Chapter Eleven
His declaration should have frightened her but instead, it sent an unexpected thrill through Nina’s entire body. She’d only had one lover in her lifetime and that was Kuruk. He was gentle and patient with her. Their lovemaking had always been enjoyable. But it had never been anything like this. Sex with Aries was raw, animalistic, mind-blowing and completely addictive.
Even though she knew she had to find a way to separate herself from him before anyone got hurt, when he touched her, all her concern flew out the window. Since the first time they were together, he’d consumed her thought. She couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d made her feel. How his long thick cock had filled her so deliciously, it was like a taste of heaven.
She looked down at the head resting between her legs. Aries devoured her pussy sending her cresting on a high she didn’t want to come down from. When she hit her third orgasm, Nina was certain she would die from pleasure, especially if he kept it up. But apparently, Aries had other ideas. Finally, he raised his head and gently put her legs down. He then positioned himself on his knees, placed his thick member against her slit.
This man was so beautiful, like a fine work of art. She bit her bottom lip to hold back the moan that threatened to spill from her lips. Unable to help herself, Nina ran her hand down the center of his toned chest down to abs.
Aries shivered. “If you continue to touch me like that I won’t be able to control myself,” he groaned.
Boldly, she ran a finger down the center of his chest and made a path to his cock. She ran her finger along its length.
“You’ve been warned, woman.” And with that, he slammed into her, stretching her walls to their absolute limit with his wide girth. Aries captured her wrists and held them above her head, holding her immobile as he plowed into her so hard and deep they became one unit.
He brushed his lips against Nina’s and stared at her with his intense green gaze. “You’re so damn beautiful. And you’re all mine,” he chanted. With each word, he thrust into her and Nina loved every second of it. In that moment she could almost believe they were safe and sound and they could be happy again. She closed her eyes and reveled in in this passionate joining with a man who she hadn’t physically known that long, but her soul had known him forever.
Not content to remain still, she wrapped her legs around him and moved with him to the rhythm of their beating hearts. Her body tightened and a fire that began in the pit of her belly and spread throughout her entire being took over sending her hurtling to her peak.
She screamed his name. “Aries!”
“Mine!” he growled as he released his seed deep inside her thirsty pussy. She clenched her muscles around his cock, holding him inside of her for as long as she could.
Finally, he collapsed on top of her, panting. Aries wrapped his arms around her as he buried his face against her neck. They’d been wet before they got started from the bathwater but now their bodies were slick with sweat from the excursion of their lovemaking.
She absently stroked his arm as they lay in silence. Aries occasionally lifted his head to kiss her brow. In the short time Nina had known him, he seemed to be a sweet and nurturing man, everything a woman could want in a mate which made it all the more imperative that she get away. Nina didn’t think she could live with herself if something were to happen to him.
To her surprise, it was Aries who broke the silence. “I would have gotten you sooner but I had some business to take care of first.”
Nina wasn’t sure why he was sharing this with her. He didn’t really owe her an explanation. “I imagine you have Beta duties that keep you busy.”
“I suppose but there was more to it than that. I lied to my Uncle about it.”
“Why?” Aries seemed like an honest person so the fact that he must have had a reason for confessing this to her.
“I…I had a friend who called me. She said that she needed to tell me something urgently that only she could tell me.”
“She?” Nina didn’t mean to say that as sharply as she had and the second it was out of her mouth she realized how it must have sounded.
Aries must have noticed too because he raised his head with a raised brow and a slight smile tilted his lips. “Jealous.”
“No,” she answered more quickly than she’d intended. Even as she denied it, Nina knew it was a lie and from the knowing look on Aries’s face, he realized it too.
He dipped his head to give a long deep kiss and then he slowly pulled away to look into her eyes. “You have no reason to be jealous. From the second I saw you, there was no one else for me.”
She scoffed in disbelief. “Even in the pathetic state I was in?”
“Yes, even when you’d come to the island. You were broken but I recognized your strength. To endure that is a testament to your strength, but that’s beside the point. This woman—”
“Were you ever intimate with her?” Nina asked out of curiosity.
Aries hesitated before answering. “Yes. But that isn’t what I rushed to see her for. She’s a shifter like us but from time to time she has these dreams or these psychic premonitions which have served our pack well. I figured it must be something important if I was the only one she wanted to relay that message to. Besides, she was the one who’d told me about having a vision of an all-black before we even knew what you were.”
“So what happened? And why did you lie about it to your Alpha?”
“When I got there, she was under attack. Three hunters had broken into her home. She’d already dispatched one but two the other two had beaten her pretty badly. As she lie helpless on the ground, they were chanting over her. But then I broke it up. I was able to take one down immediately. The other one was very powerful and it took a considerable amount of my abilities to kill him. To be honest, I’m not sure if I would have if Calliope hadn’t intervened. I suppose by my distracting the remaining hunter she had time to heal enough to join in the attack. We both could have died.”
Hearing that Aries was that close to death did something to her. Nina’s heart plummeted. “Are you all right?”
“Of course. Trust me, I’ve faced many enemies over the years. It’s going to take more than a few hunters to destroy me.”
“You say that so casually.”
“When you’re in charge of seeing to the well-being of a pack you learn to fight early or step down. Besides, because of what my parents did.” He briefly told the story about his parent’s betrayal of the pack and how his cousin was the only one who knew. “I feel like I owe this pack my life,” he said when he finished his tale.
She touched his face. “You’re like me. Paying a penance for your past. Deep down, I know that Gage was probably going to kill Micco anyway. But it doesn’t erase the guilt or the shame. But why didn’t you tell your Uncle about the ambush at her house?”
He sighed before continuing. As I told you, she gets these premonitions. She saw the attack happening before it happened. She left the island deliberately in hopes that I would come rescue her.”
“She could have gotten you both killed!”
“And she realizes that. I did tell my Uncle there was an attack, just not how it came about, mainly to protect her. She did it because she had feelings for me and I wasn’t aware of them. I felt guilty that I’d never noticed. I believe she’s learned her lesson and she’s been a valuable asset to the pack. She’s one of our fiercest fighters. If I were to tell my Uncle, he would most likely have exiled her for this stunt gone wrong. In the end I blame myself for not noticing her feelings for me. If I had set her straight a long time ago this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You carry around a lot of guilt.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps it comes with the job.”
“No. I’ve met other Beta’s in my lifetime and it just shows that you have a caring heart. That you went to see a friend and then you saved her speaks of your character. I’ve dealt with many evil men and women but you…you’re one of a kind.”
Aries smiled as he gently caressed her face. “That’s very kind of you to say.”
“I’m just being honest.”
Without warning he rolled off of her and placed his arm over his eyes. “There’s another reason I’m telling you all this.”
“What?”
“Toward the end of the battled, I tried to get information out of the last hunter. I wanted to know what Gage was up to. He intimated something about you.”
Nina stiffened. “What did he say?”
“He said something about the darkness in conjunction with you but I don’t know what that means.”
Nina let out a heavy sigh and rolled away from him, pulling her knees up to her chest. “I tried to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“You have to let me go.
“The answer to that will always be no.”
“Do you know what I’m capable of? What I can I do? What I’ve done?”
“What did you do?”
“When you said you were Malum, is that what the hunter was referring to? What did that mean?”
“You were surprised that I’ve been with Gage for a few centuries. Malum started popping up shortly after my capture. Gage found a spell that manipulates my essence into this disease that harms other shifters.”
Aries sat up and stared at her in confusion.
“It’s my understanding that I wasn’t the first all-black he’d captured. He needed one of my kind because there was something in us that could be used for his spell. He took my blood and mixed it with some recipe he got from the spellbook of black magic that he keeps with him. He’d experiment on the wolves in his employ except he wouldn’t tell them what was in the potion. They would go insane with rage. But in its infancy, the spell was only temporary. So he found a way to make it last by injecting it inside of me and using the saliva from my bite to make it work. He used it again, and it worked just like he wanted. I remember the first time he used the perfected serum on one of his unsuspecting underlings. Franz was his name. He was an ambitious shifter who believed Gage’s lies about some new world order. Gage gave him the serum and told Franz it was a special potion that would make him powerful.
In its purest form, Malum takes only a few minutes to kick in. When taken directly it happens quickly but if it’s contracted from a bite or mixed with something else, like a drink perhaps, it takes a while to manifest. So someone could be infected with it for days before the effects kick in.”
“I’m guessing he used you to create more of this serum?”
“Yes. He wanted to wipe out shifter kind with it but I couldn’t produce it fast enough. And that’s when the abuse kicked in. I found that if shifted into other wolf forms I could temporarily take on their abilities and produce more of the serum Gage required. And then something happened. I took the form of a shifter who worked with Gage and I couldn’t shift back. It was pure agony. I felt like I was losing my mind. All I saw was rage and a darkness that I had to fight. That was one of my last memories before I saw a beautiful blinding white light. It calmed me and I felt at peace.”
“What happened?” Aries asked gently. His gaze was unwavering.
It was Anisa. She touched me and healed me…temporarily. I don’t think she could finish before Gage pulled her away from me. I was in my human form again. But I’d learned from another hunter that all the shifters within a ten-mile radius, with the exception of Anisa, were dead. Apparently, Malum had been in my blood for so long that it took over and when it took over my mind, I must have let out some kind of pheromone off that killed all. I must have been in that state for days because as I was told that the hunters would capture enemy shifters bring them to my location where they were met with certain death. It was only when Anisa intervened that I was in my right mind by then but it was already too late. I’d killed so many of our kind.” Tears slid down her cheeks.
From the time she was born she was told her abilities were a blessing and would bring her great luck in her lifetime but all it had caused was nothing but pain and heartache.
Aries grasped her by the shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault. Gage is behind this. On the bright side, you had to have taken out some of his men when you were in this state.”
“Only the shifters who were in residence at the time of my madness.”
“Gage wanted me to do it again… become his killing machine but it wasn’t something I could turn on and off. He was so angry with me but he couldn’t kill me because he still needed my serum. Eventually, Anisa escaped and that’s when things started to turn dark for me again. I believe her presence actually kept what had happened to me under control. But when she was gone, I’d shift to the forms of other wolves without even trying. I think Gage sensed that this darkness that you asked me about was coming back, full fledge. The only thing I could do was think of her. The she-wolf who led me out of darkness. I concentrated on her so hard I became her wolf and Gage hated me for that. He couldn’t even get any more serum out of me and the torture was ramped up. I was starved, beaten and made to suffer in unimaginable ways.”
“You were stuck in that form, weren’t you?”
Nina nodded. “And Gage adopted me as his Pet.” There were others before me, but I was different because I thwarted his plans wanted to make an example of me, to show me that I was nothing to him but a beast her could misuse and casually dismiss at his whim. He didn’t even keep me locked up anymore because I was too broken to try to escape. And then one day he dropped the bombshell. He said that even if I wasn’t able to produce the venom, it was still in me and eventually the darkness would return. The fact that I couldn’t heal and I was in constant pain indicated to me that he was right. Shortly before Persephone was captured and she was brought to his compound, I could feel its effects slowly taking over. Aries…whatever Sarah did to me, may work now, but it wasn’t the same feeling as when Anisa did it. With more time, I believe she would have completely healed me. So it’s only a matter of time before the darkness consumes me again which is why I can’t be on this island when it happens. You have to let me go.”
Aries cupped her face in his hands. “I can never let you go. Where you go I go. But you’re right, I can’t risk the rest of the pack by having you on Circe. I have a safe house in Athens. You and I will leave, first thing in the morning.”
She shook her head. “But you could die if you come with me.”
“I think a part of me would already be dead if I let you leave.”