~

“Be still my heart, so much excitement that I don’t know if I can take it,” Raff said. The witch and the alpha were eyeing each other with mistrust, anger, and good old-fashioned death glares.

It was a case of who blinked first. Raff’s money was on his friend; shifters weren’t known to have patience. Parker was no different, and being an alpha didn’t help matters.

The witch was basically throwing up a challenge in the man’s face. How could the alpha refuse?

“Still not funny,” Kat hissed. She might have been facing the alpha, but she was no fool, and she hadn’t put her back to the vampire but kept him where she could see him.

“Well, I’m having a blast,” Raff said.

“I just need you to stick around for a while,” Parker offered an olive branch to the witch.

The woman was a firecracker, and he’d already miffed her off once, and the last thing that he needed was to escalate matters. Not when he might need her help again.

“Stick around? Give me a stick and shove it up your…”

“Can’t you be less of a witch?” Parker growled.

“The only way I can be less of a witch is if I’m not here. So why don’t you move your big furry backside away from the elevator and let me pass?” Kat bit out.

“Lady, you really don’t know how damn tempting that is,” Parker growled back.

Witches weren’t his favourite people to be around. They were meddlesome, devious, mean-spirited, and irrational. Obviously, this woman was no different.

That was a shame in his book because the fact that she was a witch didn’t stop the irrational urge within him to spend some time getting to know her. She might have been a firecracker, a small package of curves that were definitely in the right places, but he liked a challenge — and at times — he liked to live dangerously.

“I can’t do that…” Parker growled.

“Oh, let her go — I know where to find her,” Raff said.

Kat didn’t like the sound of that. How the hell did the vampire know where to find her? That wasn’t the point — the point was she needed to get out of there and fast.

Once she was free — she could put up wards around the house, hell, she could move to another damn country.

“Fine,” Parker didn’t like the idea of letting her go. But he had already made one mistake today, he got the witch’s back up that was helping them, and he didn’t want to make another.

He turned to the side, motioned for her to go around him, and watched as little miss dynamite marched right for the elevator, her skirts kicking out and swirling around her ankles. His beast grumbled a growl within him.

Kat heard that growl from behind her as she lifted her hand and stabbed the button on the wall, maybe a little harder than was necessary, maybe she was thinking she was stabbing him in the eye. When the doors opened; she didn’t waste any time in getting inside.

With a flick of a look at the vampire, a smug smile on his bloodsucking face that annoyed her enough to want to zap it off, she turned her attention to the shifter who was still grumbling a growl in her direction. Nice eyes, bad attitude.

“Oh,” Kat said as if on an afterthought, and at the moment that the doors started to swish closed, she raised her hand, flicked it on her wrist, and put some magic behind it.

The last thing she saw was the alpha doubling over in pain.

Job done.

 

~

~

 

As the pain tore through his body, Parker was sure that his granpups were going to feel that one. She’d hit him right in the balls with her magic, and he felt his knees buckle as he crumpled to the floor, gasping for breath, and there it was — the witch’s scent — damn, but that smelled good.

His beast roared within him, and if he could have caught a breath, then he would have growled long and hard.

Mine…

Damn, that was bad on so many levels.

A witch for a mate? How bad was that?

Worse still, his mate was getting away, and there wasn’t a damn thing that he could do about it at that moment in time.

Parker could barely breathe, let alone jump to his feet and give chase to his mate. No matter how much his beast wished it — as the agony of her magical, clinical strike in the balls had hit home — he couldn’t move a damn muscle.

“Oh, boy, is your day going from bad to worse,” Raff said on a chuckle that jumped up and down on the shifter’s last nerve and begged to be answered with a fist to the face.

He’d almost forgotten that the vampire was in the room with him. He managed to grunt – kind of, but words failed him.

“She got you a good one,” Raff chuckle. He was only glad that it was the alpha, and not him that she’d taken out her wrath on.

“Mmm…” Parker managed to force from his lips.

“Hungry? Now?” Raff chuckled.

“Maaa…” The alpha tried again. His mate was getting away, damn it, couldn’t the vampire read his damn mind?

“You want your mama?” Raff knew that he probably shouldn’t laugh — it could have been him that had taken a jolt to the balls — but it wasn’t, so he did.

“M… Maa… Mat…” Parker wanted to rip the vampire’s head off and hand it back to him. Of all the times to respect his privacy and not read his thoughts — he chose this one?

It was Sod's Law.

“You’re a shifter, you’ll heel,” the vampire chuckled, and he started to turn away — but, that was when the alpha started to slam his palms down on the marble floor, over and over again.

Raff got the feeling that something was up. Not just the magical kick in the balls and the shifter’s need to avenge his pride by getting even with the demon-witch, but something else. Raff took the opportunity to read the alpha’s mind.

“Mate!” Raff bit out and got a sideways death glare from the alpha. The alpha grunted to confirm it.

“Ma…” Parker growled.

“Would you like me to give chase?” Raff chuckled as he leant over and met the alpha eye to eye. Another grunt, another rumble of a pained growl, and Raff snapped upright as he read the alpha’s thoughts. “How rude. Don’t come crying to me when the witch hands you your balls on a platter.”

Parker grunted.

 

~

~

 

When Kat got to the lobby and the doors opened – she was like a Greyhound out of the traps. Through the lobby, out of the hotel, across the lawn, not caring that there was a little sign that said; please keep off the grass, rules could kiss her backside.

She’d just given a cosmic kick in the balls to an alpha wolf shifter, and she wasn’t sticking around to see if he had changed his stance on killing her. Oh no, she was in her car and revving the engine like it was Le Mans.

Then, she wheelspun out of the parking bay, sending small stones fleeing in all directions from beneath her wheels, and headed up the long driveway to freedom.

Sister or not – Mel was going to feel her wrath.