by Hettie Ivers
It wasn’t as if I cared what he thought of me, but seeing him pinpoint and tie together with ease the obvious red flags in all of my seemingly breakthrough interactions with Raul’s alleged landlady and her daughter—it made me realize how my imminent demise could’ve been avoided had I not been so desperate, and perhaps, had I possessed a shred of common sense. If only I’d given up and not nagged my mother’s estate attorney until he’d agreed to put me in touch with a P.I. connection he had in Brazil.
No sooner had I thought it that I realized what a blunder I’d made. But it was too late. Whether he’d overheard it or simply sensed my panicked reaction, he latched onto the memory I’d unconsciously conjured up of the attorney who’d been appointed executor of my mother’s last will and testament and began callously, methodically pulling thread after thread of memories surrounding my mother’s passing before I could utter a protest.
It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t fair!
It wasn’t as if it mattered that he now knew I had no family left to miss me, as I was sure knowing that someone back in the States might come searching for me wouldn’t have dissuaded him from killing me anyhow. But it was the worst sort of invasion, as these were among some of my most private, most painful memories and life moments he was flipping through as if he were surfing cable stations.
Anger surged through me like a rocket. These were the treasured, final memories of my mother as she lost her all-too-brief, four-month battle with cancer while I tried in vain to get in touch with Raul, juggle bills, and navigate insurance bureaucracies all on my own. These were horrific, desolate moments, and yet some of the most poignantly beautiful ones I possessed.
And they were mine.
This asshole in my head had no right to access them. I no longer cared what he could do to me or how much it would hurt; I harnessed all of my hatred and outrage and pushed back with a vengeance.
Pain knifed through my head in all directions as before, only this time I welcomed it, as it was accompanied by surprised, choice curse words and irritated orders from Alex for me to desist.
Fuck him!
I fought harder and somehow managed to slow down his intrusive search through my memory cache. It came with the price of insurmountable pain, though, as his anger spiked and he refused to back off and stop poking through recollections of my mother’s funeral service that I was determined to defend.
Kai began pleading with me to stop fighting Alex. Then he exchanged rapid words with Alex in Portuguese as he removed the long needle from my left arm at last. Remy and Alcaeus were soon arguing with Alex in Portuguese as well.
Though I went from crying and groaning in agony to screaming bloody murder, I was rewarded when I felt my muscles begin trembling and shaking to life again, fighting against whatever voodoo restraint he’d used to disable them as I imagined clobbering Alex with all of my might.
And just as the excruciating sensation of my brain catching fire from within started to blaze, something snapped and my right hand flew up from its imaginary restraint to land an open-palmed, resoundingly loud thwack against Alex’s ear.
It was a short-lived but tremendous victory, as my hand was drawn back down and the imaginary restraints fastened around me tighter than before. The look of dazed astonishment on Alex’s face, though, had been priceless, and well worth the devastating, shattering torture in my head that followed.
From the sound of Remy’s swearing and Alcaeus’ raucous laughter in the background, I got the impression it’d been a while since anyone had dared to box their little brother in the ear.
“Yes, sedate her,” Alex ordered. “Now.”
“This is going to hit you fast,” Kai told me as another needle pierced my arm.
And it did. I shut my eyes as the room began to spin.
There was more arguing between the brothers in Portuguese that escalated into shouting, and then finally I knew inner peace as I sensed Alex slip from my mind and release his imprisoning hold over me.
As every muscle in my body felt flooded with languor from whatever drug Kai had just given me, it served to accentuate just how tightly I’d unconsciously been holding and flexing those muscles while trying to break free, as now I was forced to release and relax every single large and tiny one I’d been contracting. Soon all of those exhausted, released muscles began trembling, though, and I was twitching and shaking like a leaf.
I was also suddenly cold. Very cold. I noted the absence of his heat and realized Alex was no longer hovering over me.
I heard him bark something in Portuguese and Kai respond in an apologetic tone and then issue what sounded like more directives to others in the room.
Warm blankets were soon piled atop and tucked all around me where I lay trembling like some addict on the marble floor. It felt good, but I didn’t understand why they were bothering to make me comfortable.
Now that Alex had gleaned whatever petty information he needed from my mind, I was sure he’d be killing me in short order. I prayed this wasn’t going to be one of those horror flick situations where they made me better just so they could slowly torture me to death.
I inadvertently whimpered when my left arm was pulled from beneath its warm cover and yet another needle pierced my vein without warning.
“Sorry,” Kai said. “This will help the shaking.”
Warm knuckles ghosted down the side of my face a moment later in a thoroughly bewildering gesture of comfort.
Even with my eyes closed, I knew it was Alex touching me. I could feel his distinct heat lingering above me again, and I could smell him. My shaking subsided.
I was surprised further when I felt sure, graceful fingers begin smoothing my wild, errant hair from my face and wiping the residual dampness from my cheeks. I sniffled and a shudder ran through me as he continued to rake gentle fingers through the hair at my scalp in a caress that to my sickening irritation felt absurdly delightful.
How dare he? Tears pooled behind my closed eyelids despite my resolve to withhold them.
With the scant muscle control I still had, I attempted to turn my head away, hoping he’d take it as the rejection it was and stop touching me. I just wanted to roll to my side, curl myself into a ball, and disappear.
But steady hands encased either side of my face, thwarting my imaginary escape. His thumbs brushed over the fresh tears that had fallen.
“I’m so sorry.”
I thought I was hallucinating when his warm breath fanned my face and I heard his deep, smooth voice utter those three softly spoken words with what sounded like complete sincerity. I struggled to blink my eyes open. My vision was bleary and the room persisted in swaying somewhat, but I could make out his face hovering a mere six inches above my own. His brown eyes were so dark they were black as they stared down at me.
“I am sorry …” he apologized stiffly, “for the recent loss of your mother, Milena.”
For a split second I teetered on the verge of maniacal laughter. He’d offered no apology for chasing me down and terrorizing me in his beast form, or for supernaturally restraining me and inflicting an excruciating, traumatizing mind-rape. But he’d just stoically offered his formal condolences for the passing of my mother three months ago of all things?
Not a word of apology had he uttered for the recent murder of my brother at his own hands. Nor an inkling of remorse had he expressed for the fact that he was resolved to offing me next. It had to be the worst, most grossly inadequate, inappropriate, ill-timed apology in the entire history of the world of all shitty apologies ever.
“Fuck you. I hope you die painfully and all alone when your time comes.” My voice sounded eerily calm and even, my words clear as they fell from my lips. I hadn’t meant to say them aloud; it’d just happened. And I didn’t care that it had. I was as good as dead anyway.
He looked momentarily stunned, and for some reason it was enough of an infinitesimal victory for me to die knowing I’d put that disoriented, confounded look on his arrogant face.
In spite of whatever pain and sedation medication they had coursing through my veins, I felt a crazy surge of adrenaline and reckless courage shoot through my weakened form. I stared him square in the eye as best I could through my increasingly blurry vision, and I told him, “Just kill me now so you can go back to your stupid party.”
CHAPTER SIX
Alex’s features went blank for a moment as he held my face in his grasp. Then his bow lips split into a grin reminiscent of Remy’s, only his didn’t come close to reaching his eyes. A low rumble of humorless laughter bubbled up from deep in his chest as the fingers of his right hand slid down the side of my face to encircle the column of my throat.
I sucked in a breath and held it as those fingers flexed and tightened, subtly squeezing my trachea. His nose lowered and inhaled the skin just beneath the ridge of my jaw. My eyes fluttered shut in anticipation of the worst.
“Mm … that really what you want, little girl?” he taunted, before pressing his lips to my ear in the briefest, faintest of kisses that somehow managed to terrify me more than his hand wrapped around my throat did. “Breathe,” he mouthed against my earlobe.
I panted small gulps of air into my lungs and was relieved to find his fingers weren’t in any way restricting my ability to do so. He maintained a gentle grip on my neck with one hand while the fingertips of his other hand delved into the thickness of my hair to once again drag back and forth against my scalp, producing such pleasurable tingles that I vacillated between despising Alex and hating myself for being so affected by him.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Milena, but no one in my house is going to harm you.”
My heart twisted between emotions of hope, disbelief, acute confusion, and dread.
“Believe me,” he lamented in a soft, deceptively dulcet tone, “I’d indulge your request and kill you this instant if I could.”
Clearly, he was trying to demonstrate that he could fuck with my head even when he wasn’t in it. He wasn’t, was he?
The tip of his nose grazed mine, and his breath fell over my slightly parted lips. It smelled of mint and chocolate. Sadistic murderers weren’t supposed to smell this good. Or administer amazing cranial massages as they casually talked about killing you.
I decided there had to have been something in one of those drugs Kai had given me to cause me to react to Alex this way. I willed my tear ducts to behave and deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing me break again. I didn’t dare open my eyes.
“For over a century it’s been our law to dispose of the blood relatives of those who betray this house,” he explained. “Always terminating the innocent as humanely as possible. I’d have taken your life so quickly and painlessly you’d never have known what happened.” He sounded almost wistful as his lips ghosted my brow.
“It’s never been personal. And I regret that circumstances are such with you that I must make an exception and insist you live.”
Wow. His propensity for apologizing was piteously stunted.
I was feeling loopier by the second, but it sounded as if he was actually applauding himself for some misguided sense of magnanimity within his unnecessary practice of murdering his enemies’ family members, just because he’d convinced himself he was being merciful about it.
I wondered how many of those innocent blood relatives had mistakenly taken his “humane” killing of them personally? It was obvious even to my doped-up brain cells that I was dealing with a devout sociopath. And then he threw down his full hand of crazy cards.
“I’m afraid you smell far too delightful to die,” he said in a covetous tone that set off every innate warning bell I possessed, despite my impaired state. “My wolf wants you very much alive.”
God, help me, what did that mean?
It took multiple tries before my eyelids responded to my brain’s command to open. And several more blinks before Alex’s two sets of blurry features merged into one. He was startlingly close to me!
His dark eyes were half-lidded, and looked as if they were about to swallow me whole as they canvassed my features. At some point his fingers had deviated from encasing my throat to massaging the vertebrae along the back of my neck, and it felt undeniably fantastic, particularly combined with the sensations induced by his other fingers working their magic on my scalp. He was evil incarnate.
When the pink tip of his tongue peeked out to lick across his full bottom lip, I felt my cheeks heat with unease and trepidation. I lowered my eyes in an effort to look elsewhere. They had nowhere to settle next but on his broad, naked shoulders, and then to his bare chest hovering over my blanketed form.
His olive brown skin was smooth and his chest and arms muscled beyond anything I’d ever seen or imagined possible for the human male body. I had to remind myself he wasn’t human. Dear Lord, was that an eight-pack? I felt my heart rate spike despite the medications within me as an unwelcome pulling sensation began in the pit of my belly, horrifying and sickening me.
I must have appeared petrified as I drew my eyes back up to his face, because he frowned and reassured me, “I won’t hurt you, Milena. Not …” He shook his head. “Never like that.”
His words were spoken as if in earnest. And fuck it all, but I was too wasted to follow whatever mind game he might be playing. I could scarcely keep up with his changing moods, and I was almost certain I preferred when he was outright angry and threatening compared to this new twisted tactic he was taking.
I didn’t like the way he was saying my name now either. Like he was savoring it. Never before had my name sounded so luxurious and exotic as it did falling from my would-be killer’s lips.
I didn’t like it. Not the way he was looking at me, not the way he was touching me, and not the way he was talking to me.
Why hadn’t the stupid sedation medication knocked me out yet? As frightening as the prospect of being unconscious at Alex’s mercy was, I was growing more desperate for any manner of escape from him that I could achieve.
“Stop,” I managed to croak at last. My mouth felt dry, and it seemed markedly more difficult to get my lips to form the words I wanted to speak than it had a few minutes ago. “Please stop.”
“Stop what?” he asked, gazing down at me with rapt interest, his near-black irises swirling with flecks of gold.
“Stop creeping her the fuck out!” Alcaeus spoke up from somewhere in the immediate vicinity. “Jesus, if you weren’t Alpha, I don’t know how you’d ever get laid. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Why are you still here?” Alex turned his attention from me to his brother. “I thought you’d have gone to comfort Lessa by now.”
To my blessed relief, his fingers stilled and withdrew from my hair and neck at long last. To my supreme irritation, the delightful tingling sensations remained.
“What, and miss this grand display of your softer side?” Alcaeus quipped. “I suspect the news of Raul’s death is slightly less heartbreaking and traumatic for Alessandra as it is for Milena. Alessandra is used to you disappointing her and disregarding her feelings.”
Somehow Alcaeus proved to be quite the comforting sight for drugged eyes as he came to crouch next to me on my right side, giving me a lopsided smile and a wink. “Holding up okay there, sweetheart?”
The emotions in me swelled in response to Alcaeus’ understanding about my brother and his confirmation of my earlier suspicion that Alessandra had held feelings for Raul, and I nearly burst into tears at his inquiry as I shook my fuzzy, weary head. I was not holding up okay.
“Please … help?” I mouthed, my watery eyes pleading with Alcaeus to save me from his evil little brother’s clutches. Alcaeus gave me a quick nod of reassurance as Alex’s inner Cujo commenced growling at him.
“Oh, quit your yapping! You’re acting about as endearing as a serial killer right now, Alex. Way to win over your mate.”
“Mate? Never. I assure you, I’ve no such interest in her.”
“’Course not. It’s only your wolf’s attraction to her
scent,” Alcaeus mocked. “You yourself couldn’t possibly find anything tempting about her hot little young human body. And I’m sure those guileless blue eyes hold zero appeal for you as well. That why you can’t keep your hands off her? She said stop! She’s a far cry from accepting you as her mate.”
“She is not my mate!”
Whatever did they mean by mate?
“This isn’t something you’re allowed to force on her,” Alcaeus lectured, ignoring his brother’s protests. “It’s against our laws, and particularly in the rare case of a human mate. She has no idea what this means.”
Did they mean mate as in … an actual mate?
“What the fuck am I forcing?” Alex blustered, arising onto his knees where he straddled my midsection. Out of the corner of my eye I noted he’d thankfully pulled on a fresh pair of pants at some point—presumably during my shaking fit.
“I don’t even want her. She is not my mate! No matter how fucking fantastic she might smell.”
Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they did mean mate as in mate!
“You were practically salivating over her just now,” Alcaeus said. “And you were growling at me for getting too close to her.”
“That wasn’t about her,” Alex denied. “I do not disregard Lessa’s feelings.”
“You did where Raul was concerned.”
“It’s our law. I don’t have to explain my actions.”
“Our law? You uphold our laws when it’s convenient for you,” Alcaeus charged. “Damnit, I don’t deny it was a unique circumstance. I’m not at all happy about what Raul did. But the consequences arising from his death at your hands are going to significantly complicate things for you, both with Lessa and now Milena. And what affects you impacts all of us.”