To Mate an Assassin: The Lost Alphars Series, Book 1

by Ceri Grenelle

  “Cimby, your absence these past few days has made it explicitly clear that you are my mate. Whether or not you choose to accept me, you will always be mine. I choose you. I know you’re mine because I feel it in my soul. I feel it in my skin, my bones, my blood. You are in my heart with every breath I take.” Her hands fell to her sides and the angry expression morphed into one of pain and confusion. Her hands tangled in her hair, tugging at the strands in frustration.

  “I’m an assassin, Kerrick—”

  “You’re my mate first, that’s what you are,” he said, cupping her face and kissing the burnt skin.

  “No,” she growled, circling his wrists tightly. “I have been defined by this one thing my entire life. Incendiaries don’t have friends. Incendiaries don’t have dreams or fantasies. Incendiaries don’t have mates. Can’t mate. Then you come along and spin my whole life on its fucking axis and expect me to accept it and fall in line. I can’t be just your mate or just an Incendiary. If you want me, I need to be both. I have to be the Incendiary.”

  “Someone else can do it. We can train a lone shifter who doesn’t want to involve themselves with a pack.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Incendiaries are not chosen at random. There is a reason we are kept away from other shifters.”

  Kerrick leaned down and pushed their foreheads together, wanting her to open up and give him all of her. He was tired of her dodging the subject and giving him half answers.

  “Then tell me what that reason is, damn it.”

  “Don’t snarl at me.”

  He let her go, doing exactly that. “Is this how it will always be between us? Me standing here with my arms open, begging you to give your trust to me? Do I need to give you a fucking order as your Alphar to get a straight answer? Perhaps I should just order you to quit being Incendiary. Maybe I need to do that to protect you from yourself,” he growled, pointing to the fresh mark on her face. “Is that what I need to do to get any reaction out of you?”

  She stood there. No screaming. No growling. Nothing to show any sort of emotion in reaction to his outburst. A few minutes of standing and staring at one another passed before she walked towards him and rose on her tiptoes to kiss him. His lips instantly responded, acting on instinct, not caring that he felt her Wolf’s anger simmering beneath her skin.

  Cimby pulled back, brushing his hair off his face. “You may be the Alphar, and there is a slight, minuscule chance that you are my mate, but you will never talk to me like that again. If you ever try to control me, like you did with the cuffs, I will geld you. If you cannot trust me to do what I was born to do, this will never work. Figure it out, Kerrick.” With that, she pushed away from him, climbed into one of the pack SUVs that had the keys inside, and drove off the property.

  He watched her drive away, knowing she’d be back since Irisi was still in The Mansion and Cimby wouldn’t abandon her. After a few minutes Rhiannon and Aaron stepped to either side of him.

  “Want us to follow her?” Rhiannon asked softly.

  “Are the visiting soldiers settled in?”

  “Yes, and the alphas that showed up,” Aaron said. “We have Leah and the Gators in the guest wing away from the Bobcats. You know they irk each other. What do you want us to do about Cymbeline?”

  “Make sure she’s safe. But don’t be sneaky about it, just talk to her.”

  The sound of Rhiannon’s laughter was like nails on a chalkboard in his agitated state. “This is fantastic. You are so bad at this relationship shit!”

  Aaron clapped a hand on his shoulder before following Rhiannon into another car and said, “She’s the best thing that has ever happened to this place. Don’t fuck it up. I need more entertainment for my lonely, unfulfilled life.” Kerrick growled, but Aaron was out of range before he could swipe his claws at his Captain.

  Kerrick was thinking about going for a run and ruminating on how he could get Cimby to not be pissed at him anymore, when his phone pinged a text from Aaron. He’d settled the girl in a room near Kerrick’s but not too near. Maybe he didn’t need to think too much about it, maybe there was someone in The Mansion who actually knew something about Cimby.

  He grabbed the bags Cimby brought, then checked in with his and Leah’s soldiers’ progress on the scouting around Mara’s property before heading into the wing of The Mansion dedicated for his use. The door to Irisi’s new room was open but he knocked anyway, knowing how precious a young female’s privacy was. There was no answer so he poked his head around the doorframe to see her sitting in the open window, her legs dangling outside.

  She had changed into some clothes The Mansion provided. A white T-shirt, sized for a child instead of the massive thing she’d been swimming in upon her arrival, and loose-fitted blue shorts. Raccoon shifters were nearly extinct. It was a gift to have her here at The Mansion so his people could protect her. Seeing her bony vertebrae sticking out of her skin through the shirt like little humps along her back made him want to kill the bastard who’d tortured this girl and hurt his mate all over again.

  “You can come in,” she said with a slight Southern twang and turning to him, her shaved red hair glinting in the sunlight. “I don’t bite.”

  He couldn’t help but return the mischievous grin she was sending over her shoulder, no matter how forced he could tell it was. She was still scared, and he had a very strong and sudden impulse to alleviate all of her fears. No wonder Cimby was so protective of the girl. “I appreciate that,” Kerrick said as he slowly put the bags on the floor. “I wouldn’t want rabies.”

  “Rabies?”

  “Well, you know what humans say, avoid raccoons out in the daylight. They must have rabies.”

  She scoffed, the expression one he recognized from Cimby’s more sarcastic moments. “Please. I think my species had to adjust to diurnal living a long time ago. Especially with the whole half-human thing.” Then she smirked, turning her body around in the window to face him and added, “A flaw in my opinion. My ancestors should have stuck strictly to Raccoon. Human lives are too messy.”

  Kerrick chuckled, sitting on the bed across from her spot in the window. “Tell me about yourself, Irisi.”

  She shrugged, the smile fading. “I’m not that interesting.”

  “Will you answer some questions for me?”

  “You just want to know about Cimby,” she said intuitively, looking down at the floor and wringing her hands. “You can just ask me about her, ya know. I could smell your mating on her a mile away. I was waiting for her to mention it because she definitely wasn’t mated when she left. But she never tells me anything about what she does when she’s gone anyway. She’s trying to protect me, probably.”

  The kid was babbling. She continued to chatter about Cimby, and as much as he wanted to listen, he couldn’t help but notice her shoulders shaking or the sweat forming on her brow. She was terrified of him and trying to keep it together. The only male role model she’d ever known had tortured her. This wouldn’t do.

  “Irisi,” he said holding up a hand to gently halt her babble. “If Cimby wants to tell me those things, she will in her own time. You know how stubborn she is.”

  “More than you could ever know,” the girl mumbled, relaxing slightly.

  “I want to know about you, Irisi. But first, there is something we need to do.” He stood and inched towards the door. “It’s a time-honored tradition to induct you into residency at The Mansion.”

  “Like a test?” she asked, hopping down from the window to follow him.

  “No. Much better, I promise.” Kerrick exited the room and waited for Irisi to follow. The moment lasted a bit too long so he poked his head back into the room to find her rooting through one of the bags Cimby had brought with them to The Mansion.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Cimby bought me a handkerchief for my head. I need it before we go roamin’ around.” S
he looked panicked, as though the thought of leaving the room and having people stare at her fuzzy head was a fate worse than death. Kerrick walked over and crouched next to her. She didn’t notice him until he gently took her hand and gave it a squeeze. Her hands were cold skin and bones.

  “You don’t need it. You are one of the lucky few with a magnificently shaped head who can get away with a look like that.”

  “Magnificently shaped head?” She laughed, subtly squeezing his hand back before removing it from his grasp. They stood and she followed him out of the room that time, sans handkerchief. He led her to the front yard, discussing the pros and cons of having a nicely shaped head. By the time they reached the big lawn she was debating the con of how a nicely shaped head might lure voodoo mages to shrink her head for nefarious purposes.

  “Very true,” Kerrick agreed. “I guess we’ll just have to change the shape of your head to fool them. Ready?”

  “What do I have to do?” she asked, knowing they were no longer discussing head shrinking.

  “What is your favorite thing to do when shifted?”

  She thought for a moment. “Forage for food and wash my hands in a stream.”

  “Well, that’s more an instinctual thing for Raccoons. What do you like doing when you’re Raccoon with the awareness of being human?”

  A small smile picked at the corners of her mouth. That was a real smile, like the one she’d given Cimby when she’d tickled her. “I play pranks on people in my neighborhood. They don’t know I’m doing it. It’s just silly kid stuff. Moving things around. Hiding their keys somewhere. Switching toothpaste with shampoo. Harmless.” Kerrick didn’t think a mouthful of shampoo was that harmless but enjoyed her enthusiasm, knowing Raccoons were instinctively mischievous. They were very much like coyotes in that manner.

  “Perfect.” He shifted into a Raccoon.

  She gasped, delighted. “You’re Raccoon!”

  He shifted back, laughing at how she jumped up and down, covering her mouth in surprise with one hand and pointing at him with the other.

  “You still have clothes on!”

  “It’s an Alphar thing. As is shifting into any animal I want. I am gifted with the ability to completely empathize with my people. To fully do so, I need to understand their animals. I know the perfect person to play a few pranks on. You up for it?”

  She began to strip, turning away from him in her human modesty. If she had been raised in a pack, she would never even know what the word modesty meant. As she turned he saw the fading lash marks on her back. A low growl echoed from across the lawn as she began to shift, the sound coming from the gate. Kerrick looked over at the entrance to see Zach frozen while adjusting some gadget he’d installed. He’d never seen such a fierce or angry look on the young man before. He didn’t blame him though, those lash marks would stir any man’s need to protect. An honorable man, anyway.

  As Irisi finished her shift, Kerrick joined her in their Raccoon forms. It was the first time he’d ever shifted into Raccoon and he had a startling sensation that he was going to enjoy his time in the girl’s critter company all too thoroughly. He led her back into The Mansion and headed straight for Aaron’s room. Oh the havoc they would wreak.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cimby pulled the SUV into the parking lot of a bar she found just over the border of Oregon. She had driven for an hour, her mind repeating Kerrick’s angry words over and over like a broken record. It was not until she passed the border did she realize she needed a drink to recover from the hellish week, even if getting drunk was virtually impossible for her due to the poison immunity training she’d been forced to endure as a teenager. But honestly, at that point she was willing to try her damn hardest to find an escape from her mental ramblings.

  Irisi was safely tucked away in The Mansion, so Cimby could let herself be a little selfish. Her day had been shit. Her week had been shit. Everything she had done to become the Incendiary was pretty much for naught at this point. She was becoming obsolete and had mated with an overbearing, machismo chauvinist who clearly thought that women could not take care of themselves. Even a woman who had been trained, pretty much since birth, to be the best goddamned assassin on the North American continent. Even a woman like that was so ineffectual that she needed to be kept safe, cocooned in bubble wrap coffins and hidden away from the world. Only the best for the fucking mate of the fucking Alphar.

  By the time she had actually pulled into the bar and stormed rather histrionically into the small, old-timey-looking place, she had worked herself into a tizzy. Something one of her old trainers used to say about her temper. She had been an angst-ridden child, especially once the hormones kicked in.

  She was pissed, but this overreaction was too much for her. She had better control over raging emotions than this, it had been drilled into her so frequently it should have been like breathing. The lack of control could only mean one thing. The fight with her so-called mate had made her horny. Horny as hell. And it was all Kerrick’s fault. It just pissed her off further.

  “Can I help you, dear?” A sweet-looking older woman asked from behind the bar. She was a short and plump woman with close-cropped gray hair. She wore a funny jean vest decked out in sewed-on buttons and pins of all shapes and sizes. There were laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. This was a woman who smiled a lot. Gods, what could that possibly feel like?

  “Whiskey neat, please,” Cimby said, almost collapsing onto a stool. The space was vacant but for the bartender and an older man sitting at the end of the long wooden bar top, filling out some paperwork.

  “Comin’ right up.” After a moment the woman placed two glasses of the amber liquid in front of her. Cimby raised her eyebrows in question. “You looked like you needed more than one. Second one is on the house. But only if you’re having man troubles, which is what I’m guessing put that look on your face.”

  Cimby smiled reluctantly at the woman’s sympathetic gesture. She hated wearing her emotions on her sleeves and always felt like a failure when she did so. “Am I that obvious?”

  “What else could put a look of fury like that on such a pretty girl? You’re the one who should be drivin’ the men to drink, not the other way around.”

  “Oh don’t worry, she drives him to drink. He’ll have alcohol poisoning before the day is through,” Aaron chimed as he plunked down in the seat to her right, making the wood of the chair groan from his massive girth.

  Rhiannon sat on Cimby’s other side, light as a feather, her nose stuck in her phone.

  “Is Iri okay?” Cimby asked, needing to know the kid was in good hands.

  “Kerrick texted saying he’s spending some time with her, said he was gonna take her out and shift for a bit.”

  “If he is grilling that little girl for information about me—”

  “Do you really think Kerrick would do that?” Aaron asked, leaning his elbow on the bar and turning to face her. “We all saw her, Cymbeline. A breeze could blow that little twig over and she’d snap.”

  Cimby took a little offense to that even if it was true. Irisi would hate to be called a twig. “She is tougher than she looks.”

  “Thanks to you, I’m sure,” Rhiannon said, running her hands over her perfectly quaffed hair. Cimby really wanted to muss that hair up. “She’s pretty much a mini you.”

  “No.” Cimby rejected the idea immediately. “Once she is fed properly and grown, she will look like you,” Cimby said with a nod to Rhiannon. “Tall and elegant. She will be beautiful.”

  “Well, no wonder you’re giving Kerrick the runaround. You’re—”

  “Don’t say it.” Rhiannon hissed.

  “—a lesbian!” Aaron looked quite pleased with his assessment, smiling at them in way that was in strict contradiction of his intimidating frame.

  At that moment the old woman leaned forward on the bar, arms crossed and one gray eyebrow cocked, w
ith no fear of his size, directly at Aaron. “You got a problem with lesbians?”

  “No, ma’am.” Aaron sat up straight, looking panicked.

  “You sure about that?”

  “I love everyone. Everywhere. Nothing against no one.”

  “Good. Now buy these ladies a drink and shut up before you hurt yourself thinking too hard.” She turned to leave with a final nod.

  “Well—”

  “You have something else to say?” She turned back again to give Aaron the gimlet.

  “Nope. No.”

  “No what, Aaron?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The woman gave him that creepy, glowy side eye one more time and walked away to speak with the old man at the end of the bar. The man looked up briefly and caught Cimby’s eye with a wink. A shiver of recognition raced up her spine but she ignored it, turning to face the now cowed Aaron once more.

  “You know her?” Cimby asked, enjoying how Aaron was comically curling in on himself.

  “She’s a Mage. Kerrick and I have stopped at this bar a few times when he needed to tour the West Coast.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “She freaks me the fuck out.”

  “Yeah and she knows it. Way to be the man, Aar,” Rhiannon snorted into her beer.

  “Shut up.”

  “Why are you two here if it is not about Iri? I knew you were following. Good job at being inconspicuous.” She took a sip of the whiskey, the liquid sweetly burning her throat but had no effect otherwise, much to her annoyance.

  “We weren’t trying to be.” Aaron shrugged after casting his eyes over the old bartender once more. “But can I just say, besides the fact that I’m still convinced you’re an emotional robot, you have some sick moves on the road. We thought you were gonna crash a few times, twisting around these mountains like a pro.”

  “I’m trained in extreme defensive driving.”