My muscles were sore the morning after, but I didn't regret any of it. I couldn't think of a better way to spend my last night on a private, deserted island than with my mate. And the father of my future children. Of all the visions I'd had in the past, there hadn't been any with my children in them. And now I knew…

Now I knew what my purpose was.

As the captain sailed the yacht back to the mainland, Tristan and I were enjoying our time together below deck. I watched as he filled a glass with champagne and orange juice and then poured some Scotch for himself to bring back over to the Jacuzzi. He rejoined me inside the steaming bath.

"You look like you want to ask a million questions," he said. "What's on your mind?"

I sighed. "Just thinking about stuff."

I took a sip of my mimosa.

"Stuff as in…your book," he said, with a crooked smile.

"No, silly. I didn't even get to work on my book. Stuff as in you," I replied.

"I'm not going to keep anything from you anymore, Elisa," he said.

"The tattoo on your back. It's a cobra. I understand enough about your businesses to know that it's code name for something."

"COBRA," he said, putting his scotch on the side of the Jacuzzi. "When I was little I used to go hunting with my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father. We all went out together. Those were the days before family issues destroyed that. We had great times on those hunts. We told stories, played games…just enjoyed ourselves without the stress of the business lingering over us. We weren't on our territory so we set up tents on the land. Just to make it look like we were normal humans, ya know. We couldn't just sleep and shift out in the open like we did on Arnou territory. One day I came back to my tent to grab my grandfather's bag and when I reached under my quilt, a cobra reared up from under it. Had I been a human, he probably would've slithered off. Cobras are really not all that confrontational. They don't bite or rear up like that unless threatened. The cobra was taller than me. It's width…as big as my arm. I was scared as shit. I think I even wet myself some. With me being a wolf shifter, it must have sensed it. I was just a kid and could barely rein in my wolf when I wanted to. I didn't shift, but my wolf was on edge. The snake struck and bit me. Right here…"

He pointed to a bite mark on the inside of his left arm that looked like two fang marks. They had since been covered by his tattoos, but I saw them plain as day now.

"I grabbed it. My claws dug into the scales. At the neck, I think. I snatched it off me and slammed it to the ground. Then I remember not being able to swallow."

I touched the fang marks on his skin. "Cobras are really poisonous. One bite could kill something as big as an elephant."

"They heard my screams before the Cobra bit me and saw it slithering out of my tent when they came to rescue me. I don't know what happened after that. Fortunately for me, someone had a helicopter and my great-grandfather knew a dealer who kept exotic snakes. He had the anti-venom and they administered it themselves. They said I was lucky that the poison hadn't entered my blood stream. It took me days to recover. They weren't expecting me to live through the night. My mom sat my bedside day and night. I don't think she even took a shower."

Tristan and I laughed.

"Anyway, when I woke up, my mom was there and you know what the first thing I said was?"

"What was that?"

"Mom, is the snake okay?"

I laughed.

"I didn't know I had just escaped death. I wanted to go back and look for the snake. My great-grandfather told almost everyone he met about it. He's the one who told Vinny when Vinny asked me if I was afraid of dying. Vinny dubbed me King Cobra. I took over my father's unit as Capo after he died…after I killed him. My unit was COBRA Coalition. When you hear someone talk about Cobra, they don't know it's a person. Very few people know that I'm King Cobra. So, when people say they work for COBRA, they work for me."

"And now you own the family business. You own it all," I said.

He nodded. "Yes, I've owned it all for a very long time."

"That's quite an origin story. You became what you feared."

"And what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."