“Funny. Thought we just finished up with that.”
Sasha’s jaw hung slack. Her outrage had no effect on him. In fact, it only seemed to egg him on. She wanted to hit him again. This time, lay her fist against his other cheek. What good would it do, though? He obviously enjoyed the fight, as evidenced by his return to the arena.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t have the power to enchant anyone or anything.” Her finger shook as she zipped and buttoned her pants. She bent down and slipped her shoes on. “So you have no one to blame but yourself for coming on to me.”
He let out an amused snort that did nothing to calm her temper. “Don’t try to cast the blame on me, as though you had no part in this.”
“Contrary to what you might think, berserker, I have no control over the tether. What’s done is done and there’s no taking it back.” Sasha pushed away from the wall and headed for the open docking bay at the rear of the stockroom. She didn’t have to explain herself to him or anyone else. And she’d be damned if she let him blame her or make her feel guilty for something that was completely out of her control.
Sasha’s wrist was seized in an iron grip a moment before she was spun around. The berserker’s eyes darkened with his anger, giving him an almost sinister appearance. Under the cover of shadow, his face became more angular. Harder. His cheekbones sharp enough to cut. He didn’t frighten her, though. It probably would’ve been better for her if he had.
“I want to know what this tether is,” he demanded. “I want to know what you’ve done to me.”
Sasha let out a disbelieving bark of laughter. “I haven’t done a damn thing to you, berserker,” she said with a rueful shake of her head. “It’s you that’s done something to me.”
“I’ve got a name. You know it now. Use it.”
Bossy SOB. Sasha let out an aggravated side. “Fine. I haven’t done a damn thing to you, Ewan. Is that better?”
For a moment, his expression softened. He quickly recovered, however, and maintained his façade of barely controlled rage. “Better. Tell me about the tether.”
Gods, he was infuriating. Sasha decided she liked him a lot better when they were simply fucking and not talking. Giving him any information would be tantamount to treason. But at this point, what did it matter? The damage was done. He was her mate and nothing would change that. Perhaps she could give him just enough to whet his appetite. Satisfy that annoyingly demanding curiosity and shut him the hell up so she could get out of here.
“Every vampire instinctually knows their mate on sight.” Wasn’t exactly a lie. She was simply mincing words. “It’s something we feel in every fiber of our being. That first night, at the warehouse, I recognize the mate bond the second you crossed the arena toward me.”
He fixed her with an unwavering stare, as he searched her expression for any sign of deceit. He made a show of breathing in deep and holding the air in his lungs before letting it slowly out. Sasha rolled her eyes. She didn’t frighten easily. And she wasn’t stupid. She knew what she could and couldn’t get away with. He wasn’t going to catch her in an outright lie.
“You expect me to believe that?”
Sasha shrugged as though she couldn’t care less. “I don’t expect anything from you. It is what it is. I’m just laying out the facts for you.”
“You call those facts? You didn’t give me one single piece of useful information.”
Sasha’s head canted slightly to the side. His accent became thicker, more pronounced, when he was agitated. Reminiscent of his native Scotland. She would’ve found it entertaining had she not been so monumentally annoyed. She couldn’t help but wonder if he were truly this hardheaded or if he were simply working an angle. “The majority of supernatural creatures recognize mate bonds.” This couldn’t possibly be news to him. “Are you seriously going to stand there and argue over the legitimacy of mine?”
For two days, she’d been operating under the assumption that Ewan had sensed the bond between them. She knew little about berserkers, but what other explanation could there have been? As sworn enemies, she couldn’t imagine him going to her willingly. He’d managed to shoot that theory to shit, though.
“Berserkers don’t recognize the mate bond.” His gaze hardened to onyx. “All of our females were executed by vampires.”
Sasha flinched as though stung. Their combined histories weren’t pretty. She’d heard the stories, though to her they’d merely been legends. An excuse for the berserkers and Sortiari to wage war against them. Either way, she didn’t appreciate the accusation in his tone. She’d had no part in what had happened to their females, and yet, she and every dhampir and vampire on the face of the earth had apparently been made to pay for it.
“As was every vampire executed by berserkers.” She could give as good as she got and she wasn’t about to stand there and take his insults.
Ewan’s dark gaze narrowed. “Not every vampire. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here right now.”
She let out a disbelieving chuff of laughter. Tethered mate or not, she wasn’t going to listen to another second of this bullshit. So typical of a berserker to think that two wrongs would make a right. She jerked her arm free of his grasp. A hundred angry retorts sat at the tip of her tongue but Sasha swallowed them down. It would do no good to speak another word. Besides, she had a feeling he’d enjoy arguing with her all day, given the chance. She turned on a heel and kicked her supernatural speed into high gear, crossing the stockroom to the docking bay in the space of a second. It would’ve been nothing for Ewan to catch her if he’d wanted to give chase. Sasha stopped just outside the docking bay and glanced over her shoulder at the empty opening. Emotion tugged at her chest, half relief and half disappointment that he hadn’t pursued her. She rubbed at her sternum as if it would somehow banish the sensation as she turned away and continued to run.
Preternatural stamina aside, Sasha regretted letting Ani take her car. The trek back to L.A. from the Valley only served to aggravate her already boiling temper. Plus, being alone gave Sasha plenty of time with her thoughts, allowing her to replay everything that had happened over and over again in her head. The images of the range of emotions that had passed over Ewan’s expression when he realized she’d bitten him were seared in Sasha’s mind. Her chest ached as though someone had hollowed it out with a spoon and she feared the dull pain would never go away. Not even Saeed in his emotionless detachment had hurt her as badly as Ewan just had.
If this is what it meant to be tethered, Sasha wanted no part of it. She wanted to send her soul back into oblivion where nothing and no one could touch her. Where her heart would be guarded from those who could so carelessly rip it from her chest. Gods. She’d forgotten how ridiculously sensitive she could be. The beauty of being without her soul for all those months was that it had given her the opportunity to harden her heart. Or at least to have created the illusion of it. Before her turning, she’d feared that emptiness. Had dreaded the prospect of becoming numb.
Sasha stopped dead in her tracks. She doubled over, wrapping her arms around her torso, and let out a scream of frustration that echoed off the buildings around her. It did little to release the tension built up inside of her and did nothing to ease the dull ache in her chest. Tears stung at her eyes but she refused to let them spill. The berserker was nothing more than a means to an end. A way to reclaim something she’d lost. There were plenty of males who would give a limb for the opportunity to have her fangs at their throats. So what if this one didn’t want her? She had her soul back. She needed nothing further from him. She could let this be the end of it and move on.
In fact, it’s what she had to do. The reality of the situation was, she had no other choice.
* * *
“Fuck!”
Ewan laid his fist into the cinderblock wall and it cracked from the force of the impact. The skin split at his knuckles and four crimson drops formed there before the wounds closed almost instantaneously. A surge of anger rose inside of him so intense, the flood of power caused him to sway on his feet. He’d wanted to chase after Sasha. To grab her by the arm once again and haul her against his body. To strip her and fuck her until he was too gods-damn tired for anything other than sleep.
Inside the building proper, the crowd cheered on two new fighters. The night was far from over and tonight’s audience was particularly bloodthirsty. It would be nothing for Ewan to pull in several thousand dollars tonight. He could fight until he was too fucking exhausted to stand and Drew would be forced to drag his ass home. He had to do something. Because if he didn’t, his own tortured thoughts would drive him out of his fucking mind.
The hurt in Sasha’s expression was burned into his damn retinas. It stabbed through him sharper than any blade and cut deep. It was the sort of wound that supernatural healing couldn’t mend. The type of wound that left a scar. Ewan had hurt many creatures over the course of his long life. Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. None of it had ever weighed on him until now.
Until her.
If she hadn’t enchanted him, why did he feel this way? If she hadn’t done something to him, why did hurting her matter when none of the others ever had? What made her so gods-damned special? What made her different? Ewan raked his fingers through the tangles of his hair, pulling at the strands. Nothing short of an ice pick through his cranium was going to get Sasha out of his head.
A growl built in Ewan’s chest as he marched out of the stockroom and headed back toward the arena. Frustration, anger, want, need, and blind rage pooled in his gut. The power it created circulated through his limbs until he shook from the force of it. A dark haze fell over his vision, drowning out all color until his world became nothing more than shades of black and white. His thoughts slowed and became cottony until he was reduced to a creature of instinct. Driven by violence. Hungry for the kill.
He pushed his way through the crowd, past the battle master, and into the arena. It didn’t matter that there were already two competitors inside. He’d kill them both. The crowd went wild until the sound of their eager shouts drowned out the last remaining shreds of Ewan’s conscious mind. The battle rage took hold completely and he went to that dark place where nothing mattered. He didn’t exist. His body moved without instruction from his conscious mind. There was nothing but empty black.
Freedom.
He came to with a spluttering gasp. His arms flailed, fists flying out to fight an invisible foe.
“Ewan!” He latched onto the sound of Drew’s voice and let it pull him toward lucidity. “You’re okay. It’s over. There’s no one left to fight.”
No one? Jesus. From the way Drew made it sound, he’d killed off half of the gods-damned city. His head pounded like someone had driven a railroad spike through his brain. Another indicator of how completely he’d given himself over to the battle rage. He imagined it was the supernatural equivalent of a hangover, only he hadn’t been afforded any of the fun to get to this place.
“What happened?” Ewan swallowed. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t have been out of it for more than a couple of hours, but his throat was dry enough to convince him he’d gone months without a sip of water.
“What happened is that you kicked serious fucking ass.” Drew’s wide grin caused Ewan’s stomach to curl into a knot. He must’ve put on one hell of a fucking show for his cousin to look so smug. Drew pulled a large roll of bills from the front pocket of his hoodie and handed it over to Ewan. “Ten grand.” He laughed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You had the crowd so amped they were practically throwing their money at you.”
Great. Like that wasn’t bound to draw a hell of a lot of unnecessary attention. There was no way Gregor wouldn’t find out about this. Ewan was fucked. “Go home, Drew. Right now. Don’t wait for me. If Gregor asks where I am, tell him you have no idea and haven’t seen me since this morning. Got it?”
Drew gave a determined shake of his head. “No way. I’m not hanging you out to dry.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” From the beginning, he’d planned to take all the heat whether Drew wanted him to or not. “Do as I say. If he asks, you’re going to look him straight in the eye and lie like you’ve never lied before.”
“He’ll see right through it.”
“No, he won’t.” They’d been working on their story for months just in case something like this happened. It was difficult to lie to a supernatural creature, but not impossible. If you owned the lie, truly believed your own bullshit, it could be done. Drew could pull it off. “It’s too late for a change of heart now.” From the beginning, Drew had been reluctant to help Ewan find the underground fighting ring and set up the matches. But his cousin was well connected in the city and trusted by those in the know despite what he was. Ewan had practically pressured him into it and there was no way in hell he was going to let him be punished for it.
“We go back together, or not at all.”
Hardheadedness was a trait all berserkers shared. That stubborn streak got them into trouble more times than not. “I’m not going to argue with you, Drew. This is what we agreed on. This is the way it has to be.”
“He might not know. He’s so damned preoccupied with other things he might not be paying attention to any of the gossip. It could be days before he hears anything about what happened tonight.”
Wishful thinking. Ewan knew better. He’d obviously been in rare form tonight, burning off the anger and frustration from his fight with Sasha. Returning to the arena had been a mistake no matter how much cash it had brought in. He’d let her get under his skin and now he was going to pay the price for it.
“He’s going to know, and he’s going to be waiting for me. I can talk my way out of it but only if I’m not worried about covering your ass as well. Do us both a favor and stick to the plan.” It was going to cost him a chunk of change and an even bigger chunk of his pride, but he’d do what had to be done. “I’ve got this under control, but you need to trust me.”
Drew studied him for a quiet moment. “Never in a million years is he going to believe you’re working alone.”
It was true that berserkers behaved more like pack animals. They usually worked in small groups; even pairings were rare. Gregor would assume there were others involved and Ewan was prepared for that. He never did anything without a backup plan.
“Whether he believes it or not is immaterial. All I need is to distract him.”
Drew’s gaze narrowed. “From what?”
Ewan gave a shake of his head. Sometimes his cousin could be a little dense. “You. Me.” He threw his hand up and swirled around. “This.” He hated that he’d have to give up tonight’s winnings, but the one thing he knew Gregor would never turn away was money. Not when he needed so much of it to fund their cause.
“No. No way.” The light bulb finally clicked on inside Drew’s head. “It’s a fucking fortune. The biggest purse you’ve won yet. And you’re just gonna hand it over to him?”
“It’s good money, but hardly a fortune. And offering it up to Gregor is worth the sacrifice if it buys us some time.” Ewan wasn’t about to take his eyes off the prize. He wanted out. As far as possible from this centuries-old vendetta and Gregor’s ego-fueled power grab. Now wasn’t the time to lose focus. He could still pull this off. He just needed Drew to cooperate.
His cousin gave a sad shake of his head. “You deserve every penny of that money. You more than earned it.”
Ewan pulled five hundred-dollar bills from the role and slapped them into Drew’s hand. It was far less than what his cut should’ve been, but he was owed something for his trouble.
“I’m not taking this.” Drew held out his hand but Ewan refused to take the money. “If you’re handing your cut over, I’m handing mine over, too.”
Ewan hesitated but he could tell by the set of his cousin’s jaw that he wasn’t about to back down. He appreciated the solidarity and took the money back without another word of argument. “I’ll make it up to you.” When Ewan made a promise, he kept it.
“I know you will.” Drew’s lips quirked in a half smile.
Anxious energy skittered down Ewan’s spine. It had been one hell of a night, and it was far from over. “Go home.” The sooner Drew got back, the better. Besides, he needed a few moments alone to clear his head.
Drew gave a curt nod and turned to leave without another word. Berserkers were creatures of action. Once they agreed on a plan, they followed through. Always. At least for that, Ewan could be thankful. The gods knew he had little else to be grateful for.
He let out a slow breath as his thoughts inevitably circled back to Sasha. He let out a chuff of rueful laughter. Funny to think, Ian Gregor was the least of his problems.