The Viper's Nest

by Tate James

  “Nope,” he muttered, grabbing me by the waist and sitting me across his waist just long enough to yank my T-shirt off. After tossing it aside, he then flipped us again, and I landed with a puff into the pillows, looking up at the glorious sight of the Northern Lights over Caleb’s half naked frame.

  “Mmm,” I grinned. “I think I like this view.”

  He smiled back at me, looking like some sort of fallen angel with the twinkling stars and glowing green framing him while he knelt between my spread legs.

  “I think I do too,” he agreed, trailing his fingertip over the thin fabric of my underwear and sending warmth curling upward into my belly.

  I crooked a finger at him to beckon him closer, and he obliged. Bringing his lips back to mine, he shifted so that his full weight wasn’t flat on top of me, which also gave him access to explore my body with one hand.

  “Can’t believe you haven’t got my asshole brother back for this yet,” he whispered, running his rough thumb over the gorgeous fox tattoo on my side, following the inked lines just as I had done to him. I knew what he meant though. Not for giving me a tattoo that strangely encompassed the essence of both me and my six guardians. He was referring to the fact that his twin brother’s name was spelled out in the negative space between butterflies.

  Austin had, quite literally, tattooed his name on my body.

  “Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll get him back,” I promised. “I just haven’t thought of the appropriate revenge yet.”

  Caleb chuckled, taking another kiss from my lips and sliding his fingers under the fabric at my hip. “Good. I have an idea for that... remind me later?”

  “Uh huh,” I sighed, flushed with heat and excitement as his long fingers reached my aching groin and slid down to tease at my opening. “Later.”

  Grasping his face, I turned his mouth back to mine, crushing a demanding kiss to his lips, silently urging him to quit messing around. My whole body was trembling with arousal, and the anticipation was fucking killing me. In the best possible way.

  His own arousal was pressed hard against my inner thigh, just inches away from where I wanted it to be. Needed it to be.

  “Caleb,” I gasped, my breath catching as his fingers slipped inside me, stroking at my inner walls then withdrawing to rub at my swollen clit, his fingers wet with my own lube.

  “Mmm patience, Kitty Kat,” he teased as his fingers circled, flicked, and dipped, driving me into a damn frenzy.

  “Cal, please,” I begged. “Please, I need you in me. Now.” My hips bucked, sliding me just a fraction closer to his naked erection.

  Don’t get me wrong; I was all for long, drawn out play sessions and a huge advocate of foreplay. But in that moment, I just needed him.

  “Dammit, Kitty Kat,” he muttered. “I can never seem to say no to you...” Withdrawing his fingers from me, he pulled the crotch of my black panties to the side and pressed the tip of his dick to my opening.

  “Yes,” I hissed with satisfaction as he pushed inside me, ever so damn slowly. My walls were still tight from the lack of warm up, and he needed to work his way in carefully while my legs wrapped around his waist and pulled him closer.

  “Fuck, yes,” I moaned as he gave up his slow entry and simply slammed the rest of the way home with a breathy grunt.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Kitty,” he swore, bracing himself above me. His arms thickly corded with muscle as he held himself in that push-up position with only our lower halves together. He looked down on me with heat in his gaze, and I bit my lip.

  “How did I get so stupidly lucky?” he breathed, pulling back out halfway before burying deep back inside me.

  “You?” I snickered in disbelief. “I think I’m the lucky one here.” My hands threaded up around his neck, pulling him down on top of me so I could feel him against my body. “Now shut up and fuck me.”

  Caleb snorted a laugh, burying his face into the crook of my neck before replying, “Yes, ma’am.”

  A grin of satisfaction spread across my face as Caleb obeyed, working my body with a ridiculous intuition of exactly what I wanted—making me just a little suspicious he might be able to read minds. Either way, I wasn’t complaining as he fucked me right up to the edge of an orgasm while the green glow of our borrowed Aurora Borealis lit the room.

  Just as I relinquished control, letting myself slip into a toe-curling climax, a light breeze tugged my attention to the open bedroom door.

  Heart racing, I forced my eyelids to stay open while my body shuddered and trembled, not once breaking the gaze of our intruder while I came. Hard. With his twin’s cock deep inside me.

  Caleb’s own climax followed quickly after my own, while my pussy was still clenching and pulsing in the aftershocks of an incredible orgasm, and he groaned into my neck. My fingernails clasped at his well-muscled back, holding him tight against me as he came, and all the while his brother watched.

  “Did you need something?” I panted the question to Austin, locking my ankles behind Caleb and holding him where he was. If Austin thought I would be blushing and grabbing for a sheet to cover up, he was sorely mistaken.

  “A great many things, Princess,” the Ink Mage, and my first bonded guardian, responded drily. “But none of which I imagine you’re willing to provide.” What the hell did that mean? “Tyson sensed you were awake and has been practically clawing a hole in the carpet to get in here.”

  Ignoring his weird statement, I looked past his sexy, tattooed ass and saw his tiger familiar crouched behind him, peering in at us. Or rather, at me.

  Austin’s familiar had manifested when we bonded and was the first known familiar to have appeared to any mage in over a thousand years. He’d named the giant cat Tyson, after Mike Tyson—insert eye roll here—and the big lug had taken a serious liking to me.

  “Hey, buddy,” I cooed to the big cat and was rewarded by a head dip that I knew was his way of saying hello. “Give me a few minutes, and we can go for a walk.”

  “Make it ten,” Caleb added, shifting his weight onto one shoulder to look at his brother. “Kitty Kat might need a hand in the shower.”

  “Make it five,” Austin snapped back, his hand curling into a fist by his side. “Unless you want my six hundred pound tiger joining you.”

  Post-sex hormones made me giggle at that mental image, and I bit down on Caleb’s bicep when I sensed he was coiling for an argument with his brother.

  “Five minutes then. Thank you, Austin. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” I snickered, my fingernails still digging into Caleb’s skin in warning.

  He knew what I was doing. The two of them had been at each other’s throats almost since the second my bonding with Austin had been completed. It wasn’t the fact that Caleb had walked in on us having sex covered in blood while my former abuser lay gutted on the floor; that had been purely a necessity in order for me to heal my many, many injuries.

  No, Caleb was pissed as hell that Austin had bonded to me, and Caleb still hadn’t..

  “Come on,” I sighed, unlinking my heels from behind him and smacking him on the bare ass. “Let’s clean up before Tyson really does decide to join us.”

  Or before I have to break up yet another King twin argument.

  “Wait, run that past me again?” I had been only half listening while scratching Tyson’s massive head where it lay in my lap. The damn tiger was no more than an overgrown house cat with human-like intelligence. “Split up? As in... go to different locations?”

  “That is generally what split up means, Princess,” Austin snarked, and I resisted the urge to pull a face at him.

  Asshole.

  Ever since we’d bonded, the emotional link seemed to be working both ways, and it was seriously messing with my head. Half the time I wasn’t sure whose emotions I was feeling, and half the time, neither did he.

  We’d silently agreed to a very healthy arrangement of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, meaning that when I felt the little flare of amusement that I was pret
ty sure wasn’t mine, I simply ignored it.

  Austin was confident we would both learn how to control it, to be able to, essentially, block it out unless we chose otherwise, which I sincerely hoped was true. Until we could master that, though, I wouldn’t risk bonding with any of the others.

  A shudder of fear rolled through me at just the thought of having seven conflicting emotions raging within me at the same time. No. Thank you.

  Austin frowned at me, having clearly just felt that chill of fear, and I ignored him. We had an arrangement, dammit.

  “I’m not saying that’s what we will do,” River replied, standing there looking every bit the leader, the Alpha. He folded his thick arms, causing his crisp white shirt to strain a little, and his golden eyes narrowed as he watched me. “It’s just one possibility we should keep on the table in case we need to create a false trail.”

  “Makes sense,” I nodded, burying my hands in the soft fur of Tyson’s neck. “I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Did we have any luck finding somewhere safe for Lucy and Elena to stay?”

  My rainbow-haired bestie snorted from the barstool where she perched, eating cereal from a bowl. “Fat fucking chance, sunshine,” she snickered. “I’m sticking to you like glue.”

  Rolling my eyes, I let out a long-suffering sigh and looked back to River. Despite the guys having formally resigned from Omega Group, River was and always would be the leader of our little team.

  “Okay, so where to this time?” I asked, dropping the whole Lucy-safehouse scenario for another day. I would win that argument sooner or later, even if I did need to appeal to her protective side. Elena—her girlfriend, as well as Cole and Vali’s sister—was nowhere near equipped to handle being on the run from Omega and whoever else was hunting me.

  “Toronto,” Vali responded instead of River.

  Dragomir Valeriu du Romane, or Vali for short, was a bit of a wild card in our crew. Cole’s estranged older brother, he had been, or still was, the head of a huge crime syndicate set up by their Romanian father.

  His intense, granite-gray eyes locked on me, unblinking as he stood in an almost mirror pose to River. Muscular arms, encased in butter-soft black cashmere, folded while he leaned his back against the door frame.

  “Cool,” I nodded, not needing to ask inane questions like why there? The location was irrelevant. Staying ahead of my adoptive father, Jonathan, was all that really seemed to matter at this point in time. Hopefully once we’d moved a few more times, we would have confused the trail enough we could go back on the offensive.

  The ducking and hiding was grating against me. I needed to know why Jonathan had been using me, but possibly more important than that... I needed to find the creepy doctor who had taken a vial of my blood.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Wesley reassured me, sliding his strong hand over my shoulder and rubbing the tense muscles in my neck. “We’ll track him down sooner or later.”

  One the one hand, I loved that Wes was in tune with my thoughts enough to know exactly what I was thinking, but on the other... “Yeah, it’s the ‘later’ that I’m worried about.”

  “Toronto might be okay as a base,” River suggested, but didn’t look overly optimistic. “I’d feel more comfortable with somewhere more secluded.”

  “I get that, I do,” I nodded, still running my fingers through Tyson’s fur, his throat vibrating against my lap as he purred. “But maybe we can just start looking when we get to Toronto? I don’t know what that dude wanted my blood for, but given he’d made an arrangement with Mr. Gray, it can’t have been anything good.”

  A deep shudder rippled through me as I remembered the slimy little man attaching an IV to my vein while I lay immobile, zip-tied to a bed. Then how he had left me there, knowing full well the kind of hell Gray intended to rain down on me... Some people were seriously sick fucks.

  “Yes, I think so,” River agreed, his golden eyes pinched with concern as he watched me.

  Wesley raked a hand through his floppy blonde hair, then scooted a little closer to me on the couch so that our thighs touched. “I’ve already started doing some background and surveillance on Director Pierre too,” he offered. “So we might have something more concrete to go on once we arrive at the new safe house.”

  “Awesome,” I grinned my appreciation, but my stomach twisted like I might throw up. How the fuck had it come to this? That we were running spy-level background checks and surveillance on my own dad?

  I guessed it was a small consolation that we’d found out when we did. Jonathan had been acting weird ever since we’d captured and questioned Madam Dupree, months ago. She’d been the one to really open my eyes to what was going on in the shadows of this world—that magic was real and I wasn’t even human.

  At least we’d found out before anyone died. Or at least, died permanently.

  “So, Toronto again. How are we getting there? Plane, train, or automobile?” I pasted on my best big-girls-don’t-cry smile and looked to Vali once more. River was in charge, yes. There was no doubt about that. But Vali was the one orchestrating our little game of hide and seek with Omega Group, thanks to his extensive directory of underworld contacts and the seemingly bottomless pit of money at his disposal.

  “By road... for the most part. Then we will cross Lake Ontario by boat.” He said it so seriously, and he looked so damn sinister in his black, long-sleeve top and dark jeans with his wavy, shoulder-length hair tied back in a tiny ponytail... it forced a grin to crack through my anxious inner turmoil.

  “Under the cover of night?” I teased. “Like real criminals?”

  Vali’s gray eyes narrowed at me in dangerous amusement. “Yes, dragă. Like real criminals.”

  The Romanian endearment sent a flutter through me, and I ducked his intense gaze. Our relationship was still... new? Uncertain? Confusing as all hell? I blamed the circumstances of our meeting for the mess we were in now.

  Vali had purchased me in a slave auction after I’d been kidnapped, but the bastard had never told me he was one of the good guys until the ninth hour. So the attraction I’d felt toward him had seemed a bit on the Stockholm Syndrome side of sane.

  “Cool,” I murmured, then looked to River once more. “Can I drive?”

  Our stoic, British leader snorted a short laugh and generously offered up a tiny half smile.

  “Not bloody likely, love.”

  Damn. Worth a try, though.

  “I’ll let you ride shotgun if you’d like,” he offered, oh so generously, and I sulked a little. River had yet to allow me to drive his Aston Martin Vanquish, despite my never-ending pleading.

  “Fine,” I sighed and headed back into the bedroom to grab my small suitcase of clothes. We had left Omega headquarters in a bit of a rush, given we were pretty certain Jonathan would have been calling the cavalry down on us, so I’d had to leave the majority of my stuff behind.

  It was for the best though. We were moving around so much, it just wasn’t practical to have more than one bag.

  As I threw my few toiletries into my bag, zipping it shut and rolling it out to the cars, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful about this next step. If all went according to plan, this would be the last stop before we could find a more permanent base and start turning the tables.

  I was sick of running and hiding. It was time for action.

  2

  Caleb

  The sound of Kit's scream and breaking glass jolted me from sleep sharply, and I leapt to my feet before my eyes had even opened.

  “Sorry,” Kit groaned, pushing herself out of bed and trying to gather up pieces of the broken lamp in the dark.

  “What happened? Are you okay?” I exclaimed, striding to the light switch and flipping it on. The decorative blown-glass bedside lamp was in pieces beside the bed where Kit must have knocked it during her nightmare.

  I'm fine,” she sighed, and I couldn't miss the deep shudder that ran through her. “Just another bad dream. Sorry I woke you.”

  “Don't be
silly,” I scolded. “You know I don't mind you waking me. I'm always here if you need to talk about them too...?”

  “I know,” she muttered, still stacking pieces of broken glass into a pile as I knelt to help. “I'd rather not, though. You know? I'd rather just ignore them and hope they go away. Besides, most nights Wes helps me. I just woke myself up with the whole broken-lamp thing before he got there this time.”

  “Let me,” I coaxed, picking up the stack of big glass shards and dumping them in the trash can under the desk. Just as I was returning to help with the smaller pieces, Kit's sharp intake of breath made me pause. Less than a second later, the spicy-sweet tang of her blood reached my nose, and I automatically inhaled.

  Fuck. Caleb, you idiot!

  The second that intoxicating scent filled my nostrils, rolling over my tongue like rich, dark chocolate, I knew I was in trouble. My control was still weak; I wasn't ready to be exposed to her blood. Not yet.

  “Crap,” Kit swore, holding her hand up to squint at it and wrinkling her nose. “Cut myself. It'll heal in a sec, but I should go wash the blood off.” She stood and stepped closer to me on her way to leave the room, and my whole body froze, wound as tight as a violin string. “You okay, Cal? You seem... tense.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I murmured, not trusting myself to open my mouth. The ache in my gums already told me the smell of magic in the air was getting the better of me.

  Kit gave me a confused frown but opened the bedroom door anyway. On the other side was my brother with his fist poised to knock. He raised an eyebrow at Kit with her bloody hand and then at me and gave a sharp nod.

  “Christina, need help cleaning up?” he suggested, placing a hand on her back and ushering her out of the room. To me, he gave another nod, and I sighed, nicking my thumb on a tooth and flicking out the droplet of blood necessary to create a teleportation rune circle. There was only one person who could help me regain control, and I could only hope she was home.