When the last notes finally faded, I was silent a good ten seconds before I could find my voice to speak.
“I don’t know what to say, other than you made my heart happy with your music. I recognized it, or rather, I’ve heard it before so it was familiar, but I have no idea what it was.”
“It’s a Bach piece — Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Here, I’ll play something you’re more familiar with.”
I smiled as I heard the first notes to Bohemian Rhapsody. My lion was fascinated as her fingers seemed to stroke some keys and caress others. What would those hands feel like on my cock?
And then her hands began an odd combination of pounding and stroking, and I was mesmerized. Such fucking talent.
But the music! I had goosebumps. I felt my damned nipples hardening. She pulled emotions out of me with a seventies song.
As the final notes died away, I pulled her to me, speechless. When I finally managed words, I could only say, “You’re amazing.”
If I hadn’t already loved her, this would’ve been the moment I realized I was head-over-heels for her. Talent is nice, but you have to cultivate it and work at it to turn it into true skill. This tiny little human had the gumption and the perseverance to hone her talents. She’d been tortured by Celrau and bore their foul scars, and she could still make beautiful music.
I wanted her in my life, but I was going to have to be careful not to fuck it up.
Chapter 5
Destiny
* * *
I had so many questions I wasn’t sure where to start.
“A few ground rules,” he told me as he used an electronic keypad to open his front door. “I can tell you almost anything about me, but I can’t tell you about other people.”
“I’ve dreamt of wolves, too. Or, half-wolves, I think.” I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure the therapist is the woman who levitated me up to the tree branch, too.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
I shook my head. “I figured maybe I shouldn’t let the therapist know just how crazy I might be.”
Zeke sat on a sofa and leaned forward with his face in his hands a few seconds before he sat back and met my gaze.
“I met Nathan when he rescued me. I was sixteen.” He looked away a few seconds before looking back at me. “I was kidnapped and raped at fifteen, and the fuckwad turned into a lion and bit me after the fourth or fifth time he raped me. I wasn’t born a lion, I was turned.” He looked away, his eyes not focused on anything in the room. “He had me for months before Nathan found me. No one was looking for me, but he happened to travel close enough he could feel my distress. A regular lion can’t do that, but Nathan’s pretty powerful and I’m lucky he came close enough to feel something wrong and check it out.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kneeled on the sofa beside his legs, facing him, and leaned in to hug him.
“I’m okay now, Teeny. Nathan made sure of it, and now I want to make sure you’re okay. Nathan’s in charge, but he’s given me leave to take care of you as long as I report in to him.”
“Who is he to you?”
“You said you’d been reading about werewolves, so you understand the concept of the Alpha Wolf, right?”
I nodded and he said, “Think of him as the leader of our Pride.”
“So you have to do what he says?”
“I do, but I love and respect him, and I’d follow his orders even if I didn’t have to.”
“You love him? Are you…” How do you ask if someone’s gay without insulting them?
Thankfully, he chuckled. “No, I like women, and my lion and I both really like you. I love Nathan like a father, or a patriarch. He saved my life and has made sure I lived it to my fullest potential ever since.”
“You’re a criminal attorney? Do you defend the bad guys?”
He smiled. “I can smell a lie. When I decide whether to take a case or not, I know if they’re guilty. Sometimes I take their case even if they’re guilty, but I base it on my own personal morals. If it was a mostly victimless crime, I’ll do my best to get them off or work out a fair plea-bargain. If they killed someone’s kid and deserve prison, or worse? No way will I take the case.”
I took a breath and asked what I most wanted to know. “You said you wanted me in your bed?”
His clear blue eyes softened and he gave me a sad smile as he cupped my face in his huge hands. “I do, but even more, I want to be sure you’re okay. It was years after I was raped before I could be intimate with anyone, and I was the one doing the fu…” He stopped himself and said it a different way. “I wasn’t the one being entered, and I still couldn’t be intimate. You weren’t raped, but you were violated. How have you handled intimacy with other men?”
My eyes filled with tears, and he pulled me onto his lap and tucked my head against his chest as his arms surrounded me. I’d always known I was safe in his arms, and now I was even more certain of it.
When I could trust my voice, I told him, “You’re the only person who’s been able to hold me like this without me freaking out a little.”
“If you see me as safe, no way can I do anything to risk that.”
“I tried to have sex. The guy was an asshole, but he was nice to me once I let him know I was interested in him, and he kissed good, and I figured I just needed to get rid of my virginity so no one else would try to sacrifice me.” I took a breath to finish the story, but my tears came and I couldn’t speak. Zeke didn’t tell me not to cry, he didn’t assure me everything was okay, he just held me as I sobbed in his arms.
Several minutes passed before I had enough control of my voice to continue. “I managed to keep from freaking out until he took my underwear off, and then I lost it. I remember feeling so vulnerable, and exposed, and helpless, and it all came back. My parents tried to marry me off at first, saying I needed a husband to properly care for me, but we had a few huge fights about it and they finally agreed to let me go to a college of my choosing if I could figure out a way to pay for it myself.”
“I’m proud of you. It can’t have been easy to stand up to your parents. I know they love you, but they have some pretty strong and inflexible beliefs.”
“Where are your parents?”
He shook his head and looked away. “They were killed by the man who abducted me. He tossed their car off a cliff with them in it, and set fire to it at the bottom of the ravine. He put another kid in the backseat, where I’d have been, so it was assumed the three of us died. No one knew to look for me. He meant to keep me as his.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nathan offered to let me kill him, but I couldn’t. He let me watch him die, though.” He shrugged, his blue eyes dark. “There’ve been times I’ve wished he’d died at my hand, and other times I’m glad it wasn’t me who did it. He’s dead, and that’s the important part.”
Murder’s wrong, but I couldn’t find fault with him being happy the man who’d killed his parents and repeatedly raped him was dead. My memories are of killing my abductors in self-defense, though my dreams are of the half-monsters killing them. Either way, I’m glad they’re dead.
Zeke’s lips touched the top of my head, and I smiled at how close I felt to him. His voice rumbled through his chest as he continued. “My sister’s a lot older than me, and she was overseas when everything happened. She’s back now, and we’re close. She thought she’d lost us all, so having me back was like getting her brother back from the dead.”
“The first night, in the hospital, you never left my side. You even knew when everything got to be too much, and you asked the nurses and police people to give me ten minutes alone, and worked it so they came back one at a time to get what they needed from me. You knew to do that because you lived through something like it?”
“My situation was different, but I knew they freaked you the fuck out. They were trying to be gentle, but it was too much, too fast.”
“I woke up once and you were in the hospital bed with me, holding
me.” We’d never talked about it. Once I was awake and okay, he’d gotten back in the chair.
“You were having a nightmare, so I held you and kept telling you I had you, and you were safe, until it went away.” He shrugged again. “If you wake someone from a nightmare, they remember it and it seeps into real life. If you can make it go away, they usually won’t remember it.”
“I looked you up. You became an attorney three years ago, when I think you’d have just been twenty-three?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t handle going back to high school — because my lion wasn’t totally under control yet, and because of what had been done to me. Nathan helped me get my GED at sixteen, and I started UTC in the fall. My lion was under enough control by then. You don’t really have to make friends to survive college, and I wasn’t ready to get close to anyone yet.” He shrugged. “I passed the bar at twenty-two, and took my first solo case at twenty-three.”
“And you’re twenty-six now?”
“Eight years older than you, but my lion doesn’t seem to think it matters.”
“But you do?”
He nodded. “I took care of you during what I’m assuming is the most traumatic time of your life. I’m not sure if it’s okay — morally and ethically — to take it farther. I care about you, but I need to be sure I’m not taking advantage of you.”
“If you can get rid of my pesky virginity, it might be me who’s taking advantage of you.”
He sighed and held me tighter. “You shouldn’t say that, Teeny.”
Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I closed my eyes and imagined myself kissing him, imagined his hand in my panties, imagined what his penis might look like. I’d watched porn and I’d seen pictures, but I hadn’t seen one in real life.
He held me tighter and groaned. “Damn, Teeny. This feels a little like being seduced by Mother Teresa’s granddaughter. You know, if she’d had kids.”
“I’m sorry. What will it take for you to be okay with…” Suddenly mortified, I felt like a small child playing in a grown up world. He didn’t want me but he was trying to be nice. I pulled away from him and tried to stand, but he didn’t let me go.
“This isn’t rejection, Destiny. I’m not lying when I say I want you, and the lion wants you, but I also have to live with myself, so yeah, I need to be sure before we do anything.”
I stopped pulling away but didn’t rest my cheek on his chest again.
He sighed and asked, “How often are you seeing the therapist?”
“Twice a week.”
He seemed to take a second to think it through before saying, “I’d like to take you out on a date Friday night. I’ll pick you up at home, and will return you home so we don’t run into us being alone here again. Give me a month, going out with me once a week, and us talking on the phone as much as we want in between. Maybe lunch a few days here and there if our schedules work out.”
“You want me to have my memories back.”
He shook his head. “No, I want to give you time to confront your feelings before we become intimate. I’d prefer you know what happened, but it isn’t necessary before we decide to take things farther. I just need to know I gave you time with Kirsten to work through everything.”
He walked me to my car and kissed my forehead before putting me in and buckling my seatbelt. “Text me when you’re home safely, please?”
Chapter 6
Five weeks later
* * *
Destiny
* * *
My parents hadn’t been happy about me going out with Zeke, but he picked me up at six and had me home by eleven-thirty, so they didn’t have much to complain about. I know my parents love me, but I also know they love God more than me. If I ever stray too far, I’ll be on my own.
On this night, though, I drove to Zeke’s and then Nathan picked the two of us up. I’d been told we were going to Aaron Drake’s home — the owner of Drake Security — and that I’d meet the person who’d taken my memory. This unnamed person would have the final say in whether I got it back or not, and I was terrified at the prospect of meeting someone who could wander around in my head and look at my memories. Not just look at them, but change them if he wanted.
The curves going up Lookout Mountain were too much for me, and both werelions knew the second the nausea hit. Nathan slowed the vehicle as Zeke aimed one of the backseat vents at my face. We were in the strangest looking SUV I’d ever seen, but it was tricked out inside.
“I know ya’ll can’t read my mind. Or, I’m assuming you were being honest when you said you can’t. Still, it’s kind of weird when you know what I’m feeling before I say anything.”
“If I’d known you’re prone to being carsick, I’d have put you up front with Nathan,” Zeke told me. “I thought you’d be better off back here by my side, so I could help keep you from being so nervous.”
I looked out the front window and tried to settle my stomach with my breathing. The cool air helped, and Nathan took the curves a lot slower and easier.
“Tell me what we’re walking into, please? What can I expect?”
“Aaron’s wife and kids aren’t home, so it’ll just be the four of us, and Abbott,” Nathan told me from the front seat, his eyes on me in the rearview mirror.
The mystery person finally had a name. Maybe I could ask questions now and actually get answers. “Aaron Drake is your boss — how is Abbott connected? I know he’s the one who changed my memory of what happened, but how is he… who is he, to you?”
“Aaron, Abbott, and I have been friends a very long time,” Nathan answered. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about them, but feel free to ask them any questions you have. They may or may not answer, and you should choose your questions carefully because they may only give you a few answers, if they give any at all.”
“I’m assuming werewolves are real, since I know werelions are. It makes sense there are lots of… species? Is that the right word?”
“If your suppositions are correct, it would make sense,” Nathan answered.
“So what kind of animal can get into your memories? I keep going for things like owls or snakes, but nothing really fits.”
We reached the top of the mountain and were on a straight road, finally, and I leaned back once again. Zeke touched my leg and reached for my hand. “We can’t answer any of those questions, Teeny. Only Abbott can tell you what he is.”
Aaron Drake lived on the brow near Point Park, and I was suitably impressed. Apparently, the security business pays well. It was well past dark outside, and the view of the city below with the lights twinkling was gorgeous.
I couldn’t focus on it much, though, because I was introduced to Aaron and Abbott — complete with old-fashioned handshakes. I remembered Aaron from my rescue, but not Abbott.
I’ve noted before how Zeke and Nathan seem warmer than everyone else — like their resting body temperature is higher than a normal human. Aaron’s hand was also warmer, but Abbott’s was quite cool to the touch. My imagination immediately decided he was either a cold-blooded animal shifter like a snake or other reptile, or a vampire.
“You signed paperwork in Kirsten’s office giving her permission to speak with me about how you’re dealing with the events of last year,” Nathan began. “I respect her opinion both as a therapist, and as someone who can help me understand how this must feel from a human perspective.” He looked to Abbott and back to me. “I won’t apologize for making the decisions we made. Only one in a thousand or so people realize their memories aren’t right. We wanted to give you the best chance at moving forward and putting the whole situation behind you, and we thought memories of fighting your way out of a bad situation would empower you.”
“There are a couple of ways I can alter memories,” Abbott said. He was sitting in a fancy, armed chair, and almost looked like royalty. Actually, Aaron and Nathan looked a little like royalty too. It wasn’t like they tried, but they seemed regal. Noble.
“I left your memories intact,” A
bbott told me, “but I put a wall up so you couldn’t access them, and replaced the blocked portions with what we wanted you to remember. In my experience, most people do best with this approach to something traumatic. It didn’t work for you, so my options at this point are to remove them entirely — to wipe that portion of your brain as if it were a hard drive on a computer — or to remove the wall and make them accessible to you.”
I was still standing, and Zeke wrapped his arms around me from behind. “There are a few things you need to know ahead of time, before Abbott will consider returning your memories. Will you sit with me on the sofa, please?”
Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, I learned there are several species of vampires. Abbott is known as a Strigorii vampire. He doesn’t have to kill to feed, and whether he uses his powers for good or bad is entirely up to him.
In contrast, there are Celrau vampires — the men who abducted me — who must feed once a month on the new moon, and they must kill. They need not only the blood, but also the life force of the human they drink from. Aaron explained the Celrau often work their evil in circles, which are basically little domes of energy designed to hold the power they’re working with while keeping other forces out.
“They thrive on evil,” Zeke told me, “but they didn’t contaminate you with it. You weren’t there as sustenance — they took your blood without biting you, and we now know they were offering you to demonkind in exchange for a deal. We knew you were being offered to a particular Demon Lord, though since the Celrau who took you weren’t privy to the particulars of the deal, we couldn’t get the end-game out of them. We know more, now. A human friend was kidnapped by the Celrau and taken to the Hell Realm. Nathan went to hell to bring her back, and we learned a lot during her abduction and rescue.”
“I need you to look at me, and not look away while I explain this next part,” said Abbott. His voice soothed me, and I knew I shouldn’t feel so comfortable, knowing he was a vampire, but he seemed safe. “The things I did when I altered your memories also shielded you, so no one would realize you’re still a virgin from the energy of your aura. I applaud you for beginning the process of altering the symbols on your chest, but you’re still marked. When I remove all pieces of myself from your head, you’ll lose the shielding I put into your aura and brainwaves. It’s imperative you don’t remain a virgin, little one.”
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