Unchained Beauty (Deadly Beauties Live On Book 5)

by C. M. Owens

  His smug smirk grows as he steps back.

  “Now that I’ve provoked your instincts, come get me, Princess.”

  He spins so fast I barely see it, and a gust of power explodes from him. I barely defend against it in time to keep from getting blown back, and I launch my own strike at him.

  He vanishes from sight, then reappears right behind me, his hands wrenching both of mine behind me as he presses his lips against my ear. “Be more accurate, my dear,” he says before vanishing again.

  I launch a streak of energy, missing him wide when he appears again, but he’s gone before I can correct the direction.

  “Maybe something more beginner level for the pup?” he muses, taunting me from somewhere in the woods, letting his voice echo all around me.

  I spin twice, then feel him behind me again, his hands running up my legs, dragging the hem of my dress with it as my head falls back to his chest. “You let the devil too close too easily,” he says as his fangs tease the skin of my throat.

  All my thoughts are driven to lust, and I hear his dark laughter in my ear.

  “So easily distracted,” he says before vanishing again, but this time I release a streak of power, sensing his heartbeat, and I hear him curse as my eyes stay closed.

  I continue listening to his heartbeat, singling it out, using it as a medium just like he’s taught me. It’s all I listen for as the other sounds of the woods begin to fade. Even as the power I keep releasing finally drags me into the darkness and I no longer have control, I’m not alone in the darkness.

  I hear his heartbeat.

  I hear how it quickens, and the blink—as I like to call it—ends. My vision swarms back to find him under me, tearing my dress down my body as his lips fuse to my neck and bite down.

  I blink again, and he’s over me, his hands pinning mine above my head as I arch into him, feeling all the incredible sensations of him moving in and out of me. This is always my favorite part of training—the part where he loses his own control in another way.

  He leans down, and I bite into him, feeling the explosion of his power and taste on my tongue, only driving me madder with need that is burning through my veins already.

  A small flash of another image pops into my mind, barely showing me him as he writes in his journal. Wrists shackled and a little bloody, he uses just the tip of his finger to imprint the words, but the words are in English…

  This is all for her, is all I see before the image is gone.

  I blink again, and he’s behind me when my eyes open, and the pressure of control comes back to me as the orgasm crashes throughout my body, stealing my breath. His hips slam against my ass from behind, and his hand on my throat tightens just a little before he collapses to my back.

  “You shouldn’t have ever given me permission to fuck you when you’re like that,” he grumbles as we topple to the forest floor. “It’s made this all incredibly distracting,” he goes on, curling in behind me as I continue to pant for air, still buzzing with the aftershocks of yet another intense session.

  “It’s your darkness. It’s why I’m so drawn to you when I’m lost to it. It only makes sense how much hotter the sex is,” I explain, grinning when he groans and starts to harden against me again.

  “It also makes training you incredibly diffi—”

  He pauses, stopping mid-sentence, and sits up like he’s listening for something. “I’ll meet you at the cabin tonight,” he tells me before dematerializing.

  It happens from time to time, since we’re still preparing for a war, and both of us think of things we need to do immediately before we forget, so I don’t question it.

  Considering the obscene amount of lust still rolling through me, I dematerialize myself back into Karma’s room, causing Dray to look over at me with an arched eyebrow.

  “I’ll feed her for a little bit. I think I have plenty of what she needs right now,” I tell him as I take a seat and put my hand over her stomach.

  He drops a sheet to my shoulders, and I wrap up in it, covering myself better.

  The baby latches on like she’s starving and tickled, and I can feel her contented little heart as well as hear it beating excitedly.

  “This could still be a bad thing,” Dray whispers to me.

  “We’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow,” I tell him dismissively.

  He exhales harshly before standing. “I’ll go find a way to pump my own lust so I can take over again in a few hours,” he says as he plucks a couple of twigs from my hair and examines them with a wry look.

  I shrug an unapologetic shoulder even as I grin like a stupid love-struck girl.

  “Careful, Ella,” he tells me, apparently intent on bursting my bubble. “The only thing we know about Slade is that he survived all these years to die in this war. Are you sure he’s suddenly willing to give up centuries of planning just to be with you so easily?”

  “Are you sure he’d rather die than be with me?” I ask him with a little more of a sharp edge than intended.

  His sad eyes stay affixed to mine for a brief second. “I think he knew about you for centuries, yet still plotted his death. Tell me something; has he shared these centuries of planning with you? Because it seems to me like he’s playing this all by ear, same as us. Yet consistently talks about his planning. I’ve heard Kane and Alyssa discussing it at length.”

  I don’t like the sour taste that finds my mouth, but I try not to overthink it. I also try to ignore the piece inside of me that screams for me to listen to Dray, like it’s been trying to tell me this for a while.

  “He’s not a broken man. He wants to live,” I say to him like I’m trying to reassure myself. “He told me he’d let Alton die.”

  “But did he say he’d live?” Dray asks me immediately.

  I start to tell him yes, then pause. Slade never actually said that, but it was implied.

  “Only one Gemini has to die for this prophecy.”

  “The prophecy Alton told you about,” he says like he’s trying to get me to see something he sees. “The vague prophecy none of us have learned anything about.”

  I open my mouth to speak, when Kya suddenly appears in the room, relief all over her face when she sees Karma still sleeping peacefully, even though she looks no better overall.

  “Dice asked me if I’d had any Lokie/jinn/dragon dick lately and told me to get here to feed his baby if I had,” she explains with a straight face as she sits down beside me. “So how bad is it that my niece or nephew is already feeding from others?”

  Dray clears his throat before vanishing from the room.

  “Kya, you said you tried reading Slade’s journal, but when I saw it, it was in some dead language he didn’t give me details on.”

  Her hand goes beside mine, and I feel the baby shift its attention from me to her. Kya startles a laugh, then her eyes flash to mine. “I’ve never felt this power before,” she states in awe.

  “It’s just like Dice when he does it, but he must do it so subtly that we don’t usually notice,” I quickly explain. “The journal,” I prompt.

  She shakes her head and looks over at me. “It’s always in various languages, but English was one of them. I could tell by the letters. I would have been happy to read it in any language, just so I could know the plan.”

  The plan.

  “The centuries of planning that were written down in it,” I say to her, as if reciting something Slade has said over and over. “And what parts of those plans have you put into action?”

  “We just recently killed all those funders, transporters, and informants, not to mention all the ones we still have left to kill. We’ll deal with that after the war,” she says, not even batting an eye.

  “He learned those names from Gavin recently, so how was that part of the plan?”

  “The plan was obviously to learn their names and kill them. At least part of the plan. The main objective is killing Hannah right now.” She hisses a low breath. “Man, this baby is seriously hungry, and I
think she’s a girl. I don’t know how I can tell that, but I think she’s a succubus instead of an incubus.”

  She keeps talking, but my mind has already strayed.

  Slade called Hannah mild in comparison to her predecessors, so why focus so intently on her? Why did Dray make me start overthinking everything?

  “Did he ever tell you about me at all in the rings?” I ask her.

  “Slade? No,” she says absently. “When they weren’t ripping him apart, he kept his eyes closed mostly, possibly meditating.” Watching me. “After they did rounds, he’d read his journal or write in it, and he’d always promise me we’d be free. I liked it when he read his journal, because I liked hearing him sound…different. Hopeful, almost.”

  “Yet he still wanted to die despite feeling hopeful?” I ask her quietly, drawing her attention solely back to me as she frowns.

  “I guess he did, but clearly that’s changed. Hell, everyone in the camp has noticed how different he is since finding you. His sole focus is you when he’s not planning for D-day. You know he plans to drain the prison he built for Alton in order to kill her, right? He’s going to use Alton as a conduit, I think.”

  The Alton-conduit part is new.

  “How?”

  She shrugs. “Twin thing, I guess. His blood is Alton’s blood or something, so they can both use the prison’s power to channel into Hannah.”

  Why wouldn’t he have told me that? He hasn’t mentioned Alton at all.

  “I need to do something real fast,” I tell her, dematerializing before she can stop me, and I land in a familiar cave I haven’t visited in too long.

  Dull, silver eyes meet mine, and Alton gives me a sad smile.

  “To what do I owe this unworthy pleasure?” he asks.

  I take a seat near him, warily watching him. “Tell me about that prophecy again.”

  Chapter 27

  SLADE

  The power slices through my hand, obliterating the last line of ravenous, vampiric savages. Kya staggers, drained.

  “She has all kinds of powerful slaves she’s brainwashed or put under blood oath, so why is she sending these fleets again?” she asks as Chaz starts burning the dead bodies of the fallen.

  “Because she needs her strongest soldiers at her side for the end-battle,” I tell her as I pull out my journal, flipping to the back pages and scribbling down this variable to inspect later.

  I put it into my back pocket, and she watches. “Just curious, why didn’t you ever teach me to read?” she asks randomly.

  “Someone would have caught us and taken the journal up,” I state dismissively. “That would have been terrible. Besides, I taught you the slave language. It was the only language that mattered, and you managed to form your own journal using it.”

  Walking away from her and ignoring her huff, I start stepping over some of the bodies as the rest deal with cleanup.

  “Ella was with you, wasn’t she? Why not bring her with you? I saw her just before you called,” Kya prattles on.

  “What was she doing with your sister? I thought that’s where you were,” I go on, my jaw tensing as I glance down at Hank’s shredded body. That’s an unfortunate inconvenience—losing a soldier so close to the final battle.

  “The baby is a hungry succubus, and we were feeding her,” Kya states like that makes all the sense in the world, and I heave out a breath before pinching the bridge of my nose.

  “Why are you following me?” I ask on an exasperated exhale.

  “Are you still planning to die?” she asks quietly.

  I turn to face her, finding unshed tears in her eyes, despite the fact she seems to hate them being there while she’s in front of me.

  “I plan to let Alton die,” I tell her before starting to dematerialize, but suddenly she launches herself against me, arms going around my waist as her body shakes a little.

  I stand frozen, a little horrified to see her hugging me so tightly, and awkwardly pat her on the back as my brow furrows.

  She clears her throat, releasing me abruptly as she wipes away a stray tear, then avoids looking at me as she shrugs a shoulder. “Okay then,” she says, her tears seeming to dry up as she walks off.

  A heavy breath shakes out of me when I realize just how relieved her tone is, and I close my eyes, dematerializing back into my cabin and taking a seat at my desk.

  Scrubbing a hand over my face, I swallow the lump in my throat, groaning inwardly as the journal reminds me today’s battle is not the new variable I was hoping it would be.

  Hope is a dangerous thing for a man like you, the journal reminds me, causing me to slam it shut as I stare at the drawing on my desk.

  I pull it out, smiling sadly at Ella’s laughing eyes. I sketched it last night, when she was laughing at me for tripping while in lycan form and falling head first into a puddle after she distracted me.

  She fell to the ground in flesh, laughing so hard I shifted immediately just so I could kiss her like that, know her taste when she’s that happy. Then I tasted her for the rest of the night, while teaching her to use heartbeats as guiding instruments, controlling the monster from the subconscious since she loses consciousness.

  It’s not ready to test without me in her presence, but I need to test it soon, so I can be sure she can control herself in the end when it matters most. If she accidentally kills everyone she loves because she’s lost to a trance…

  Picking up the journal, I launch it across the room, roaring in frustration before dematerializing again, refusing to look for her in my mind. Right now, I need to focus on following through with what I started.

  Chapter 28

  ELLA

  “For the last time, all I know is that one Gemini has to die in order to stop Hannah from reigning as ruler supreme,” Alton says on a sigh, sipping his tea in the back of the apartment.

  I’m not even sure whose apartment we’ve hijacked, but hopefully they won’t come in any time soon. He’s already put that symbol on the wall to block Slade from seeing us.

  “You have no idea how you die or why you have to die? How do you know it’s this battle that the prophecy refers to? The end of days is a trivial terminology, considering my family history is full of stopping the end of days numerous times,” I tell him, leaning forward.

  “No clue how I know. I just do. My memories are often fractured. I assume it has to do with the portal opening, obviously. I knew how to close the last one because I read it in one of our family’s old books.” He frowns. “That memory just emerged. I’d forgotten it,” he goes on thoughtfully. “We learned from the last time dragonites were unleashed on us how to close the portal to their world.”

  “But not the Lokie portal?” I ask, even though I bookmark this conversation, because I have a follow-up question.

  “It’s in a book,” he goes on, lips pursing.

  My follow-up question is now legitimate, so I ask, “Did you put a portal book somewhere you knew we’d find it?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I haven’t done anything much, since I’m not sure what my brother’s plan is. I’m worried I’ll do something wrong to interfere with whatever he has mapped out.”

  “Nobody’s really sure of his full plan,” I mutter to myself, feeling my beasts pacing inside me in a way they haven’t done since Slade told me he’d let Alton die, alluding to the fact he’d live and be with me.

  I’ve been so calmed and soothed, not feeling this restlessness. Challenging my mother for the throne hasn’t even come close to being a concern of mine again since then. Since Thad and other shifters felt the same thing, I assumed it was Hannah’s threat.

  Now I wonder if it wasn’t my instincts screaming to protect Slade, and now they’re screaming at me again, since I’m no longer as convinced he’s planning to live. But he doesn’t act anything like a man who wants to die anymore, so I have no idea why I’m panicking like this.

  Words Alton once spoke to me enter my mind as if summoned by my own subconscious, as if the instinct is doi
ng the same thing to me that I’ve started to do to it when I’m pushed back into the darkness of my mind.

  “Slade is very cautious. He’d never tell anyone his true intentions, least of all you,” I tell him, repeating his words. “Why’d you say that to me?”

  “Because Slade was constantly calculating odds and piecing together his visions, creating new variables for different outcomes. He kept things to himself mostly. He only ever saw the changeable future. He never saw the things that were set in stone.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask him as he sips his tea without a care in the world.

  “Slade was more in touch with the visionary part of his creature.”

  “We don’t have visions,” I remind him.

  He snorts derisively. “Slade watched you in his mind for centuries, and you think he has no visionary in him?”

  “That’s his connection to me as a mate. You saw your mate too,” I remind him, then grimace when he turns pale and goes rigid. “Sorry,” I say softly.

  He clears his throat and nods to himself, his eyes going vacant. I think telling me his lie was so much easier than telling me the truth, until he felt like he could be punished for his confession.

  “Our link provided me with visions of her. The visions stopped after I betrayed him and shattered my side of the bond by attempting to show them you,” he says quietly.

  He starts violently slapping his head, tears falling as he shouts, “Weak! Weak! Weak! She died because I was weak! Weak! Weak!”

  “Stop!” I shout, and his pupils dilate for a second as he lowers his gaze and his hand, hunching in on himself like a kicked puppy.

  He goes silent, and I frown, because I think I just accidentally dominated him, and I’m not even sure how. That shouldn’t be possible, since he’s supposed to be just as strong as Slade…

  “What do you mean betrayed him and weakened the bond? You claimed your mate, and—”

  “That’s what I meant,” he says quickly, then cocks his head. “I claimed my mate and shattered the bond on my end. But his link was still active. It’s how he blocked all visions of you from my mind and memories. I sentenced my mate to death for being weak, and he’s spent his entire existence protecting his. It’s why you’d be the last to know of his plans.”