratched the sea monster’s tentacle when it wrapped around her wrist, how she’d managed to escape every potential onslaught with the vigor of her speed, a beautiful look of determination swallowing her facial features when she slapped her hand against the wall and sent the illusion scattering. Kellen hadn’t stopped the illusion himself—he’d planned to maintain the beast for longer to fuck with her more, but the moment her hand touched the wall, he’d lost control over the illusion, as though his own ability was stripped away from him. He hadn’t stopped thinking about that since he left her in the pool.

What was it about Noella Rose that weakened not only his control over his Varmin form, but his ability to sustain an illusion?

“Did she cry?” Oliviana panted, her eyes closed as she pictured Noella, not even paying attention to Kellen.

“Yes, she did.”

“Oh, Gods. Yes.” Fuck, this is so unattractive. The second he gave voice to it in his head, his cock went flaccid. “What just happened?” Oliviana spluttered at the loss of her impending orgasm.

“This is supposed to be fun,” he grumbled.

“ I was having fun,” she argued, her thin brows pulling together as her face scrunched up in a scowl.

“Yeah, getting off on hearing how I tortured Ms. Rose. Not the most flattering of looks for you, Oli.”

“Don’t try and tell me you didn’t find pleasure in seeing her like that, because I won’t believe you, Kell.”

“Fair.” He could admit that. He wasn’t that shitty of a person. “But retelling the story of how I made a woman cry a million times so you can orgasm isn’t fun for me. It’s really fucking irritating.”

“Correction. How you made a human cry. She doesn’t even deserve the title of woman.” Kellen’s patience for Oliviana’s trivial drama had thinned to the point of rupture, reaching its limit. He curled his fingers around her waist and guided her off him, pushing her back so he could rise from the couch.

“I think you should go,” he told her, reaching for his sweatpants.

“You’re kicking me out? Why?”

“Because I’m finding this conversation to be the antithesis of arousing, so I’d rather just crash for the night than struggle to maintain it.”

“Gods, you’re such a dick,” Oliviana hissed before she gathered her jeans from off the floor.

The two raised their heads when they heard a velvety, feminine voice, muffled by the door.

“Let’s do our abridged-long walk tonight. Mommy’s had a rough day,” Noella Rose announced to an invisible figure in the hallway.

“Is she talking to herself?’ Oliviana snickered.

“She’s talking to her gremlin,” Kellen murmured. Oliviana cocked her head.

“Her what?”

“Her dog. She has a dog here with her.” Kellen had yet to meet Noella’s Earthly Plane pet, but the scent of the creature littered every surface of their apartment complex, the noxious odor tending to curse him with a piercing headache every time he encountered it. When he inhaled that wet, grass-like stench, he wished to trade his heightened sense of smell for any other power in Cavale.

“An Earthly Plane mutt?” Oliviana pretended to puke over Kellen’s couch. “Why the fuck would Headmistress Dyer permit that thing to enter our realm, in addition to the wretched human?”

“Do I look like Headmistress Dyer? Ask her your fucking self.” Kellen knew he was being an ass, but he couldn’t muster the fucks he needed to give in order to stop his behavior. Oliviana didn’t seem to hear, or if she did, she acted as though she didn’t. She finally finished buttoning her blouse.

“Same time tomorrow?” she asked with a half-moon smile. Kellen sighed.

This was his biggest issue with Oliviana. He could treat her like shit, he could give her the cold shoulder or throw the cruelest insults at her in the hopes she got the message, but none of it registered.

She always came back. And that was so…boring. Dreadfully boring.

He needed fire. He needed someone who could match his energy, someone who wouldn’t take his bullshit, who could put him in his place. If he asked Oliviana to jump, she’d ask how high and where. There was no mystery, no spontaneity. He knew exactly how she would react to any situation. He could recite every conversation they would ever have before they even happened.

But on the other end of that rope lay having nothing but his hand to pleasure himself with while the hum of Noella Rose in the apartment across the hall rung through his ears. That sounded like the epitome of Terminus to him.

So he tossed at her a non-committal, “Sure,” then watched her scuttle out the front door, hating himself a tiny bit more.

Kellen fell back onto his couch, then reached into his sweatpants pocket and dialed his brother’s number.

“Hey, Kell,” Jarion answered after the first ring, his prepubescent voice adorably squeaky on the other end.

“Hey, Jare. Is Laya with you?”

“Duh!” His little sister, Laya, screeched from what sounded like across the room from Jarion.

Kellen’s lips settled into an adoring smile, feeling more content in the company of their voices then he’d felt all day. His heart belonged solely to those two twelve-year-olds. There wasn’t room for anything or anyone else. Every time he wondered if he’d made the right choice refusing Aros Cavalian’s offer of employment, he heard their voices and looked at their sweet faces and was reminded why it mattered for him to be here to help care for his siblings, why he’d chosen correctly.

“Hi, my loves.” My whole fucking world. My favorite people. “Fill me in on your days.”

“Fine,” Jarion forced out in a less-than-convincing tone. Kellen crunched his fingers into a fist.

“You’ve been saying that a lot lately,” Kellen noted, not attempting to mask his concern. “You sure you’re okay, Jare?”

“Yeah. Everything’s fine. Got nothing to report on.” Yeah fucking right. I can smell bullshit a mile away.

“Have either of you started to feel your Varmin forms emerge?”

At age twelve, on the precipice of puberty, a Varmin’s shifter-form began surfacing. The process of a shifter-form developing was an uncomfortable and at times painful experience—especially for the dragon-shifters who taste fire in their throats for the first time—hence the imperative need to master control over their forms once they fully emerged. Kellen had been keeping a close eye on Jarion and Laya over the summer, but hadn’t detected any indication that their forms were imminent…apart from the strange change in Jarion’s mood the last few weeks, though that could very well be due to typical adolescence and have nothing to do with his dragon.

“I was eating yogurt yesterday and thought I tasted some smoke,” Laya told him. Kellen sat up.

“Really? Tell me what it tasted like.”

“Disgusting.” She gagged into the phone. He heard her hair shake along with her embellished shudder. “I almost vomited.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t taste good,” he validated. “That never gets better.”

“So wonderful that I have that to look forward to for the rest of my life.” Kellen knew she was rolling her eyes without having to look at her.

“Did your throat burn at all, or was it just a hint of the flavor of smoke?”

“No burn. Just a hint. But it’s entirely possible the yogurt just didn’t taste good. The food at Delmarth sucks. I’m always on the brink of hurling here. ” Kellen couldn’t help but laugh at his little sister’s hyperbole.

“Jare? Any signs of your dragon?”

“Nope. You don’t need to keep asking every five minutes.” Kellen sighed at the brusque response. Talk to me, Jare. Please. “Did you see Oliviana tonight?” Jarion enquired, the suggestion of a smile seeping through his voice as he successfully changed the subject off him and dumped it onto Kellen.

“Briefly. Wasn’t feeling it, so I called you guys.”

“How lovely that we were your second choice,” Laya quipped, her giggle drenching his ears.

“You are never my second choice, Eulaylia Ates. The two of you are my firsts and my only.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Laya’s voice softened with reverence.

“Kell, you’re never feeling Oliviana,” Jarion said, bringing the discussion back to Oliviana for some fucking reason. “Why do you keep seeing her? You don’t even like her.”

“Don’t answer that,” Laya rushed, adding, “If you answer with some shitty response of only caring about the body in front of you and not the person, I’ll be forced to hate you. And I happen to love you quite a bit, so please, don’t remind me that you’re part of the less superior gender.”

“Hey! I’m a man,” Jarion reminded her. Kellen heard silence for a moment, so he assumed Laya was looking her brother up and down, stretching the moment out for dramatic effect.

“Exactly,” she said after thirty seconds of quiet.

“I should really stop cursing in front of you,” Kellen laughed. “What a potty mouth you’ve developed, Laylie.”

“You should not be surprised, dear brother, considering Mother told me your first word was fuck.”

The mention of their mother swathed a blanket of uncomfortable silence over the three siblings.

“Have you heard anything from her since the beginning of school?” Jarion asked in a subdued voice.

“Not a word,” Kellen answered, only a half-truth. He hadn’t heard from her directly since she attempted to storm onto campus and remove Jarion and Laya from Delmarth when she learned they’d hired a human on the faculty. Kellen had been alerted by security of her presence on campus, so he hid Jarion and Laya until she was formally removed. He didn’t tell his siblings that he regularly checked up on her, once a day flying off campus to stalk her whereabouts in Cavale and verify she was keeping her distance, as court ordered. He didn’t tell them that last week, he’d seen her at a lawyer’s office, where he overheard her discussing a plan to have Kellen replaced as Jarion and Laya’s sole guardian, on the basis of him simply allowing them to be near a human.

Which wasn’t entirely a useless argument, should a judge take interest and decide to reopen the custody agreement.

He didn’t want to worry them—so instead of tell them the truth of what he’d learned, he worked tirelessly to eliminate the real issue: the disgusting human living across the hall from him.

If she was gone, so would the threat of losing his siblings to his mother.

“I don’t want either of you to waste any amount of time stressing about her,” Kellen told them. “That’s time you need to devote to your studies and preparing your bodies for your shifter-forms to emerge. Let me deal with her, alright? That’s my job. Your only job is to be twelve-year-olds.”

“That’s a pretty big job for you to take on,” Jarion spat with scorn.

“Well, it’s a good thing I’m more than capable of meeting the challenge, little brother,” Kellen replied, equaling Jarion’s hostile tone.

“We’re very lucky to have you,” Laya interrupted. Kellen could hear in her voice that she didn’t understand Jarion’s attitude. “I’m going to run to the restroom. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Kellings.”

“I love you, Laylie. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” When he heard the door shut behind her, he focused on Jarion. “Jarion, what the fuck is going on with you? You’re not acting like yourself.”

“Am I not entitled to some privacy, Kellen? You ask me every single fucking day about my dragon. I’m stressed enough as it is about the emergence. I don’t need any added pressure from you.”

“I don’t mean to pressure you, Jare,” Kellen insisted, softening his tone. “Please, don’t mistake my interest or questions as pressure. I went through exactly what you’re about to go through. I know firsthand how tough it can be, and I did it alone. I don’t want either of you to endure that. If I can offer any wisdom or advice to make the transition easier, that’s all I want. I love you, and I want to help. That’s all, okay?” Silence swelled between them. Kellen huffed, struggling to put a damper on his own irritation at Jarion’s lack of response. “Why didn’t you tell me you were stressed about your dragon form emerging?”

“We don’t talk about that shit, Kell. I honestly didn’t think you would care.” Kellen’s cheeks boiled, that heat rushing up to consume the tips of his ears. If there was one thing he couldn’t tolerate, it was anyone suggesting he didn’t care for the twins, when his entire fucking life since he was sixteen was dedicated to them, after the Gods decided to bless him with the two best people ever created for little siblings. Still, he tried not to let that resentment creep into his answer.

“In what universe would I not care about that, Jarion? You must be mistaking me for someone else’s brother.”

“Because everything comes so fucking easy for you, Kell!” Kellen doubled back at Jarion’s strangled cry. “For you and for Laya. Laya gets excited every time her back hurts because she’s hoping it means her wings will appear. I don’t feel that way. You don’t know what it’s like for me, living in the shadow of the greatest dragon-shifter of our generation, the Primordial the King of the Gods personally wanted for his cadre. Forgive me for thinking you couldn’t handle anything that’s not perfect.” For the first time in possibly his whole life, Kellen didn’t know what to say.

“Jare—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” And just like that, the phone line went dead on the other end.

Kellen chucked his phone into the couch cushion, then buried his face in his hands, bellowing a silent scream between his fingers. Kellen wanted to reach inside his phone, pull his brother out, and slap the side of his head, then bury Jarion in his arms and tell him the truth— nothing came easily to Kellen. Nothing about Kellen could ever be considered perfect. His heart was a mangled, smushed thing, covered in seething rot, touched by the same trauma that drew scrapes along his own siblings’ hearts. His ability to feel anything but anger decayed more and more with each passing day.

His brother and sister would never understand the hardships he’d faced, the pain he carried with him from watching the two most important people in his life suffer from horrific abuse at the hands of their parents before he finally intervened and saved them. They would never know how that experience maimed him, and that was how it should be. Kellen didn’t want Jarion or Laya to know.

He just wanted them to be happy.