by Hettie Ivers
Cautious as I believed I was being, the greatest mistake of my life had already been made.
And no, it actually wasn’t getting killed by a werewolf and coming back to life harboring a soul attached to a magical, revenge-greedy dark matter that would soon become my unborn werewolf fetus.
As it turned out, my greatest mistake of all was alerting the authorities to the incident in the first place. I might’ve fared better in the years that followed had I simply tattooed a giant red target on my forehead and ass.
Alcaeus
Almost a decade later in Los Angeles, CA
I needed pussy. Badly. My cock flexed against the seam of my jeans as I inhaled the buffet before me.
Not even the stench of alcohol, marijuana, and cheap perfume melding with the sweat emanating off of the human bodies filling the bar could mask the underlying scent of freshly washed, neatly landscaped, eager-to-be-fucked human pussy wrapped in lace undies and crammed into too-tight pants and skirts.
“Wallet,” Kai’s voice demanded, halting me midstep.
I turned to find my oldest friend and Beta with his hand outstretched, a harassed look on his face.
I frowned. “Forgot yours?”
“No. I don’t see why we should make a poor Omega search dirty alleys and public restrooms to locate yours later on when you can give it to me now for safekeeping.”
“Such a dutiful wife,” I muttered, fishing my wallet from my back pocket. “Remind me when it’s our anniversary to get you something nice.” I slapped the wallet into Kai’s awaiting palm.
“Like a divorce? Remind me why we’re here again?”
My knuckles cracked as my fist clenched at my side. “Because Los Angeles is a city of loners. It’s the perfect hiding spot for a rogue.”
And because we’d already searched everywhere else across the U.S. for most of the past decade. More or less.
“I was referring to this bar.” His tight smile was one of condescension. “Don’t you think a rogue werewolf might be inclined to avoid the L.A. party scene?”
“Have a drink, Kai. Talk to a woman.” I added the weight of authority to my words. “That’s not a suggestion.”
“We’re wasting time, Al. Our mission here is done. The Rogue obviously isn’t in the States.”
I shook my head. “We’re going to find him here. It’s only a matter of time. The best seers all said—”
“The same seers who are all dead?” He raked a hand through his hair and lowered his volume as he continued. “Future events shift as circumstances change. You and I have lived long enough to know that.”
“Too long,” I mumbled, scanning the crowd for my next escape. I felt like I would fly out of my skin at any moment if I didn’t ground myself. It’d been days since I’d killed anything. I needed to walk away from Kai before I said something I really wanted to.
He and I were both in our fifth century. I’d begun to think that maybe that was what was wrong with us. I’d grown tired of the empty look in the hazel eyes that stared back at me through the mirror each time I caught my own reflection. And I was beyond sick of having to face Kai’s comatose features each day over the past decade that we’d coexisted on our Rogue mission in America—to the point that I largely avoided eye contact with him anymore. It was too damned depressing.
And infuriating.
“The pack needs you.”
Bullshit. I laughed outright, my eyes rolling away from the blonde blatantly checking me out across the bar. “The pack’s doing better than ever without me. Everyone knows it.”
“It’s got nothing to do with your absence. And it doesn’t mean that Milena doesn’t still need or want your help. Besides … Jussara misses you.” He took aim below the belt. “It’d be good for you both to spend some time grieving togeth—”
“Jussara’s fine,” I snapped. “She and I talk every week.”
“Really?” His brow arched. “A week is still measured as a period of seven days, you know.”
“You want to go back to Brazil? Go. I’ll be fine carrying on the mission without you.”
“Ha! What mission? If I weren’t here to keep the team on track, this would be nothing but a nonstop sex tour of the United States.”
“Not true.” I threw my pointer finger in his face. “We’ve eliminated scores of rogue werewolves over the past decade.”
“Which any peon werewolf can do. Come on, Al, you were a real Alpha once.”
“And you were a man once!”
Fuck. I shouldn’t have said—shouted—that. I ran my palm over my face as people sitting at the bar nearby turned to stare at Kai, who was subtly shaking his head at the ceiling—that all-too-familiar pinched look of open disapproval lining his face.
For a century throughout the Reinoso pack, Kai had been known as the “pack priest” because of his longstanding celibacy. But in the past decade while on our mission in America, the guys and I had taken to calling him “pack eunuch.”
I might’ve started it.
“I gotta go,” I said rather than apologize. “Have a drink and talk to a woman,” I ordered again before striding off in the direction of the hot blonde.
Some things never got old no matter how long I lived or how dead inside I became: like the sight of my dick sliding balls deep inside a beautiful pink pussy and gliding back out again dripping wet. That visual never got old.
Nor did the sounds a woman made while getting properly filled and fucked, her skittle played just right.
I had needed this. It’d been far too long—since yesterday.
Besides fighting and killing, sex was the only thing that grounded me anymore, pulling me out of my head and reconnecting me to my wolf.
Kai had labeled it an avoidance addiction. But to me, it was the opposite. It was the only time I felt present. Alive. Sensate.
And it was more than the primal, physical sensation of my cock dragging in and out of a velvety-smooth, gripping wet channel that did it for me; more than the inevitable release. It was the scent of a living, breathing, and warm and willing human female—even if it would forever be the wrong scent.
The wrong human female.
And I’d fucked hundreds—okay, more like thousands—of wrong human females over the past decade. After centuries of largely abstaining from sex with the fragile species, I was sure I’d become more proficient at handling them than even my human-harem-keeping stepbrother, Remy.
In the beginning, it was to prove to myself that I could. That I could take a human female sexually without breaking her. God knows why. I guess I felt the need to punish myself with that knowledge—the knowledge that I’d been a coward for fifty years.
The knowledge that maybe if I’d done something differently … if I’d forged more of a physical, sexual connection with—
“Oh, God! Oh, oh, oh fuck!” The wrong human female squealed, clenching hard around my thrusting cock. Her spine arched and her nails clawed the bathroom countertop she was bent over.
Orgasm number three for the blonde, and I still wasn’t anywhere near reaching my own. Nowhere near feeling grounded enough.
Damnit.
I shut my eyes and focused on her human scent, on the sensation of soft skin and smooth, feminine curves beneath my exploring fingertips. After a moment, I started to lose myself in the desperate, pleading sounds she began to make as my fingers pinched and rolled over her clit. I felt my wolf rising to the surface at last as I gripped her hips more forcefully, my dick swelling and my balls drawing up—
“And to think the pack rumors were kinder than reality for once.”
My eyes flew open at the sound of my brother Alex’s supercilious words to find his reflection in the mirror, standing a few feet away, dressed to the nines in a dark silk tux. He looked almost comical against the backdrop of the dirty bar restroom, his patent leather wing-tip shoes so shiny I could probably catch the reflection of my dick in them. But there was nothing funny about him teleporting in on me and thwarting my impending eja
culation.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Trying not to inhale, at the moment,” Alex said from behind his palm, taking in his surroundings with unabashed disdain.
Sonofabitch.
I rammed hard into the blonde one final time, inadvertently setting off her fourth orgasm. Great.
I groaned and covered her mouth with my hand as she began shrieking.
My Beta was a dead wolf. Kai could barely stand my little brother, Alex. Those two had never gotten along. If he had called him here for the petty sake of trying to rat me out, then things were far more strained between us than I’d thought.
“Kai called you?” I demanded, angrier than ever at having to endure my dick being squeezed in the best possible way while being unable to chase my own release.
Alex shook his head. “No. You have your own idiocy to blame for the fact that I just left a perfectly dignified function—which, by the way, I happened to be enjoying immensely with my wife—to come here and witness your sad descent into”—he waved his hand about, his nose scrunching up—“E. coli-ridden debauchery. You Alpha-commanded him to talk to a woman. You of all people should know by now there are only two women on the planet with whom Kai converses anymore if he can help it.”
Jussara and Milena.
Of course Kai had called Milena. It was doubly annoying to acknowledge that Alex was right: I should’ve anticipated that the pack eunuch would find any excuse to avoid socializing with a member of the opposite sex in a bar setting. God forbid he remembered what attraction and arousal felt like.
“As often as Milena reminds me that it’s only a small man who would celebrate another’s misfortune”—Alex winced, sucking air through his teeth as the asshole grin he’d been struggling to withhold broke across his face—“I must admit … it’s really taking all of my self-restraint right now not to throw one of your own windbag know-it-all lectures back at you.”
Her orgasm waning, I released my hand over the blonde’s mouth. When she turned her head, she started beneath me as her half-mast eyes landed on Alex, realizing for the first time that we had company.
“How rude of me.” Alex held his hands up in a poor imitation of shock and contrition. “I didn’t realize my brother had company in here. I knocked, but … I guess you two were indisposed.” He shrugged, then gifted the blonde with a phony smile of sympathy. “You must be so distressed. I’m sure you never imagined such an embarrassing scenario occurring when you snuck in here for a quick fuck.”
That was my baby brother. No matter how much everyone believed that my sister-in-law had changed him, Alex was pretty much the same prick he’d always been.
The blonde frowned, accurately deducing that he was insulting her. But then Alex winked and flashed his phony megawatt smile, and I watched in disgust as her face lit up.
And she blushed.
Ugh. I felt my penis shrinking in revulsion as I pulled out of her. You’re welcome for the four orgasms.
Her eyes flitted back and forth between the two of us as she straightened her undies and skirt. I disposed of the condom and tucked my blue balls into my jeans.
“Wow,” she said on a breathy exhale.
“Wow, indeed.” Alex’s voice dripped sarcasm. “You’ll have to excuse my brother for failing to properly introduce us. He was literally raised by wolves, I’m afraid.” He threw an impudent smile my way, prompting an introduction. The little shit was banking on me not knowing her name.
And he was right.
“Oh, we agreed no names.” The blonde unwittingly jumped to my rescue. Alex’s cocky smile slipped. She shrugged. “I mean, you know … why complicate a good thing?”
And this was why I loved American girls—particularly the New York City and Los Angeles variety.
“So I’m not normally into threesomes, but if you two …” She left the invitation hanging in the air as she bit her lip and made eyes at Alex.
Jesus, what was it about my brother that women always went for? It defied the laws of logic and self-preservation.
“Flattering,” Alex said in a tone that suggested he was more repulsed than anything else. “But not interested.” He held his left hand up and wiggled his ring finger, showing off his wedding band. “However, there is a friend of ours sitting at the bar who I’d love for you to chat up.” He flashed her his cheesy grin again, and I found myself stifling laughter, knowing that he was about to charm her into hitting on Kai without even needing to use compulsion.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Disregarding my brother, I leaned back in my stool chair and took a leisurely sip of beer. He was standing next to the high-top table where I was seated, having judged the stool chairs as beneath his ass to sit upon, no doubt. “Why are you really here, Alex?”
“I’ve told you. Milena’s worried about you.”
“Me? Don’t you mean Kai?”
“Eh … sure.” Alex’s lip curled with distaste. “Him, too, I suppose.” His eyes shifted to where Kai was seated at the bar about twenty feet from us. Kai’s posture was ramrod straight and awkward as he engaged in forced conversation with no-name hot blondie. A satisfied, sadistic smirk returned to Alex’s mouth, relaxing his tense features somewhat. “Lately she fusses more over you. Anyway, she wants you both to come back and help with the Rogue search in Europe.”
I shook my head. “Tell her to quit worrying.”
“Like that’d work.”
“It should. I’m a grown fucking man. I survived four centuries without your wife worrying about me.”
“Yes, I’ve assured her that dumb luck has long been on your side. It failed to assuage her concern.”
“Knock her up and give her a baby to fuss over. What are you two waiting for anyway? I’d like a niece or nephew sometime before I turn half a millennia.”
Alex’s jaw tightened. It was a sore subject and I knew it. I smiled into my glass of beer as I tipped it back. My brother was beyond eager to impregnate his mate. But Milena was dead set against bringing a baby into the world until the Rogue had been eliminated.
Centuries ago, during my late father’s tenure as Alpha, seers had foretold that a mythical Rogue—the firstborn of a new and errant breed of werewolf—would rise to power during the time of the second vessel. As the second vessel, Milena had been prophesied to be “the key to the Rogue.”
She was widely regarded within our pack as being our best shot at both finding and eliminating the abomination. Few took the task of rogue hunting more seriously than Milena did. Not even me—and I’d been playing at hunting the creature for most of my damn life.
“Look, I’m not saying I want you or Kai to return—yet. I’m asking you to come for a visit. Check in with her. You haven’t been back since …” Alex hesitated, but only for a breath before going for the open wound few dared to poke. “Since Lupe’s death.”
I ignored it. “I’ll order Kai to return. He spends all his time on the phone with Milena anyway,” I provoked right back.
Alex’s coal eyes turned steely. “I’m aware.” His gaze returned to Kai and the blonde at the bar. “If he wasn’t the pack eunuch already, I might make him one for real.” The open bafflement and underlying pity in Alex’s eyes as he studied Kai’s behavior with the blonde mirrored that of every man who tried to wrap his brain around the anomaly of nature who was our permanently celibate pack doctor. “But we all know you need Kai. I wouldn’t dream of leaving you to rely solely upon public transportation.”
I rolled my eyes at his juvenile jab at the fact that I couldn’t teleport. As far as we knew, there were only a handful of werelocks on the planet who could teleport. Within our Reinoso pack, Kai was one of them. Alex and my sister Alessandra were also capable of teleporting. Among our enemies, we knew of two other werelocks who possessed the gift.
“I’ll manage. My mission in America isn’t over.”
“Oh, come on! You know I can’t stand it when she gets that sad, distressed look on her face. And then
she does that—that thing …” He gestured to his mouth. “That little thing with her lip.”
“Stop. I’m gonna be sick.”
“I’m serious. It’s fucking heartbreaking, that lip thing.” He rubbed his palm against his tuxedo shirt. “My chest gets tight and I can’t breathe when she does it.”
I didn’t doubt it. Alex had been a virtual slave to Milena’s emotional projections ever since the moment they’d met. It was as if his long-arrested sense of empathy had finally been awakened through their mate connection. Years later, he was still very much like a baby discovering his own hand and learning how to use it when it came to emotional intelligence.
“Not my problem, Alex.”
“I can make it your problem.”
I laughed. Alex had reigned as Alpha of the Reinoso pack for longer than I ever had before him, yet he’d somehow never gained the ability to command me. We both knew he couldn’t order me to do shit. And while I wasn’t as confident of my odds against him in a fight, I was willing to risk it.
“Go ahead and try—”
“Damnit, Al!” He smacked his hand against the table, sloshing his untouched glass of scotch everywhere. “I promised Milena I wouldn’t resort to violence. It’s one family visit.”
“Wait a minute … you’re asking me for a favor?” I mocked. “Oh, wow, I’m sorry. I failed to catch that fact based on the way you blew in here cock-blocking and insulting me. Apparently those pack rumors about how well Milena has housebroken and taught you basic human manners were exaggerated.”
He bit the inside of his cheek, looking put out and disgusted, his stubborn eyes all but pleading with me not to make him say the magic word Milena had finally succeeded in teaching him to use at the ripe age of one hundred forty-one. Finally, he cast those eyes to the ceiling. “Fine. Will you please come back to Morumbi for a visit?”