Dark Secrets

by Madeline Pryce

  A low, rumbling growl left Micah and he grabbed my arm to pull me behind him. “She’s fine, wolf, we’ve got it under control.”

  I’d learned over the last couple of weeks that alpha demon males didn’t like naked men around their mates. The girly part of myself I tried to repress preened—not that I’d ever admit that aloud. Up on my tiptoes, so I could see over Micah’s shoulder, I flicked my gaze down Eiven’s broad shoulders. The dark, springy hair covering his chest narrowed into a single line that ran down the center of his rippling eight-pack.

  “My queen,” Eiven said, stepping closer.

  My gaze jerked up to meet his smirk.

  He smoothed his thumb across his moist lower lip. “We should summon your sire.”

  “God, no!” Micah and I shouted at the same time.

  Julian, my sire and ex-lover, was the last person I wanted to talk to. “Everything is fine, Eiven, you can leave. We’re redecorating. I wanted an indoor swimming pool.”

  No one moved.

  I stepped out from behind Micah. He crossed his arms over his chest, his impressive biceps bulging, and glared at the packmaster. Two weeks ago, Micah would have grabbed my hand, maybe even drawn it up to his mouth and brushed his soft lips against my knuckles. Not today. The division between us slammed into my gut.

  The something off between us was back and it kept me from reaching out to him despite the closeness we’d just shared minutes ago. Squaring my shoulders and lifting my head, I capitalized the “B” in “bitch”. “Go. Away.”

  Eiven bowed—his actions less formal and more a mockery. “As you wish.” He addressed the wolves milling around the room, their snouts to the ground taking in as many scents as they could. “Come.”

  He turned, showing off the wolf insignia inked into the skin on his back and upper shoulders. He walked through the door, the muscles in his back and ass flexing with each step. Behind him, the Fenrir followed obediently one by one.

  “Are you joining us, Elijah?” Eiven asked over his shoulder, his tone bristling with what sounded like annoyance.

  I glanced at Eli, at the way he turned up his snout. Even though he was in wolf form, his soulful amber eyes conveyed his resentment crystal clear. Eiven might not have been the one to infect him with lycanthropy, but one of them had. The pack ate together, slept together, fucked together and killed together. They only separated for patrols—a job they’d taken in my stead until I figured out my little soul-blackening dilemma.

  Without another word, Eiven strode into the hall.

  “I hate that guy,” Micah grumbled and dropped his hands to his side. “Are you sure we can’t get rid of him?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve tried, they won’t leave. The Fenrir are in the service to the royal family for, oh, I don’t know, another hundred years. Apparently they take their promises seriously.”

  Micah shook his head. “Don’t use the word ‘service’ in the same sentence as Eiven. The thought of him touching you…”

  “Touching me? Yah, I don’t think so. His job is to protect me. End of story.”

  “You’re delusional, babe. One of the wolves, Ja-air, let it slip that Lizbeth used them for more than just elite bodyguards. They, and I mean the entire pack, serviced her needs in and out of the bedroom.”

  Images of pre-pubescent girls, because that was what Lizbeth was in appearance, and massive wolves flashed through my brain. All of them made me want to vomit. “The entire pack? Like, at once?”

  Micah frowned at me as if he knew I was trying to figure out the logistics of eight dicks and only a few holes. Vagina. Ass. Mouth. Ear?

  “Does it matter?” he asked, sounding as disgusted as I felt.

  I shook my head, hoping to dislodge my derailing thoughts. “The little sadist probably got off on group orgies.”

  “I’d rather not guess at all. How old did you say she looked? Fourteen?”

  “Her little-girl charm knew no bounds.” Vomit churned in my belly. “Let’s not talk about it.”

  I turned to Micah and hesitantly smoothed a hand up his chest. Would he push me away? Would he make an excuse and leave? I—an action girl at heart—was having a hard time with waiting patiently for him to come around and fuck the living daylights out of me. Honestly, I was shocked I’d made it this long. I’d found stubbornness trumped patience.

  I curled my fingers around the nape of his neck and pressed close. Warmth tingled through my veins and a burst of energy filled me at the jolts electrifying my skin where we touched. I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of how it felt to touch him.

  His eyes darkened into a shade more blue than green and he cupped my hips. The single, simple caress made me throb. The heat between us turned into fire. As if he felt it too, he tightened his grip and brought me against the hard ridge of his cock. I rubbed my belly against his steel length with a little purr.

  My insides went liquid with want. Two weeks without sex—Micah’s doing, not mine—felt like an eternity. I needed him. Needed this. Needed to know he still desired me. When he touched me, the doubts I had surrounding the bond and whether Micah would choose to be with me or not vanished.

  He dipped his head to mine and traced his tongue along my lower lip, flicked the bow of my upper one. On a moan, my eyes fell shut and I closed the distance between our mouths.

  My stomach clenched in a wave of arousal at the first slow, wet slide of our tongues tangling. Whatever reasons Micah had for keeping me at arm’s length no longer seemed to matter. He slid his hand around my waist, lower to cup my ass in his palm. The slinky material of my workout shorts crept up, higher and higher, as Micah kneaded my flesh.

  He nipped my lower lip, growled and chased forward to resume a kiss so potent I felt it in the depths of my soul. One awkward step at a time, he forced us back until my spine hit something solid—a wall maybe. I cupped the back of his head with both hands, threaded my fingers through his silky hair and tugged. The kiss turned feral. Teeth clanked and nipped. Lips bruised while our tongues tussled. All the pent-up sexual frustration I’d been carrying exploded.

  Eli chuffed, and Micah and I turned, limbs and legs tangled, mid-kiss, to stare at him. Damn. I’d forgotten he was in the room. Even in canine form, the annoyance in his gaze came across loud and clear. He looked pointedly at the hole in the wall, then back at Micah with another snort.

  Micah gently removed my hands from his hair and stepped back. The man wasn’t even winded, unlike me—I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath—guess that meant I wasn’t getting lucky. Why did the karma gods hate me?

  “Right,” I said, not even trying to hide my pissed-offness.

  I smoothed down the shorts that had ridden up my crotch. My trial was coming up. I waited for Micah’s go-to excuse. Babe, we need to focus. Innocent or not, we needed proof that I hadn’t broken my oath. A simple blood test wouldn’t show Micah was part demon, he’d been seeing Agency doctors all his life.

  We needed something concrete.

  My skin prickled along the side untouched by the fireball and I turned to the sensation. Since my transition into full vampire, I was more sensitive to other supernatural beings. Castro, a demon lord and strangely enough, one of Micah’s good friends, walked into the room and looked around at the destruction with boredom, as if this was a familiar sight. I suppose where Micah and I were concerned, nothing surprised him.

  “Redecorating again, I see,” Castro said, his British accent sexafying his words.

  I glanced at Micah and glared. “He threw a fireball at my head.”

  Micah scowled at me, the skin around his eyes wrinkling. “On. Accident.”

  Castro studied us for a long moment, gaze bouncing back and forth. Gray tendrils of opaque smoke curled from beneath the cuffs of a tailored pinstriped suit that clung to his tall—like almost-to-the-ceiling tall—muscular body. With his black, shoulder-length hair pulled back, he was, as usual, all business. My skin itched from the waves of otherworldly energy he emitted and I rubbed my arms
to help ease the sensation.

  Castro settled his focus on Micah. “Let me see your hand. Your demonic powers are emerging—I wondered when that would happen.”

  Micah, who was still coming to terms with his own otherness, reluctantly held out his arm. Castro took it in his and traced a finger across the pattern etched into Micah’s palm, a mark that hadn’t been there before the immolation attempt.

  Castro looked up, met Micah’s gaze. Emotion I couldn’t name filled the demon’s gaze.

  “What does it mean?” I asked, my anger fading under the weight of curiosity.

  “Remarkable,” Castro whispered.

  A strange kind of tension filled the room and I wasn’t sure how to categorize it, or where it was coming from. Micah? Castro? The demon lord had the ability to alter one’s emotions and I wondered if he was projecting his feelings.

  Castro stepped back. He smiled, his lips spreading to show a line of straight, white teeth. The man, in all his gorgeousness, would make killer toothpaste commercials.

  “Why are you here?” Micah asked, his shoulders tense and his voice tight.

  Castro’s wattage never dimmed. “I tried to call, but no one was picking up their phones. I’ve got new information about your mother.”

  “New?” I asked, looking between them.

  Micah’s ramrod body told me something was amiss. A niggling sense of unease wormed its way inside me. I stared at Micah as if he’d grown a second head. The longer he stayed silent, the more my thoughts spun. When had it become old? With our peek-a-boo bond and ability to see into each other’s heads when we made love, we didn’t keep information to ourselves.

  When no one answered me, I crossed my arms under my chest and spoke louder. Just in case they hadn’t heard me before. “What’s he talking about? What about your mom?”

  Micah, who was already stiff, went rigid. He avoided my gaze and glared at Castro with such fierce heat I feared the demon might spontaneously combust. When Micah spoke, it was through clenched teeth. “You should’ve left a message.”

  Warning bells went off in my head and for some strange reason, I had a flashback of Julian arguing with one of his go-to guys when we’d dated. My sire’s tone had been an exact replica of Micah’s.

  Castro glanced between us, his perfect face now marred by lines of confusion wrinkling his brow. Join the fucking club. He too crossed his arms over his chest.

  “This isn’t something you leave on a voicemail. I’ve finally pinpointed your mother’s whereabouts. Time is of the essence if we are to rescue her before Ella’s trial.”

  Anger whipped through me with the speed of a striking viper. I’d obviously been left out of the loop on this one. “Rescue? I thought your mother was dead. Explain. Now.”

  “You haven’t told her?” The disapproval in Castro’s voice washed over me and made the low-level nausea I’d been fighting all day worsen.

  Screw anger. I upped the ante, skipped a few levels and found myself in a state of rage. My fury uncoiled and boiled in the pit of my stomach, an uncomfortable churning. The steady beat of my heart kicked up a few notches and knocked against the inside of my chest. “Tell me what?”

  Micah faced me. The expression in his eyes was guarded, his face hard and emotionless. It was a look I hadn’t seen in a long time, at least not directed at me. A cold chill ran down my spine, a direct contrast to the heat in my gut. Pain, not just from my ribs, but also from something deep inside, sliced me open.

  I got it now. He’d been keeping something from me. Something he didn’t want me to know. Whatever his secret was had kept him from touching me for almost two weeks. He’d deliberately kept something from me.

  “My mother is alive and being held in a government-maintained institution,” Micah said in a flat voice devoid of emotion.

  The bottom of my stomach dropped out and whatever I’d been about to say vanished. How could he keep something this huge from me? My anger melted into something worse. Something very close to betrayal.

  Micah—whose world hadn’t just been rocked by the person he trusted—kept talking. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a demon to maim.” He stalked forward, grabbed Castro’s arm and pulled him from the room.

  Chapter Two

  Mother-fucking, cocksucking prick. A hard, morphing ball of fire settled in the pit of my gut and I fought to push it away. Now that I’d seen what the flames looked like streaming through the air, I could visualize them stoking to life. Flesh melted from the inside out, decimating everything in its path. The hotter my anger burned, the fiercer the roiling mass became. I despised the heat—hated that I’d nearly killed my mate because I couldn’t handle my fucking emotions.

  The words forever drilled into me surfaced and I heard Richard’s voice, felt the spray of his spittle and tasted the stench of liquor. You’re nothing but a weak, pathetic pussy.

  A low, rumbling sound left my throat and I bared my teeth.

  Richard’s face, twisted in rage, flashed in my mind. Double exposed over it was Ella. The betrayal in her vibrant blue eyes stripped away my control one layer at a time and gave the demon I’d been born with free rein.

  The violence I fought to suppress morphed and twisted until the humanity I clung to vanished under the weight of darkness. Where I clutched Castro’s arm, I flexed my fingers and dug in, ready to rip flesh from bone.

  My palm smoldered, curling wisps of smoke threading between my fingers. The glass and splinters embedded in the bottom of my feet sliced deeper with every step and I welcomed the stabs of pain. My penance.

  I deserved so much more.

  Ella might know of my deception, but she didn’t know the truth—the real reasons I’d kept her at arm’s length or how I’d wrestled with the decision to keep the information about my mother to myself. Fuck. Had it really been so wrong to keep this one thing private until I figured how to process this shit?

  I loved Ella, I did, but the bond between us was suffocating at times. I couldn’t breathe without her knowing about it. My mother was alive and a part of a breeding program if Castro’s information from two weeks ago was accurate. I was a demon. How could I tell Ella I was a product of rape? She’d never look at me the same.

  My mother had probably suffered god only knew what so that I could be born. My very existence spoke of pain and violence. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and I sure as fuck didn’t want to talk about it. So I’d avoided it—avoided her.

  Mistake. She’d looked at me as if I’d kicked her in the stomach. Newsflash, this crap wasn’t a piece of cake for me either. The last two weeks had been hell. Not touching her, not taking her, not feeling her writhing beneath me while she made those sweet-as-fuck sounds was agony. The longer I went without losing myself inside her, the hotter I burned.

  Today I’d reached my limit. Fuck. I’d thrown a goddamn fireball at her, watched with horror as she stood there staring death in the face. There’d been a moment, a split-second choice I’d seen in her eyes when she’d decided to succumb to the dark. She’d been so out of it lately, moody and emotional—nothing like my girl. Then again, I hadn’t been acting like her man either.

  One drop at a time, water leached from my skin, a desperate attempt to escape the flames. Beads of sweat peppered my forehead. A few paused on my upper lip, some curled along my jaw. Another rolled down the center of my spine.

  The consuming heat eating me alive was so intense I saw everything in a haze of red, as if blood painted the walls. In a few minutes, it might. The frilly Victorian wallpaper, all unfurling roses and winding vines, threatened to make me lose my mind.

  I navigated the halls, all but dragging Castro with me in my fury to get him somewhere private. Once we were inside the sprawling office slash library, he ripped his arm from my grasp and glared down at me. A lesser man might have cowered under the penetrating energy rolling off the demon lord. Me, I could give a fuck if he was pissed. His anger had nothing on mine.

  His judgment filled the space between us,
something I could touch and taste. Castro’s eyes—similar in color to mine—swirled and glowed. I balled my smoking hand into a fist. It took all of my strength not to punch him in the face.

  “You didn’t tell her.” The cultured sound of his voice had never been more grating.

  I drew in a deep lungful of air and tasted the lingering dust hovering in the room. Centuries-old books lined the walls and gave off a musty, almost mildewed aroma. This place, pre-Fenrir attack, would have been a coveted spot for Eli to lose himself in for hours. Books always had been his thing. Now it was just a spot for him to screw one of the many females he’d been parading throughout the house.

  “No shit?” I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at Castro. “I had everything under control until you waltzed in and screwed it up.”

  “Control?” He lifted a black eyebrow. “So the fireball you threw at Ella was on purpose then?”

  I clenched my teeth together. “Fuck you.”

  He searched my face as if he could draw out my secrets with just a look. It was the same way he’d studied me all those years ago when I’d first contacted him to help me find the demon that had raped and murdered my little sister, Lily.

  “Why didn’t you tell her?” he asked.

  My skin crawled and the tight pulsing knot in my stomach was almost more than I could bear. For a brief second, at the back of my mind, I saw Lily’s pale body, naked and brutalized before it sank back into the darkness where I kept it hidden. Had my mother had suffered the same fate? Living seemed so much worse. Death would end the torment. Life—being face-to-face with a breathing memory of your attack was a cruelty no one should have to endure.

  I balled and released my fists. “My reasons don’t concern you.”

  Castro clucked his tongue. The sharp crack of his anger lashed out and threatened to split my skin. “Haven’t I proved you can trust me?”

  I lifted my chin. “You’ve proven you’re a pain in the ass.”

  He pulled his emotions back, leaving me alone with the hot mess festering inside.