Warm hands sliding over my belly were what woke me, gently, from the deep sleep I’d been in. With a soft sigh, I snuggled back into the body behind me.

“What time is it?” I whispered in a voice thick with sleep, not bothering to open my eyes.

“Late,” Caleb murmured back, pressing a kiss to the back of my neck. “Or early, depends how you look at it.”

“How early?” I asked, rolling over in his arms and snaking my own around his waist to cuddle in tight. My cheek pressed to his hard chest, and I breathed in his vanilla and cinnamon scent. He smelled like the most delicious cookie sometimes…

“Kitty Kat,” he chuckled. “Did you just lick me?”

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, nodding slightly. “Your fault. You smell like baking.”

He huffed a little disgruntled sound. “I guess there’re worse things, and if it means you licking me more often...”

It probably wasn’t intended to be funny, but I snorted a laugh nonetheless, cracking my eyes open a scant millimeter and pushing up to peer at him.

“Why so late tonight?” I whispered, inspecting his face and finding worrying dark circles under his eyes. He’d been spending almost every night with this witch who was teaching him to control his powers, and I was getting concerned he might burn out.

Caleb hesitated a moment. “No reason,” he replied, dodging my eye contact.

My lips pursed, and I thought again about pushing him for more information. It wasn’t worth the fight though, as I’d already learned. We’d been on the run from Omega for just over a week, and in that time Caleb and I had already entered into some pretty heated arguments about this mysterious training.

“We need to move again today,” he told me, changing the subject.

Tucking my face back into the crook of his neck, I sighed. “Again?”

“We have to stay ahead of Omega,” he reminded me for what felt like the seven thousandth time. Of course I knew we needed to. Jonathan—my dad, and head of the Omega Group—had tried to kill us all on more than one occasion, and I didn’t care to stick around and wait for him to succeed.

“Why do you think he’s doing this?” I asked again. I’d been asking the same question all damn week, ever since overhearing the damning evidence that my own dad was behind the car bomb and the crash and countless other little accidents over the past month and a half.

“I don’t know, Kitty Kat. But we’re going to find out, right?” Caleb pulled back to peer into my eyes again. His own emerald gaze serious for once as he met mine. “We’re in this together now. All of us.”

His meaning was clear, and I smiled sadly. He meant even though my adoptive dad had apparently been using me for his own gain and had maybe never loved me at all, I didn’t need him. I had more people in my life now who cared for me than I’d ever had before, and I would not let this betrayal break me.

“I know,” I whispered back, sliding my hand up to brush over his cheek. He hadn’t shaved, and his stubble was rough under my palm. “Do we need to leave soon?”

“Not for another few hours. Vali was organizing the next location when I came in.” His gaze ducked to my lips before returning to my eyes. “You should get some more sleep.”

I gave a tiny shake of my head. “No, I’ve done hardly anything but sleep this past week. I’m ready for some action or something. Maybe I should see if I can help Vali.”

“You know he’ll say no.” Caleb grinned. Vali had been saying nothing other than no to me all week. Some crap about not wanting to involve me in his sordid affairs, but it was starting to sting as a bit of a rejection.

“Oh, don’t give me that face,” Caleb laughed when I pouted at him. “If you really don’t want to sleep, I could suggest another activity...”

This time, it was my gaze that ducked to his lips. “Oh, yeah?” I grinned, anticipation fluttering through me as I became acutely aware of how close our bodies were and just how little we were wearing.

“Yeah,” he replied, a wicked smile on his lips as he lay back on the pillows and tugged me closer until I was flush against his side. “Look.”

He reached over to the nightstand and grabbed a small switchblade, which he used to prick his finger. Fascinated and more than a little confused, I watched while he squeezed a sizeable droplet of blood onto his fingertip, then raised his eyebrows at me.

“Ready?” he asked, and I narrowed my eyes. Ready for what? Certainly not what I’d had in mind…

With a sexy sort of chuckle, he flicked his hand up at the ceiling, sending that little droplet of blood soaring through the air. I watched it, transfixed, and when it hit the plaster beside the ugly-ass light fixture, the whole ceiling seemed to just... disappear.

“What...” I breathed out, staring up at the clear night sky above us and the luminescent green light bending and curving in front of the stars.

“We travelled all the way to fucking Harrow, Alaska, and you never got to see the Northern Lights,” Caleb murmured, tugging me to lie back down beside him so we could both look up at the display.

“So you thought...” I trailed off again, totally gobsmacked by what I was seeing. “Is this just an illusion?”

Caleb snickered, and his hand tightened around my waist. “Listen to you becoming an expert in magic. No, Kitty. Not an illusion. More like a window. This is the exact sky over the North Pole right now.”

His teasing about me becoming an expert in magic was in good spirits. Since bonding with Austin, an Ink Mage, my magic had been sort of just bleeding out all over the place. I’d been casting spells I hadn’t intended, and after accidentally turning Cole green one day, Austin had decided I needed more formal training in how to use his magic.

If I’d thought his teaching was painful when learning how to shoot, it was nothing compared to the ogre he was when teaching magic.

“This is so cool,” I whispered, gazing up at the beautiful natural phenomenon above us for a long time. The way the light shifted and moved was mesmerizing, and I soon found myself... calm. Calm in a way that I just hadn’t been able to achieve in longer than I cared to remember.

Between finding out I was a Ban Dia—one of a master race that essentially created all supernatural beings—and being hunted, tortured, and blown up by every man and his damn dog... there just hadn’t been any downtime.

Turning back to Caleb, I pressed a soft kiss to his lips, letting it linger a moment before pulling back. “Thank you,” I murmured, meeting his eyes with sincerity. “This is amazing.”

“Anything for you, Kitty Kat,” he replied, his fingers trailing up my side underneath my baggy sleep shirt. Or rather, Cole’s T-shirt, which I had commandeered to sleep in. Men’s T-shirts were always so damn cosy.

“Couple of hours, you say?” I double-checked, knowing we would need to allow at least one hour to pack up the cars and wipe any trace of ourselves clean.

“Mm-hmm, that I did.” This time, his smirk was as wicked as my own, and heat flushed through me.

“Good.” My fingers traced over the ink on Caleb’s well-muscled abdomen, following the swirl and flow of the lotus blooms down lower until my fingers reached the waistband of his sweatpants. “Then we have time to fully appreciate this amazing view.” And by that, I was not referring to the Aurora Borealis lighting up the room with its shimmering, green glow.

“Kitty Kat...” Caleb scolded, “I was trying to have a nice, relaxing moment with you.”

Humming happily in my throat, I placed another lingering kiss against his lips, taking my time and feeling his body respond.

“Consider me relaxed,” I teased when our kiss ended. “Now I want to thank you for this amazing gift.”

My fingers had hooked into the waistband of his sweats, and there could be no mistaking what I meant by that. Caleb groaned, then threaded his fingers into my hair to pull my lips back to his.

This time when our lips met, there was nothing languid or gentle about it. Caleb teased my lips apart, his tongue delving into my mouth and tangling with mine in a torrent of pent up desire on both of our parts. With everything that had happened recently—Caleb’s magic training, our mission to retrieve my Ban Dia ring, and then all the safe-house hopping—it had really been too damn long since Caleb and I had been intimate with one another.

“Kitty Kat,” he hissed as I freed him from his sweats and wrapped my palm around his length. “This was supposed to be something nice for you.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, but my mouth was busy moving down the line of his neck to his chest.

Caleb sucked in a sharp breath, his hips lifting slightly as my fingers gripped him and stroked. For just a few moments, he let me, and my lips closed over one of his nipples.

“Nope,” he muttered, grabbing me by the waist and sitting me across his waist just long enough to yank my T-shirt off. After tossing it aside, he then flipped us again, and I landed with a puff into the pillows, looking up at the glorious sight of the Northern Lights over Caleb’s half naked frame.

“Mmm,” I grinned. “I think I like this view.”

He smiled back at me, looking like some sort of fallen angel with the twinkling stars and glowing green framing him while he knelt between my spread legs.

“I think I do too,” he agreed, trailing his fingertip over the thin fabric of my underwear and sending warmth curling upward into my belly.

I crooked a finger at him to beckon him closer, and he obliged. Bringing his lips back to mine, he shifted so that his full weight wasn’t flat on top of me, which also gave him access to explore my body with one hand.

“Can’t believe you haven’t got my asshole brother back for this yet,” he whispered, running his rough thumb over the gorgeous fox tattoo on my side, following the inked lines just as I had done to him. I knew what he meant though. Not for giving me a tattoo that strangely encompassed the essence of both me and my six guardians. He was referring to the fact that his twin brother’s name was spelled out in the negative space between butterflies.

Austin had, quite literally, tattooed his name on my body.

“Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll get him back,” I promised. “I just haven’t thought of the appropriate revenge yet.”

Caleb chuckled, taking another kiss from my lips and sliding his fingers under the fabric at my hip. “Good. I have an idea for that... remind me later?”

“Uh huh,” I sighed, flushed with heat and excitement as his long fingers reached my aching groin and slid down to tease at my opening. “Later.”

Grasping his face, I turned his mouth back to mine, crushing a demanding kiss to his lips, silently urging him to quit messing around. My whole body was trembling with arousal, and the anticipation was fucking killing me. In the best possible way.

His own arousal was pressed hard against my inner thigh, just inches away from where I wanted it to be. Needed it to be.

“Caleb,” I gasped, my breath catching as his fingers slipped inside me, stroking at my inner walls then withdrawing to rub at my swollen clit, his fingers wet with my own lube.

“Mmm patience, Kitty Kat,” he teased as his fingers circled, flicked, and dipped, driving me into a damn frenzy.

“Cal, please,” I begged. “Please, I need you in me. Now.” My hips bucked, sliding me just a fraction closer to his naked erection.

Don’t get me wrong; I was all for long, drawn out play sessions and a huge advocate of foreplay. But in that moment, I just needed him.

“Dammit, Kitty Kat,” he muttered. “I can never seem to say no to you...” Withdrawing his fingers from me, he pulled the crotch of my black panties to the side and pressed the tip of his dick to my opening.

“Yes,” I hissed with satisfaction as he pushed inside me, ever so damn slowly. My walls were still tight from the lack of warm up, and he needed to work his way in carefully while my legs wrapped around his waist and pulled him closer.

“Fuck, yes,” I moaned as he gave up his slow entry and simply slammed the rest of the way home with a breathy grunt.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Kitty,” he swore, bracing himself above me. His arms thickly corded with muscle as he held himself in that push-up position with only our lower halves together. He looked down on me with heat in his gaze, and I bit my lip.

“How did I get so stupidly lucky?” he breathed, pulling back out halfway before burying deep back inside me.

“You?” I snickered in disbelief. “I think I’m the lucky one here.” My hands threaded up around his neck, pulling him down on top of me so I could feel him against my body. “Now shut up and fuck me.”

Caleb snorted a laugh, burying his face into the crook of my neck before replying, “Yes, ma’am.”

A grin of satisfaction spread across my face as Caleb obeyed, working my body with a ridiculous intuition of exactly what I wanted—making me just a little suspicious he might be able to read minds. Either way, I wasn’t complaining as he fucked me right up to the edge of an orgasm while the green glow of our borrowed Aurora Borealis lit the room.

Just as I relinquished control, letting myself slip into a toe-curling climax, a light breeze tugged my attention to the open bedroom door.

Heart racing, I forced my eyelids to stay open while my body shuddered and trembled, not once breaking the gaze of our intruder while I came. Hard. With his twin’s cock deep inside me.

Caleb’s own climax followed quickly after my own, while my pussy was still clenching and pulsing in the aftershocks of an incredible orgasm, and he groaned into my neck. My fingernails clasped at his well-muscled back, holding him tight against me as he came, and all the while his brother watched.

“Did you need something?” I panted the question to Austin, locking my ankles behind Caleb and holding him where he was. If Austin thought I would be blushing and grabbing for a sheet to cover up, he was sorely mistaken.

“A great many things, Princess,” the Ink Mage, and my first bonded guardian, responded drily. “But none of which I imagine you’re willing to provide.” What the hell did that mean? “Tyson sensed you were awake and has been practically clawing a hole in the carpet to get in here.”

Ignoring his weird statement, I looked past his sexy, tattooed ass and saw his tiger familiar crouched behind him, peering in at us. Or rather, at me.

Austin’s familiar had manifested when we bonded and was the first known familiar to have appeared to any mage in over a thousand years. He’d named the giant cat Tyson, after Mike Tyson—insert eye roll here—and the big lug had taken a serious liking to me.

“Hey, buddy,” I cooed to the big cat and was rewarded by a head dip that I knew was his way of saying hello. “Give me a few minutes, and we can go for a walk.”

“Make it ten,” Caleb added, shifting his weight onto one shoulder to look at his brother. “Kitty Kat might need a hand in the shower.”

“Make it five,” Austin snapped back, his hand curling into a fist by his side. “Unless you want my six hundred pound tiger joining you.”

Post-sex hormones made me giggle at that mental image, and I bit down on Caleb’s bicep when I sensed he was coiling for an argument with his brother.

“Five minutes then. Thank you, Austin. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” I snickered, my fingernails still digging into Caleb’s skin in warning.

He knew what I was doing. The two of them had been at each other’s throats almost since the second my bonding with Austin had been completed. It wasn’t the fact that Caleb had walked in on us having sex covered in blood while my former abuser lay gutted on the floor; that had been purely a necessity in order for me to heal my many, many injuries.

No, Caleb was pissed as hell that Austin had bonded to me, and Caleb still hadn’t..

“Come on,” I sighed, unlinking my heels from behind him and smacking him on the bare ass. “Let’s clean up before Tyson really does decide to join us.”

Or before I have to break up yet another King twin argument.

“Wait, run that past me again?” I had been only half listening while scratching Tyson’s massive head where it lay in my lap. The damn tiger was no more than an overgrown house cat with human-like intelligence. “Split up? As in... go to different locations?”

“That is generally what split up means, Princess,” Austin snarked, and I resisted the urge to pull a face at him.

Asshole.

Ever since we’d bonded, the emotional link seemed to be working both ways, and it was seriously messing with my head. Half the time I wasn’t sure whose emotions I was feeling, and half the time, neither did he.

We’d silently agreed to a very healthy arrangement of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, meaning that when I felt the little flare of amusement that I was pretty sure wasn’t mine, I simply ignored it.

Austin was confident we would both learn how to control it, to be able to, essentially, block it out unless we chose otherwise, which I sincerely hoped was true. Until we could master that, though, I wouldn’t risk bonding with any of the others.

A shudder of fear rolled through me at just the thought of having seven conflicting emotions raging within me at the same time. No. Thank you.

Austin frowned at me, having clearly just felt that chill of fear, and I ignored him. We had an arrangement, dammit.

“I’m not saying that’s what we will do,” River replied, standing there looking every bit the leader, the Alpha. He folded his thick arms, causing his crisp white shirt to strain a little, and his golden eyes narrowed as he watched me. “It’s just one possibility we should keep on the table in case we need to create a false trail.”

“Makes sense,” I nodded, burying my hands in the soft fur of Tyson’s neck. “I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Did we have any luck finding somewhere safe for Lucy and Elena to stay?”

My rainbow-haired bestie snorted from the barstool where she perched, eating cereal from a bowl. “Fat fucking chance, sunshine,” she snickered. “I’m sticking to you like glue.”

Rolling my eyes, I let out a long-suffering sigh and looked back to River. Despite the guys having formally resigned from Omega Group, River was and always would be the leader of our little team.

“Okay, so where to this time?” I asked, dropping the whole Lucy-safehouse scenario for another day. I would win that argument sooner or later, even if I did need to appeal to her protective side. Elena—her girlfriend, as well as Cole and Vali’s sister—was nowhere near equipped to handle being on the run from Omega and whoever else was hunting me.

“Toronto,” Vali responded instead of River.

Dragomir Valeriu du Romane, or Vali for short, was a bit of a wild card in our crew. Cole’s estranged older brother, he had been, or still was, the head of a huge crime syndicate set up by their Romanian father.

His intense, granite-gray eyes locked on me, unblinking as he stood in an almost mirror pose to River. Muscular arms, encased in butter-soft black cashmere, folded while he leaned his back against the door frame.

“Cool,” I nodded, not needing to ask inane questions like why there? The location was irrelevant. Staying ahead of my adoptive father, Jonathan, was all that really seemed to matter at this point in time. Hopefully once we’d moved a few more times, we would have confused the trail enough we could go back on the offensive.

The ducking and hiding was grating against me. I needed to know why Jonathan had been using me, but possibly more important than that... I needed to find the creepy doctor who had taken a vial of my blood.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Wesley reassured me, sliding his strong hand over my shoulder and rubbing the tense muscles in my neck. “We’ll track him down sooner or later.”

One the one hand, I loved that Wes was in tune with my thoughts enough to know exactly what I was thinking, but on the other... “Yeah, it’s the ‘later’ that I’m worried about.”

“Toronto might be okay as a base,” River suggested, but didn’t look overly optimistic. “I’d feel more comfortable with somewhere more secluded.”

“I get that, I do,” I nodded, still running my fingers through Tyson’s fur, his throat vibrating against my lap as he purred. “But maybe we can just start looking when we get to Toronto? I don’t know what that dude wanted my blood for, but given he’d made an arrangement with Mr. Gray, it can’t have been anything good.”

A deep shudder rippled through me as I remembered the slimy little man attaching an IV to my vein while I lay immobile, zip-tied to a bed. Then how he had left me there, knowing full well the kind of hell Gray intended to rain down on me... Some people were seriously sick fucks.

“Yes, I think so,” River agreed, his golden eyes pinched with concern as he watched me.

Wesley raked a hand through his floppy blonde hair, then scooted a little closer to me on the couch so that our thighs touched. “I’ve already started doing some background and surveillance on Director Pierre too,” he offered. “So we might have something more concrete to go on once we arrive at the new safe house.”

“Awesome,” I grinned my appreciation, but my stomach twisted like I might throw up. How the fuck had it come to this? That we were running spy-level background checks and surveillance on my own dad?

I guessed it was a small consolation that we’d found out when we did. Jonathan had been acting weird ever since we’d captured and questioned Madam Dupree, months ago. She’d been the one to really open my eyes to what was going on in the shadows of this world—that magic was real and I wasn’t even human.

At least we’d found out before anyone died. Or at least, died permanently.

“So, Toronto again. How are we getting there? Plane, train, or automobile?” I pasted on my best big-girls-don’t-cry smile and looked to Vali once more. River was in charge, yes. There was no doubt about that. But Vali was the one orchestrating our little game of hide and seek with Omega Group, thanks to his extensive directory of underworld contacts and the seemingly bottomless pit of money at his disposal.

“By road... for the most part. Then we will cross Lake Ontario by boat.” He said it so seriously, and he looked so damn sinister in his black, long-sleeve top and dark jeans with his wavy, shoulder-length hair tied back in a tiny ponytail... it forced a grin to crack through my anxious inner turmoil.

“Under the cover of night?” I teased. “Like real criminals?”

Vali’s gray eyes narrowed at me in dangerous amusement. “Yes, draga. Like real criminals.”

The Romanian endearment sent a flutter through me, and I ducked his intense gaze. Our relationship was still... new? Uncertain? Confusing as all hell? I blamed the circumstances of our meeting for the mess we were in now.

Vali had purchased me in a slave auction after I’d been kidnapped, but the bastard had never told me he was one of the good guys until the ninth hour. So the attraction I’d felt toward him had seemed a bit on the Stockholm Syndrome side of sane.

“Cool,” I murmured, then looked to River once more. “Can I drive?”

Our stoic, British leader snorted a short laugh and generously offered up a tiny half smile.

“Not bloody likely, love.”

Damn. Worth a try, though.

“I’ll let you ride shotgun if you’d like,” he offered, oh so generously, and I sulked a little. River had yet to allow me to drive his Aston Martin Vanquish, despite my never-ending pleading.

“Fine,” I sighed and headed back into the bedroom to grab my small suitcase of clothes. We had left Omega headquarters in a bit of a rush, given we were pretty certain Jonathan would have been calling the cavalry down on us, so I’d had to leave the majority of my stuff behind.

It was for the best though. We were moving around so much, it just wasn’t practical to have more than one bag.

As I threw my few toiletries into my bag, zipping it shut and rolling it out to the cars, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful about this next step. If all went according to plan, this would be the last stop before we could find a more permanent base and start turning the tables.

I was sick of running and hiding. It was time for action.