by V Vee
Angelo couldn’t wait to taste her. To have her juices, the essence of her, covering his lips, his beard, his tongue, his chin. He wanted to bathe in her wetness. Wanted her wetness covering his face, and to taste her hours from when she’d orgasmed. Long after they’d finished.
But he would have to wait for that. Right now, he would make her cum with his fingers, then they would talk, and he would make plans for the rest of it.
But Angelo’s plans went awry the moment Joi wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing his face against the curve of her neck and shoulder, bit her lower lip and released a soft cry of pleasure as her pussy tightened around his fingers and she flooded her panties and coated his hand with her orgasm.
The scent of her pleasure, the feel of her heat tightening around his fingers, drove Angelo over the edge, and without warning, he pierced the flesh of Joi’s neck with his teeth, even as his own body shook and shuddered with an unexpected orgasm. Joining his soul with Joi’s forever.
Binding them together.
For eternity.
Mating them.
Making them one soul. One mind. One spirit. One heart.
Until death took them.
And he did it without her permission. Without telling her who or rather what he was.
Oh. Fuck.
Chapter 9
Joi blinked, long moments after her body had shattered into a million little pieces. That had most assuredly been one of the best orgasms of her life. And the fact that Angelo did it with his fingers? Joi was blown away. Flabbergasted. In awe. Wonder. Shock.
Afraid.
Deep in her bones, beneath the too sensitive skin, the lungs desperately searching for air, the brain befuddled and strangled by a desire satisfied, and the heart that still thundered wildly in her chest, fear swirled in her belly, pushing away the pleasant feeling that had taken her senses hostage only moments before.
Fear—that bitch—battered at her insecurities, at the walls she’d so fastidiously built up in an attempt to protect her heart. Fear raged at her, whispering in her ear that Angelo had only taken her in such a way in an attempt to get what he wanted from her regarding her company with no further push back on her part. Fear stroked its ice-cold fingers down the skin of her arms, causing her to shiver, not from the remnants of pleasure, but from anxiety. From trepidation.
Fear’s sister, terror, just as evil as her sibling, climbed on her back, wrapping its hands around her throat, cutting off her breath, making her panic and desperately fight for air.
She was having a panic attack. Why? She was a successful woman, a successful black woman, who’d just had an amazing orgasm by an even more successful, gorgeous man. So why the fuck was she freaking out?
“Joi?” Angelo’s concerned voice came to her ears through a fog and she panted, her eyes wide as she looked back at him. “Are you okay?” he asked her slowly. Carefully.
She shook her head frantically. Admitting to him that she felt weak. Helpless.
Scared.
“Okay, Joi. Breathe with me,” Angelo said to her. He inhaled deeply and waited for her to imitate him. Joi nodded and inhaled deeply, exhaling with Angelo did. Her hands dropped to his shoulders and she tightened her fingers in the fabric of his shirt. When Angelo inhaled again, Joi followed him automatically, her gaze on his lips.
Look at me. In my eyes, she heard Angelo say to her loudly, but… his lips didn’t move? How could that be?
Joi closed her eyes and shook her head in confusion, before she opened them and looked back at him, staring directly into his gaze. Her panic attack was obviously making her delusional if she thought Angelo spoke to her without moving his lips. There was no way the man was telepathic. A secret like that would not be able to stay secret for long. No. Joi was just losing her mind. Going crazy.
Because of a damn orgasm.
She snorted and swallowed back a laugh. Her panic attack easing and soon fading away as she continued to breathe with Angelo.
Angelo quirked his eyebrow in her direction and Joi shook her head.
“Something funny?” he asked—his lips moving with his question, that was good, it meant her crazy was fading along with her panic attack.
Joi shrugged and dragged her hands down over his biceps to his elbows. “Nothing,” she laughed softly. “Just… I realized that I was having a panic attack because you gave me an orgasm.” She rolled her eyes. “How stupid is that?”
Angelo laughed deeply. “If you were having a panic attack because of an orgasm, it would be pretty silly, but I don’t think that’s why you were having one.”
Joi lifted her eyebrows in surprise, then lowered them in confusion. She gently pushed Angelo away from her, unwrapping her legs from around his waist. She shivered as his fingers slid from inside of her, gliding across the skin of her pelvis, to rest on her waist as he lowered her to her feet. Joi wobbled for a moment, once she stood on her own two feet once again, but she cleared her throat and smoothed down the fabric of her dress, her focus on making herself as presentable as possible.
What does he know? Angelo barely knows me. If I tell him I had a panic attack from him giving me an orgasm he should accept that as gospel, not question me. Besides, there’s no way he’d know that I’m afraid he was simply trying to get me to comply by making me cum first, Joi thought to herself. Cum then comply is probably his own personal motto when it comes to working with difficult or recalcitrant women who own their own businesses. He’s going to leave and I’ll never hear from him again.
When Angelo growled low in his throat, Joi’s eyes flew up to collide with his in surprise.
“A-Angelo?” she stammered in confusion.
She swallowed when he took her chin in his large palm, lifting her face up until she met his gaze head on.
“I want you to listen to me and listen carefully. You had a panic attack because you think I may have been using you for business, right?” he forged on without letting her respond, though Joi wasn’t entirely sure what she would have said. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m still going to offer you one billion dollars, but this time I’m going to hire you and your employees on to work at Woodland Pack Incorporated, in our Women and Diversity Division, working on all the things you were working on before. Creating all the things you were creating before, just with a bigger reach and more resources, and a very big safety net in case something fails. I’m doing this as a professional matter. That’s the professional with us. That has nothing to do with the personal.” He lowered his voice and stepped closer to Joi, though she was surprised he could get any closer than he had been before.
“As for the personal, private, intimate side of our relationship. Sssshh,” Angelo stopped her from responding, putting a finger over her lips when she would have denied them having a relationship. “Our relationship,” he reiterated. “I will tell you this in a non-stalker, but extremely Alpha, possessive way: You. Are. Mine. And I. Am. Yours. From now until forever. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Got it? Don’t run, Miss Young, because I will chase you, I will find you, and I will claim you and mark you all over again. No matter where you are, no matter where you go, you belong to me, and I belong to you.”
Joi’s jaw dropped open in shock, not sure how she felt about his very possessive very misogynistic, very animalistic, very old-world speech. However, when he took her lips in a passionate kiss, one that gave no quarter for arguing, one that was all heat, desire, possession, yearning, and… forever, Joi was helpless to do anything but sink into it and return it with every part of her.
However, after they signed the new contract, after Angelo kissed her goodbye with a promise to call her later that night to wish her goodnight and to see her the next night for their date, even after Joi accepted the congratulations, teasing, and mocking reprimands from her family about what she and Angelo had been up in her father’s study, Joi did the one thing Angelo told her not to do.
She ran.
Chapter 10
Rome, It
aly
1818 AD
Fontana dei Dioscuri
Beta of the splintered Bianchi pack, Michelangelo Bianchi, stood at the edge of the Fontana dei Dioscuri and scowled. He hated that he’d been sent on such a meaningless task. Anyone could have done what he’d been sent to do, and yet, his Alpha—former Alpha—had given the job to him, giving him the bullshit reasoning that it was too important to assign to anyone else. Michelangelo snorted and shoved his fingers through the tendrils of his long, black hair. It was a mere meeting between two betas of two opposing packs. Something that shouldn’t even cause a moment of consideration from anyone monitoring the behaviors of the former Bianchi pack.
Former pack.
The words left a bad taste in Michelangelo’s mouth. Once the Bianchi pack had been the most feared of packs in all of North America. They’d regularly terrorized the humans of different regions, made money selling illegal alcohol, drugs, and had gotten involved in the sex slave market. The pack hadn’t cared what they’d done as long as it had filled their coffers with money, allowing pack members to live in some of the most prominent and luxurious estates in all of the nation. They’d been gods and goddesses in their own right.
Until he’d shown up.
As a matter of fact, it was because of him that Michelangelo was currently sweating his balls off in Italy in the first place. While his ancestors had once lived in the country of the beautiful, charming, and passionate, it had been quite a while since anyone from the Bianchi family had stepped foot in Italy, much less in Rome. But desperate times called for desperate measures. And they’d passed desperate five trials ago.
Michelangelo crossed his massively muscled, and tanned arms across his bare chest as he observed the men and women hanging out around the fountain, many of them tossing in coins and making frivolous wishes. He rolled his eyes. He would never understand humans and their never-ending well of optimism and dreams. After everything many of them had endured, from poverty, death, love lost, childbirth, war, and so much more, their ability to smile, to laugh, to continue to procreate in the midst of such devastation and despair served to baffle him. He knew there were some members of his old pack who found this phenomenon fascinating, and it endeared humans to the superior shifters, but Michelangelo wasn’t one of them. No, to him it was proof that the inferior flesh bags of bones needed to be eliminated completely. They were too stupid and useless to live.
He snapped out of his private musings when he saw the door to the residence across the courtyard open and a cloaked figure step from within. Finally, the person he’d come all this way to see had emerged from the building and Michelangelo could have their meeting and be about his way. Pushing away from the fountain, he strolled aimlessly to the slender figure and walked side-by-side with them down the road until they reached an abandoned alleyway. The sound of a stagecoach approaching halted their forward progress and Michelangelo nodded his head discreetly at the driver, a fellow shifter. If humans only knew how surrounded they were by shifters at every turn, they would be astounded. They would be afraid.
They would kneel and submit.
So why are we still hiding in the shadows?
“It pleases me that you were able to venture to the land of your ancestors for this meeting,” the husky voice drifted to his ears and Michelangelo had to bite back his retort. It would do him no good to anger the one person who could help the Bianchi pack. Especially not when they were going against him.
Michelangelo bowed his head slightly but kept his eyes straightforward as they came to the end of the alley, obscured by debris, refuse, and broken down carriages. Michelangelo turned to his companion and swallowed as the hood of their cape was lowered and their face came into view.
He bowed low.
“Your Highness,” he murmurs, astonished that she was standing before him.
“Rise, dog,” she mutters, muttering in Italian once he does so. Michelangelo wasn’t exactly sure what she was saying, there weren’t many members of the pack back home that still spoke Italian fluently. If he was going to continue to have these meetings, however, he would probably have to brush up on the Romance language.
“You know why you are here, yes?” she asked.
Michelangelo nodded. “My Alpha…” he began.
“Former Alpha. He has lost his position, no?” Her Highness, Queen Isabella, beta of the Numisius pack—one that had almost been completely eliminated during the Fall of Rome but had tripled its numbers over the years—pointed out with one quirked eyebrow.
Michelangelo swallowed the fury that rose up in his chest. It would do him no good to unleash his rage upon the Queen. Not when she wielded so much power. Not when she held the fate and the life of his family, indeed, his entire pack, in her slender, olive-skinned hand. So instead, he simply nodded.
“Yes, that is correct. His position has been… removed from him,” Michelangelo stated.
The queen snorted inelegantly. “Removed? Questo americano parla di follia. It was not removed. It was taken. That alpha, as he claims to be, has stolen the title of Alpha from your pack, the Bianchi. He must be stopped.” Her eyes narrowed. “Our own pack, the Numisius, has only just now recovered from the damage his ancestor did during the Fire of Rome.”
Michelangelo frowned. “But was it not the Numisius pack which started the fire?” He questioned.
The queen waved away his statement with an unladylike grunt. “It was not only our pack, but all the packs of Rome, except that pack. They raced through the city and rescued humans, fighting and slaughtering other shifters, or driving them away. And it was his ancestor who dealt the fatal blow to Alpha Numisius’ sons. The Alpha almost passed away without siring any other sons to carry on the Numisius name. The gods, Remus and Romulus, blessed him, and us, at the last minute with the children he had who proceeded to fill our numbers once again.”
She turned her intense stare on him, and her lips thinned. Michelangelo let his eyes run over her sturdy, yet delicate figure. He was sure that if anyone were to look at her they would only see her petite form, her olive skin, her big, wide, innocent looking hazel-green eyes, her black hair which was pulled back into a chignon, and her curvy frame encased in the finery befitting a royal.
Michelangelo could see why painters and sculptors had taken to recreating her image. He could also see why men tripped over themselves to catch her eye, in spite of her marriage to the king. However, it was a fool to thing that Queen Isabella was too delicate to fight her own battles, or that she could be easily swayed. He would not be making that mistake.
Returning his mind back to the conversation at hand, Michelangelo nodded. “He and his pack have been causing many issues. For quite some time. However, Alpha Bianchi believes that Her Highness may be of some assistance?”
The queen stared at him for long moments; not moving, and not speaking. Finally, she sighed and pulled out a document. It was ancient looking and singed on the edges. She passed it over to him, and he took it without question. Turning, she lifted her hood back over her head.
“We expect great things from the Bianchi pack.”
They were her last words before she blended into the crowd at the opening of the alley. Michelangelo shook his head at her strange behavior before turning back to the parchment he held in his hand. He rolled it open and let his eyes peruse its contents. His heart started to pound in excitement. This was it. This was how the Bianchi pack would turn things around. This was how they would reclaim their lands, their businesses, and their positions.
This was how they would wipe out the Marconi pack.
As he made his way back to his temporary lodgings, he was acutely aware of the feeling of unsettledness that came with him. It was as if he were being watched.
When his body was found three days later in his room, the parchment was missing.
Chapter 11
Angelo grit his teeth and squeezed his phone until the electronic device cracked and shattered in his fist. Another dead end. Joi had been on
the run for three weeks and their connection had become nothing but static in that time. He’d heard the moment she’d decided to run, knew she was making her way to the airport, and he’d had every intention of meeting her there before she could board, however, before he could leave his office, one of the biggest mistakes he’d ever made had sauntered in.
Don Alpha Fernando Bianchi. The head of the Italian pack, and mob boss.
Angelo had never completely understood how the other Alpha could and would allow himself to get entangled in a life of organized crime, and involve himself in human matters, shifters as a whole had no need for wealth, the bulk of their money coming from gold, diamonds, jewels, and ancient coins and treasures passed down from packs long past. Most pack families and members were born into wealth, upper middle and lower upper class. Wanting for nothing. It was rare that a pack family or pack member suffered or went without, unless they were a loner, pack-less, or had been exiled from a pack. And even then, once the nearest Alpha was made aware of their circumstances, steps were taken to rectify the situation.
However, Alpha Bianchi and many in his Italian pack—or at least, how it had been presented in the Meeting of Alphas—were greedy and wanted more wealth, wanted to rule over the humans in their area. Keep them under thumb with intimidation and crime. So much was corrupt within the Italian pack, and yet, they weren’t the worst ones. There was the Russian pack, the South American pack, the Romanian pack… even the North American pack had its problems, its corruption, its evilness.
And yet, it was Alpha Bianchi who had approached Angelo about partnering together to increase the wealth of their packs. Angelo had been young, foolish, new to the position of Alpha, one his father had before him, before stepping down for reasons unknown to Angelo and being killed three short weeks later. Angelo would have loved to blame his choices on grief, on his need for revenge for his father, but none of that was true. He’d made his decision purely because he was greedy for more wealth, more power, because he was foolish.