Alcaeus
I held my wolf in check for as long as I could. But when the first orgasm hit her—her pussy squeezing, fluttering, and clenching around me as her body tightened and then melted in ecstasy against mine—I lost control and sank my canines into her throat.
Mine.
She cried out in surprise and her nails dug into my shoulders.
I paused just long enough to inhale deeply as I pulled my hips from the cradle of her spread thighs, withdrawing a few inches from the heaven of her gripping wet heat. When I scented no fear or pain from her, I growled and thrust my hips forward, biting down until my canines were lodged deep within the muscle tissue of her neck.
Mine forever.
She cried out again.
I didn’t pause this time. Because her cry was accompanied by a rush of hot liquid at the base of my cock as her pussy flooded me with heat, her arousal coating my balls as I drew back and rammed deep, again and again, circling my hips and grinding against her to ensure a direct hit to her little button every single time.
Mating venom dripped from my fangs. I released so much of it that the taste flooded my mouth.
Still, I bit down harder—anger and primal protective instincts fueling me as my hands stroked and squeezed her ass and thighs and my fingers found the scar on the back of her left hamstring—wanting to make sure that my mark would take. So that there could never be any doubt to anyone that she was mine.
We were a mated pair. I wanted the world to know that if anyone dared to harm her, they were asking for hell on earth, for fire and brimstone, from me.
When she came a second time, I joined her, filling her with my cum as I released even more venom into her neck.
I bent her over the couch and took her from behind next. The view was everything I’d known it would be, and more.
While the scars on her back that were directly in my line of sight from this angle still enraged me, it was hard to stay angry at the ghosts from Avery’s past who had caused those scars amid the sight and sensation of my dick gliding in and out of her wet pink folds. And equally difficult to find room for emotions like regret or sorrow when my mate was moaning and undulating in front of me, arching her back and raising her fucktastic ass in the air, her hips pushing back to meet my strokes as her pussy swallowed my cock, over and over again.
After round six in my sitting room, Avery’s tiny stomach began growling.
I brought her to the kitchen to feed her, and wound up feeding myself—spreading her delectable body across the island countertop and eating her to orgasm three times. She returned the favor, dropping to her knees on the floor in the kitchen and devouring my cock with such enthusiasm and skill, I broke down and told her that I loved her.
Seven times.
I’d been trying to hold back, not wanting to freak her out by saying it too soon, but I figured a blowjob love confession was as safe a way to go as any for the first time.
After briefly breaking our sex marathon to eat real food, we found ourselves engaging in shower sex—some of which proved rather acrobatic—for two hours next, followed by a relaxing soak in the whirlpool tub. Avery actually fell asleep curled against my chest for a full thirty minutes inside the tub before my wandering hands made their way between her thighs, rousing her.
Ultimately, we christened every room in the penthouse but the one that Kai was holed up sulking in, before finally doing it classic missionary-style in my bed. We collapsed shortly thereafter from exhaustion.
I was awakened by the sensation of Avery’s mouth sucking my cock.
“I love you.”
Damn. I’d said it again.
She giggled and hummed around me in response, and my dick jerked, leaking precum into her warm mouth.
I opened my eyes to watch her.
Jesus. She’d twisted her long black hair into a knot at the top of her head to keep it from getting in the way of her sucking my cock. I could see my mark on her neck. I was in heaven. Her lips were swollen and puffy as they worked me into a state of total idiocy.
I decided she’d never looked so beautiful before as she did with her mouth full of my dick. When she released me with a pop to lick my balls, I decided we’d get married in the morning at whatever church opened earliest.
I think I also said it out loud, because she giggled again as she sucked the head of my cock inside her mouth once more, twirling her tongue all around it before pressing the pointed tip of her tongue into the slit in my glans, prompting me to swear in Portuguese and reach for the knot of hair she’d secured at the top of her head as my hips jerked up into her mouth, filling it to the back of her throat.
Her fingers wrapped around the base of my dick, stroking and pumping the lower half as I rolled and jerked my hips up like a desperate, horny teenager, coming embarrassingly fast inside her mouth.
I was still muttering to myself in Portuguese as she finished me off, licking me clean once she’d sucked me dry, and then pressing a sweet kiss to my dick before hopping off the bed.
“I need a computer,” she announced gaily. “And Internet access.”
“Take anything you want,” I told her with a groan of satisfaction. “Anything in here is yours. I’ll put your name on the deed to the whole place right after we get married this morning.”
“Right.” She laughed and began to explore the room.
Naked.
God, she was a sight.
“Am I getting warmer?” she asked as she searched the teak bureau next to my antique writing desk.
“Hot as sin, sweetheart.”
She pulled out a razor-thin laptop and held it up in the air. “This one?”
“Any of ’em,” I said, stifling a yawn. “I mean it. You’re welcome to whatever you want.” I rolled over and looked at the clock by the bed. It was a little after three in the morning. We’d barely slept at all.
Before she’d nodded off in the whirlpool earlier, I’d gotten her to confide quite a bit to me about her daughter, Sloane. She’d said that she needed to get a message to Sloane and her caretaker, Azda, and I’d assured her that I’d get her a computer and Internet access right after we got out of the tub.
Of course, that promise had been forgotten the moment I’d been balls deep inside of her again.
“Password?” she asked. She’d set up the laptop at my writing desk and was logging on.
“Bento1482,” I answered quickly as I felt Lessa tapping my mind. I hesitated for a second before blocking her.
I really did need to talk to Lessa. But now wasn’t the best time.
Right now I just wanted to enjoy being in Avery’s presence for a while longer—to bask in this beautiful state of normalcy that we were experiencing. It was so rare in our world. Plus, I was ass-tired, and I needed to have all my wits about me before I started trying to explain to family members about my new Rogue daughter, Sloane.
A phone started ringing somewhere—everywhere—throughout the house. I had a house phone here? Oh, yeah, I guess I did.
I didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know that it was Lessa. My sister was a damn bloodhound.
“Sorry. I gotta take this real quick,” I told Avery before snatching up the receiver on the nightstand and walking into the adjoining master bathroom for privacy.
“Hey, Lessa,” I greeted, then went straight into ditching her. “Now’s not a great time. I meant to call you after the meeting in Denver, but I’ve been kind of busy with—”
“Never mind about that,” she cut me off. “I already heard the whole thing was a bust. That’s not why I’m calling.”
“What? Wait—what whole thing was a bust?”
“When I didn’t hear from you, I contacted Clifton, the Highlands Ranch pack Alpha you were supposed to have the meeting with,” she relayed at breakneck speed. “He told me they weren’t able to make it to the meeting with you because there was some terrible attack on his pack that night.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked nonchalantly, fighting to keep the smile on my face out of my voice.
“Yeah, someone burned their whole gated community down. They don’t know who or why.”
“Wow. Tough break. Hey, listen, I gotta jet—”
“Alcaeus, wait! I have an emergency, and I need your help.”
“I’m listening.”
“Wyatt’s gone missing.”
“What?”
“Wyatt’s missing!” she screamed into the receiver.
“Lessa, calm down. How can he be missing? Just enter his mind and find his location. I thought you practically lived inside his head already, constantly rearranging his memories and impressions of you.”
“This isn’t a joke!” she shrieked. “His mind is blocked. He hasn’t been to any of his homes in the past twenty-four hours, nor has he been to his office. I have tracking devices on all of his cars as well as his shoes, and they’re all accounted for. There’s been no activity on any of his credit cards, and his cell phone tracking has been disabled.”
Yikes. My sister was more than a bloodhound. She had all the stalker bases covered. And then some.
“And I’ve checked the surveillance activity for all the hidden cameras I set up in his homes and his cars and office,” she continued, “and there’s nothing, Al. Nothing. No sign whatsoever of what happened to him. My mate has vanished off the face of the earth. You have to help me find him.”
“Okay, okay, when did you last see or speak with him?” I cast my eyes to the ceiling. “Or track him on any one of the many hundreds of tracking devices that you have on him in a given day?”
“About two days ago. I spoke to him in the afternoon on the day of the Denver meeting. Al, I know something’s not right. I’m not going crazy or being paranoid. As much as it terrifies me to believe it, a powerful werelock had to have blocked his mind from me. It’s the only explanation.”
Fuck. Humans didn’t just disappear like that—certainly not when my sister was responsible for stalking them. And Lessa was right: the most disturbing part was Wyatt’s mind being blocked. If Wyatt had been taken hostage by an enemy werelock, it was a threat not only to my sister’s life but also to Avery’s life, as well as to her daughter’s, given how much information Wyatt had about them.
I had a bad feeling I knew just the werelock who was behind this, too.
“Okay. Try and stay calm, Lessa, and keep trying to tap his mind. I’m going to do a little investigating myself. I’ll call you back.”
After I hung up the phone with Lessa, I immediately dialed the number for “Scary Stranger” that I had memorized yesterday.
Following my initial blowjob love confession to Avery in the kitchen last night, I’d gently grilled her over sandwiches about her relationship with Raul. She’d laughed and reassured me that she was “not into Raul like that” and had explained that she didn’t think Raul was actually into her in that way either—that she thought he’d only staged a phony engagement between them in the restaurant just prior to Gabriel’s surprise arrival in order to throw the Salvatella Alpha off and help her get away from Gabriel quickly.
She’d also insisted that she’d only met Raul the day before she’d met me. I’d scented no lie in any of it.
And the fact that Raul had disobeyed Gabe, his own Alpha, in order to defend Avery’s life last night was significant—I just wasn’t sure what it meant or what Raul’s game was this time. He was obviously eager to get his hands on Sloane. Yet Avery had said that Raul had offered to go on the run with her and Sloane, rather than try to convince her to join the Salvatella pack.
“Chaos,” Raul greeted me in a sleep-roughened voice the third time I redialed his number. “What the fuck, brah? It’s five in the morning here.”
“Congratulations. It’s three in the morning here.”
A two-hour time difference likely placed him in Bariloche, the location of one of the Salvatella pack’s main strongholds. The fact that he knew that it was me calling from an unlisted number in New York City meant he was either stalking me Lessa-style or he’d only given this particular number to Avery.
“How’s my girl?”
I ignored his taunt and got to the point. “What do you want this time, Raul?”
“What the hell? You called me, dude.”
“Drop the surfer-boy shtick. I’m serious.”
He laughed. After a pause, he said, “I want an agreement from the Reinoso pack that Avery and her daughter Sloane are off-limits. I want Milena to call off her hunt for the Rogue, and I want her to quit lobbying and rallying other packs against the Rogue as well.”
He didn’t sound at all sleepy or surfer-boy blasé as he said it. In fact, he sounded like an Alpha—which was even scarier. Because it was Raul. And because he was Milena’s brother. Raul had inherited his werelock blood power from the same source that Milena had. And Milena’s powers had grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade.
On top of that, Raul had also inherited Nuriel Salvatella’s werelock powers—which was the only reason he could teleport. Milena had never gained that ability.
Undead Maribel had transferred Nuriel’s powers directly to Raul ten years ago after she’d used Lupe’s form as a channel through which to direct her power from the ether and destroy Nuriel in a rather gruesome—albeit well-deserved—display of violence.
Upon his death, Nuriel’s powers should have rightfully transferred to his brother, Gabriel, as was the natural law of the werelock species.
My siblings and I had never quite understood why Maribel, a former member of our Reinoso pack, had chosen to rig the system in Raul’s favor in this regard. Why hadn’t Maribel gifted Nuriel’s power to her beloved Kai? Or to Lessa, who had been Maribel’s best friend in life? Or even to Alex, who had served as Maribel’s Alpha?
We’d been anxious at first about what it would mean as far as Raul’s power accumulation and development, but we’d more or less ceased fretting over it when several years passed and Raul’s powers hadn’t seemed to have changed or developed any further—as far as we knew—and when he remained in his position as Gabriel’s head Beta, whereas Milena had already become the Alpha of our pack.
“Are you still there?” Raul asked. “I’m about to hang up and go back to sleep.”
“Avery’s my mate, Raul. No one in my pack will ever harm my mate or my daughter, Sloane.”
He chuckled. “Wow. That’s good to hear. I had my doubts about your intentions, but after seeing you and Avery together yesterday, I was almost convinced that you two might actually be true mates.”
“We are true mates, Raul. There’s no question about it. And we’ve both been marked now.”
“Well, congrats, man.” He paused. “And you’ve told Milena? And she’s agreed to back off and accept the Rogue as her adopted niece?”
When I didn’t answer right away, he continued. “Let me guess: that’s a no, you haven’t told Milena yet? That’s what I thought. So look, I’ll just hold onto my collateral while you sort things out with Milena and Alex and get me the agreement I want from your pack.”
“What collateral?”
“Oh, I think you know, Chaos, or you wouldn’t be calling me at this hour.”
Little shit. I could hear the smirk on his face through the phone line. Fuck. He definitely had Wyatt.
“No, I don’t know, Raul,” I denied.
“Well, then, you’ll find out soon enough. Give my regards to your sister while you still can. And don’t fuck this up,” he said in warning just before the line went dead.