Another heavy yawn creaked my jaw, and I rubbed my eyes while I stood in the lobby with Lucy, waiting for our SUV to arrive.

The heavenly smell of coffee reached my nostrils, and my mouth watered when I saw the massive takeaway cup being waved in front of my face.

“Thank the glorious caffeine gods,” I moaned, taking the cup from Caleb and smelling it. “Thank you, you beautiful human.”

“Don’t encourage her, Cal,” Lucy snapped, making as if to grab my coffee but retracting her hand when I snarled at her. “Maybe if little miss thing here had actually slept last night instead of drinking and fucking with Wes, she wouldn’t be such an ogre right now.”

Caleb fought back a laugh at my rainbow-haired bestie scolding me, but I didn’t bother. Taking a long sip of my coffee, I grinned at her.

“No regrets, Luce. None.” Except for the sandpaper feeling inside my eyelids from too much tequila and not enough sleep. Wes and I had quickly found the suite was only stocked with alcohol but, seeing as we were both newly twenty-one, decided shots were appropriate. Naked shots. Between... other activities.

Come to think of it... my eyelids weren’t the only thing feeling a bit raw this morning.

Damn selective healing. I made a mental note to get better control over that magic. Love bites and fingerprints I didn’t mind keeping for the normal, human length of time to heal, but the uncomfortable ache between my thighs I could probably do without.

“No regrets about what?” Wes asked, coming up to us holding two coffees, then frowning when he saw the one already in my hand. “Oh, I got you a coffee, but I guess Cal beat me to it.”

Caleb smirked, and Lucy held out her hand to take the extra one from Wes.

“Don’t you mean, ‘Hey Luce, I got you a coffee too’?” she prompted sarcastically, and Wesley snorted.

“Uh yep, exactly what I meant,” he nodded, then turned his light blue eyes back to me. “So what are we having no regrets about?”

“All the fucking you two did last night,” Lucy replied with all the tact of a freight train. “And the drinking.” She narrowed her eyes at me, but she was just salty because she was now the youngest.

“Um.” Wesley flicked an uncertain look to me and then back to Lucy. “But it was my birthday?”

His answer surprised me and made me snort coffee, but Lucy was less than impressed. I was pretty sure she was mostly sulking that we were leaving her behind here in Toronto with Elena. But leaving Elena alone wasn’t an option, and they couldn’t both come with us. Hiding out with just the seven of us was going to be hard enough, let alone trying to sneak nine people into a small town without being noticed.

As it was, River, Vali, and Austin had left in the early hours of the morning to go and sort out access keys and things for our new home, while the rest of us were just following now at about mid-morning. Our destination wasa cottage somewhere in the Ontario wilderness that, according to Vali, he’d won in a poker game some years past.

Being a totally black market deal, there was no paper trail connecting him—and by association, us—to the cottage so—touch wood—we should be safe there for a while. At least until we could get a handle on our magic and the guardian bonds and work out what to do with everything we now knew.

Outside the glass doors of the lobby where we stood, a shiny red Nissan Armada pulled up, and Cole hopped out of the front.

“Cole’s here,” I told the boys, handing Caleb my bag to load into the car while I said goodbye to Lucy.

“Promise me you’ll keep safe, Luce?” I asked her seriously, and she rolled her eyes at me.

“Seriously, Kit?” she asked in a dry voice. “You’re telling me to keep safe? Never thought I’d see the day. Don’t worry, girl, we’ll be fine. Finn is going to come and stay with us too, if that makes you feel better?”

It seriously did not. “Oh good, wait until the second we’re leaving to spring it on me that you and Elena’s mentally unstable boyfriend of undisclosed supernatural origins is coming to stay.” I pursed my lips, knowing I had no leg to stand on, given the men I’d chosen for my own guardians. “Just...”

“I know, Kit. Be safe. The same goes for you, you know. Wes and I have made sure all your phones are totally secure now, so don’t go losing it or breaking it.” She tried to look tough, and I smiled, wrapping her in a one-armed hug without spilling either of our coffees.

“Love you, Lucifer,” I told her.

“Love you too, Christina,” she replied, and I joined my boys in the stupidly large SUV, leaving her in the lobby.

Why these cars needed to be so damn massive, I had never understood. But considering my new entourage of lovers, I was beginning to see the appeal. A quick glance in the back confirmed there was eight seats too.

“Vixen,” Cole murmured, pressing the little button to close the SUV’s back door and coming around to open the passenger door for me, “you’re up front with me today. Those two assholes have been stealing too much of your time lately.”

“Aw, I missed you too, Cutie,” I replied, leaning up on my tiptoes to kiss him before clambering up into the passenger side seat.

Cole rumbled something under his breath too low for me to hear, then closed my door and jogged back around to the driver’s side.

“You boys ready to roll?” he asked, glancing in the rearview mirror and then chuckling. Curious about what was so funny, I looked over into the back seat and found Caleb with a marker drawing a careful moustache on a deeply sleeping Wesley.

“What?” Caleb asked me with a shrug. “It’s been too damn long since we had some fun... and he deserves it for keeping you out all night.”

I snickered a laugh and sat back in my seat. “I sense the start of a war.” I glanced at Cole, and he snorted.

“Oh, Vix babe, you have no idea.” He shook his head, turning out onto the street and following the signs north. “The last time this started...” He clicked his tongue, and I heard a chuckle from the backseat.

“Something tells me I’m going to find out when Wes wakes up?” I asked, and this time I needed no reply. Living in the middle of nowhere with my guys was going to be fun; there was no question about that.

It was a decent drive from where we’d been staying in Toronto to our new home, and Wesley was predictably pissed when he discovered his inked on moustache. Even more pissed when he found it was permanent marker and that he’d been chatting with us for over an hour while we held back giggles. It hadn’t been until we stopped at a gas station for fuel and snacks that he’d caught sight of himself in the reflection of a fridge door.

Foolishly, Caleb then fell asleep against the door not long afterwards, so Wes went to town with the permanent marker, giving him a monobrow, a goatee, and a monocle.

“How much farther is it, do you know?” I asked Cole, stretching my neck and rubbing at my lower back. Sitting in cars for too long always made me feel all sorts of kinked up.

Cole scratched at his chin for a moment before replying. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and fuck, it was sexy on him. He and River pulled off three-day stubble like no men I’d ever met.

“Shouldn’t be too much further. Maybe another hour or so?” He glanced over at me and nodded to the glove compartment. “There’s a map in there with the exact location marked.”

“A map?” I chuckled. “How very old school.”

“Not old school, Vixen,” Cole corrected as I flicked open the latch to the glove compartment and pulled out the folded paper map. “Secretive. According to Vali, this house isn’t listed anywhere online, and he didn’t want to go plugging coordinates into Google only to have Omega intercept them somehow. Paper is much safer.”

Sounded sensible, so I nodded and unfolded the paper to inspect it. Sure enough, there was a little dot inked on the paper with a red circle around it.

“Okay, so we are just passing...” I looked out the window, checking for a location on the shop names of the little town we were passing through. “Bravenherst. I think.”

I inspected my map again, located the town of Bravenherst, and absentmindedly circled it with the marker I’d stolen from Wes and Caleb to prevent any more facial features being added to either of them.

“And we need to get to here...” Using the tip of my pen, I tapped the dot that marked the house. “Ugh, that still looks like a ways to go. I wish we could just magic ourselves there.”

Now, one might have assumed that I’d have been more careful about the words I used and the intent behind them... especially when handling ink... but in my defense, I was still really new to the whole magic thing and I was really tired, dammit!

There was no warning or time to react. One minute we were driving sixty to seventy miles an hour down a deserted road on our way out of Bravenherst, and the next we were about to drive straight into the side of a gorgeously extravagant log cabin.

“Shit!” Cole yelled, slamming his foot on the brakes and skidding to a halt some inches from the side of the house. “Vixen!”

“That wasn’t me!” I screamed back, even though I was at least sixty-eight percent sure it was me.

“Well, it wasn’t fucking me,” Caleb snickered from the backseat. “My rune circles can only take, like, one extra person, not an entire SUV and four people with luggage.”

“Uh-oh,” Wes muttered, and I whipped around to look at him.

“Uh-oh, what? What now?” I demanded, starting to panic a bit that I’d done something like... give myself a unicorn horn. As discreetly as I could, I ran a hand over my forehead just in case.

“That.” Wesley nodded out his window to the furious faces of Austin and River as they stormed across the grass.

“Crap,” I groaned. “Cal, uh, any chance you know how to make me invisible?” I tried pleading with my eyes at him, but couldn’t take him seriously with an inked-on monobrow and eyeglass.

“You’re on your own, Kitty Kat,” he smirked. “Don’t think I don’t see you trying not to giggle.”

“Dammit,” I hissed as Austin and River reached our SUV and Austin came around to my side.

Ripping the door open, his scowling face got all up in my business as he yelled. “Christina! I know this was your doing! What in the ever-loving fuck were you thinking? What if people had seen you pop out of thin fucking air here? What if you’d fucked it up and only half the car made the jump? What if you’d all ended up splattered through the fucking car like ketchup? What if—”

“What if you stop yelling at me and consider it was a goddamn fucking accident?” I screamed back at him, unclipping my seat belt and pushing him out of the way so I could exit the car.

Best defense was a good offense, right? Besides, I was not the kind of girl to sit back and be scolded like a damn two-year-old for an accident!

“Do not walk away from me, Christina!” Austin bellowed from behind me, but I didn’t bother stopping or looking back. Instead, I flipped him off and brushed past River to get to the front door of the house.

Fuck. Him.

My anger was burning way hotter than the situation really called for, and part of me knew it was Austin’s anger that was clawing at my throat and making it hard to breathe. I needed to... I didn’t even know. Run? Hit something? Something!

A commotion was going on with the guys still by the car, and Austin was yelling something about reckless use of magic and could have killed us all, but I blocked them out. My only concern was to find a way to calm the hell down before I accidentally blew something up or teleported the entire house somewhere. Hell, I didn’t know what was possible, but I did know that my temper was not going to be good for controlling magic.

“Draga,” Vali’s voice sounded from nearby as I paused in the foyer to the jaw-dropping house.

“Wilderness cabin?” I narrowed my eyes at him standing in the open doorway to the kitchen looking beyond sexy in a tight gray T-shirt and blue jeans. “Vali, this is a fucking mansion.”

The foyer where I stood opened into a huge sunken living area with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over a lake. A lake that I probably would have known was there had we arrived via road and not popped out of thin air in the driveway…

Vali shrugged. “Language barrier. Come, I’ll show you your room.”

I snorted a laugh at his language barrier excuse. Damn Romanian spoke better English than I did. Still, it was better than standing in the foyer fuming with anger and clenching my fists.

“Sure,” I huffed. “Find me somewhere to hide until I lose the urge to rip Austin’s fucking head off.”

“Mmm, his head? Or his clothes?” Vali arched a brow at me then flashed a devilish grin and led the way up the grand wooden staircase.

Muttering weak denials under my breath, I followed him and raised my eyebrows when we entered a bedroom that must have been directly above the living area below. The huge bay windows showed the same view of the lake, and an enormous California king bed took up barely half of the tastefully decorated bedroom.

“This is my bedroom, huh?” I asked. Having expected a pretty basic kind of fishing cabin or something, the shock of this opulence was taking some of the burn out of my anger. Austin was still furious though, and it was keeping my own temper stoked.

“It’s the master suite, yes,” Vali nodded. “Seeing as you’re the master in this little crew of misfits, I thought it appropriate.”

“That’s... really sweet of you, but it’s your house. I don’t mind taking one of the other rooms.” I frowned, trying to rein in my foul mood and be polite but really struggling.

“Regina mea,” Vali chuckled. “You don’t need to mind your manners with me. I can feel your fury and frustration. Sit, talk to me.”

“Regina mea?” I repeated, but did as I was told and flopped down backward onto the impressive bed.

“It means ‘my Queen’ in Romanian,” Vali explained, climbing onto the bed and leaning his back on the headboard. He was already barefoot, and for some reason I found that incredibly hot.

“Austin is always calling you Princess, but you’re not. You’re a queen. Our queen.” He wrapped one of his huge hands around my upper arm and pulled me up the bed till my head was in his lap and he could run his fingers through my hair.

“Hmm.” I pursed my lips. “I like it... which is weird because I hate Austin calling me Princess.”

Vali huffed a small laugh. “No, you don’t. Just like you’re not as mad at him right now as you think you are. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“You didn’t see?” I asked, tilting my head back to look up at him.

“No, Regina, or I wouldn’t be asking, now would I?” He softened his words with a small smile as his gentle fingers brushed through my hair. How odd to think this was the same man who’d shot one of his guards point blank in front of me when we first met.

“Uh, I accidentally somehow magicked us here from Bravenherst, and Austin is losing his shit that it was reckless and stupid, but it was a fucking accident. I didn’t mean to do... whatever the hell I did. It just happened.” I scowled, but Vali’s fingers in my hair were slowly but surely melting the anger out of me.

“It just happened?” he repeated, using a finger to tilt my head back to look at him. “Really? That’s the defense you want to stick with?”

“It did,” I muttered, indignant. He arched a brow at me over those sexy, granite-gray eyes of his.

“Were you handling any ink at the time?” he asked me sternly, and my cheeks heated. “I take that as a yes. I have no idea how this ink magic works, but I would probably say that handling any sort of ink until you get a better grasp of control might be considered reckless and stupid, don’t you?”

My eyes narrowed. “You’re supposed to be on my side, Vali.”

“Why?” he challenged me. “Because I want to fuck you? That’s no reason to always agree when you’re clearly in the wrong.”

Indignation flared inside me, and I sat up to glare at him. “What the hell? I am not clearly in the wrong here! It was an accident!”

“Yes, but it was an accident that could have been prevented had you not been handling ink. Correct?” Damn man didn’t even have the grace to look anything but calm, but I really had nothing to say back to that, seeing as he was one hundred percent correct. Instead, I changed the subject.

“You want to fuck me, huh?” Sweeping my dishevelled hair off my face where it had flopped when I sat up so quickly, I tried really had to wipe the scowl from my face.

Vali barked a laugh, then stroked his thumb over my cheek. “Nice deflection. And yes, you know I do. It’s practically all I’ve been able to think of since seeing you on that stage at the Onyx Auction.”

“Huh, I would have thought it’s been since you caught me masturbating in your bath tub.” I gave him a cheeky smile and received the heated stare I was aiming for in return. His fingers on my face warmed with dragon magic until they were just this side of uncomfortable, and I shifted until I was sitting closer to him on the bed.

“That certainly didn’t help,” he murmured, his blazing eyes fixated on my mouth while I silently begged him to kiss me.

“So, what’s stopping you now?” I whispered back, leaning forward until our faces were only inches apart. We’d only kissed once, but the memory of his lips on mine was still fresh in my mind.

Vali let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Only your five other boyfriends, and the fact that one of them is my estranged little brother who I suspect wants to kill me in my sleep some days?”

“Ah,” I nodded. “Cole.”

“Yeah, Cole,” he agreed, and I sat back a bit. “I hope you understand. I want to make things right with him before...”

Chewing my lip, I nodded again. “Before sleeping with his girlfriend? Got it. Actually, really admirable, and I can’t even be a little mad about it.” I paused, running a hand through my slightly tangled waves. “Frustrated and horny as hell, but not mad.”

Vali smiled and pressed a lingering kiss to my cheek. “Thank you for being understanding; it means a lot to me that I have this chance to mend things with Cole. This is why you’re Regina mea.”

“Uh-huh, that’s me... super understanding.” I huffed another frustrated sigh. “At least I’m in less of a violent rage now.”

“Amazing what talking can do, hmm?” Vali smirked like a shithead. “Has Austin cooled down too? You know he was only scared for you.”

“Bullshit,” I snorted, but when I took the time to inspect his feelings swirling inside my chest, they weren’t totally all outraged anger like I’d thought. Yeah, there was a heavy dose of that, but there was also concern, panic, and fear.

Crap, maybe he wasn’t such an asshole after all.

“Austin... I don’t know him as well as you do, but I maybe have a different perspective? He has not had very good experiences with love, and he is still learning to deal with how he feels for you.” I snorted, but Vali laid a finger over my lips to silence me. “Sooner or later, you two will need to stop lying to yourselves and each other. Until then, this anger and fighting seems to be the only way he can deal with things. I think, despite everything you have gone through, that you’re stronger. Emotionally. So maybe cut him some slack and examine those feelings you are privy to before automatically snapping back at him.”

My lips tightened, and I met Vali’s serious gaze for a long moment while I turned this over in my head.

“Fine,” I murmured eventually. “But only if you do something for me.”

“What’s that?” He smiled indulgently.

“Fix shit with Cole. Fast. Being near you like this and not acting on what my body wants is going to drive me insane.” I rolled my eyes dramatically, but I was telling the truth.

Vali grinned and swiped his thumb gently over my cheek once more. “Deal. Now, are you ready to be yelled at by River? I just bet he has some words for you, too.”

I groaned. Dammit, he was right.

Time to face the music, Kit. Just... keep your trap shut and take the telling-off like a man. Woman. Ugh, whatever.