by Emilia Rose
After inhaling his scent, I vowed that I wouldn’t let myself lose this fight.
I’d lost last night. I wouldn’t be able to stand that arrogant face of his when we got home tonight.
So, I back-bridged out of his grasp and turned onto my stomach. From behind me, he hooked his legs around my thighs, spread my legs so I couldn’t hold a strong base, and tried hard to break me back down.
It was that position that lost him the match because his cock was pressed against my ass. Instead of actually fighting—because, let’s face it, I was still way too horny to think straight—I ground my hips back against his. When I felt him harden against his shorts, I elbowed him hard in the ribs and turned us over, so I was on top.
Straddling his waist, I swung my leg around his right calf and squeezed hard, putting his right ankle into a tight lockdown with my legs. Almost immediately, he tapped out, a low, guttural growl exiting his throat.
“Fuck, Aurora. Let go.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked when I let go and he still looked like he was in pain.
He shook his head, and then showed me the large canine scar across his right calf. “It’s from a battle I was in years ago with a hound,” he said, rubbing it gently. It looked like the muscle had been chewed off and grown back.
“I should call you Achilles.”
He growled under his breath and grabbed my hand to pull himself to his feet. “If you start calling me that, Kitten is going right out the window.” He walked over to the sidelines with me and tugged on his shirt. Despite practice still running, he checked his phone. “Six p.m. Don’t we have a date at Pink Moon Tavern to attend?”
“We?” I asked, wiping the sweat off my body with a towel. I glanced over at Marcel and Charolette bickering back and forth about something. “I don’t remember you asking to go with me to meet with Adrian.” I arched a brow and rolled my deodorant stick under my arms. “But you can come, as long as you apologize to Adrian for what you did last night.”
“What did I do?” Ares asked, so seriously dumbfounded that I almost believed him. Almost. “Finger-fucked my woman so many times that she had to beg me to stop? Made sure she knew she was mine? Protected her from some asshole who could take her away from me?”
I rolled my eyes and waved good-bye to Marcel and Charolette. “Guess you don’t want to go. You can always stay here and babysit Ruffles, so she doesn’t go out ho-ing anymore. Will that do it for you?”
“Fine. I’ll apologize but not because I’m sorry about it.” He grabbed my hand and led me down to the prison, taking a detour before we ran to the tavern. “Only because you want me to.”
Dusty and filled with cobwebs, the prison reeked of feces and days-old wheat. Dad sat in his open cell in the same bloodied clothes and barely looked at me. I stared at him for a few moments and frowned. I didn’t know what to say to him anymore. I hadn’t found the words, nor had the confidence to ask him to live in this pack with Ares and me. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I thought it was kind of a given, but everything felt weird with him now.
“How’s Liam doing?” Ares asked a guard.
Sleeping on the hard cement with chains binding each of his extremities, Liam lay on the ground two cells down from Dad. He was another problem that we needed to sort out as soon as possible. Ares needed a beta to take Liam’s place. Marcel would fit perfectly, but he was already in charge of training the pack.
“Doesn’t eat his food or talk to anyone here,” the guard said, shrugging. “Sits in that corner and sleeps all day or just mutters to himself about how stupid he was for blindly trusting a rogue.”
“And the rogue?” I asked, brows furrowed.
After glancing briefly down the hall in the opposite direction, he directed his attention to me. “She’s … self-harming. We’ve tried to stop it by using metals other than silver, but she continues to find a way.”
Ares tensed and glanced down the hall toward her cell. This was a sensitive topic for him. He had done the same to himself Goddess knew how many times. I didn’t want him to even think about it.
So, I ushered him up the stairs, but before I followed him, I stopped in front of the guard. “Keep me updated on the rogue and give her a mental evaluation. She has a son. I don’t want her trying to give herself fatal wounds.”
After he nodded, I followed Ares up the stairs and out into the dark wilderness. I grabbed Ares’s hand and let him guide me to the borders, trying to get his mind off the rogue and on something less … sensitive.
“So, when are we having the pups over for your group therapy session?”
“Tuesday night.” Ares intertwined his fingers with mine. “You’re going to be there, right?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.
He paused, looked over at me, and smiled—a bit of Mars peeking through his solid, rocky exterior. “I wanted to talk to you about the Luna Ceremony. I heard you speaking to Charolette about it during practice and wanted to ask if you would wear my mother’s—”
Before Ares could finish, the mind link started buzzing with wolves. “The hounds are here.”
Chapter 7
Aurora
One quiet and almost-meek hound stood fifty feet away from our pack borders, staring at our prepared guards with dull, dead eyes. I furrowed my brows as Ares and I advanced from the east with caution. So far, the forest near the property line looked empty and clear of any other hounds.
Why was this one alone? And what was he doing here?
This could be a setup.
“Don’t attack,” I ordered through the mind link.
It was too weird to not only see one hound without his pack, but to also have that same hound not be aggressive toward other wolves. Hounds were undead beasts who attacked anything and everything they could find. To my knowledge, nobody knew the reason for their aggression. But maybe, just maybe, Jeremy had been onto something with all that divine revenge talk.
When we approached the guards, Ares growled and bared his teeth at the hound. The hound fixed his gaze on me and walked forward—slowly, steadily, and calculatingly. Though he looked harmless, something about him told me to be careful. This wasn’t a typical hound who would’ve tried to kill me already. And he certainly wasn’t a Jeremy-like hound.
Wolves whispered behind me, arguing about how to capture him without anyone dying.
“Stay back. This is a setup. It has to be.”
Just as the words left my mind, the hound bolted toward me, slashing his claws through the air with a whoosh, growling deep into the night, and baring his blunt, blood-and-saliva-glazed teeth at me.
Ares shifted into his wolf midair, latched his canines into the wolf’s neck, and jerked him side to side like a dog would a rag doll. The hound slammed against the forest floor over and over, the intensity making the tree branches above us shake. I stepped forward toward my warring mate, grasped the hound’s neck, and snapped it myself with my bare hands.
Adrenaline pumped through every bloody vessel of my body. I backed up and glared around the forest with the hound’s foul scent smeared all over my hands. I waited for more hounds to attack because they rarely fought alone. There had to be more.
And that was when my gaze landed on two piercing gold eyes deep in the woods.
The man who had raised wolves from the dead stood hundreds of yards away from us, staring at me. My heart raced, and I swallowed hard, unable to pull my gaze away. He was watching me fight, not Ares. It was extremely unsettling.
Without losing sight of him, I growled low. “The hound who raped your mother is here,” I said to Ares through the mind link, not knowing how else to refer to him. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t think that Ares did either. “North. Hidden behind that big pine tree.”
Muscles swollen, mouth bloodied, eyes dark under the night sky, Ares growled and looked north. As soon as he made eye contact, the hound sprinted away through the woods.
Ares went to follow, but I grabbed his hind leg and y
anked him back. “Don’t attack. He might be up to something that we don’t know about.”
Ares ripped his leg away from me and took off through the dark and foggy woods. Though I knew he was tired of the hound taunting him, something else was up with that man. I couldn’t let Ares thrust himself into war and get killed.
I sprinted after Ares, jumped forward, and snatched his back leg again, landing flat on my stomach. For a moment, Ares dragged me through the woods and against the fallen leaves and twigs. Ares stumbled a bit, his claws digging into the dirt, and stopped.
“Let go of me, Aurora.” Ares seethed through the mind link. “I’m going to kill that fucker. I’m done with his games.”
Instead of letting go, I wrapped both my hands around his hind leg and pulled him back with all my strength. “You’re not going,” I said through clenched teeth. I crawled to my knees and pinned him to the ground. “Shift now.”
Canines dripping with saliva, Ares shifted under me and wiggled out of my hold. “What was that? I could’ve killed him. This would be over with by now. We could’ve stopped a war before it started.”
Crossing my arms, I refused to let him talk down to me. “He would’ve killed you. You don’t know how many hounds he has in that forest, waiting to attack.” I stepped closer to him and stared up into those wolfish golden eyes. “And I’m not about to let you get killed.”
It would destroy me to lose my mate. I had already lost so many family and pack members. But Ares … he didn’t just have a special place in my heart. He owned my heart. Losing him would be like losing a piece of myself.
“We need to amp up our security, so this doesn’t happen again.” I placed my hands flat on his chest and curled my fingers into the bare muscle. “Please, calm down and think things through before you react. We have a pack to protect.”
Vein pulsing wildly in his neck, he looked as if he wanted to rip that man piece by piece. And one day, I’d turn Ares loose, so he could do just that. That man deserved more than just death. But Ares couldn’t do anything now. I wouldn’t let him put himself in senseless danger.
“Fuck!” Ares hurled his fist into a tree next to us. It snapped and fell, the impact shaking the trees surrounding it.
Everyone stayed quiet, and Ares turned back to me, his eyes golden with a red tint to them. I sucked in a breath.
Though stories plagued Sanguine Wilds of Ares being a god, of his eyes blazing red when fury controlled his body, I had never seen it. After meeting him, I never thought the rumors were true. But maybe, just maybe, I was seeing things.
Most gods, besides our Moon Goddess, were myths created by wolves before us.
Ares wasn’t immortal. He suffered wounds, had scars, lived life like everyday could be his last. But those eyes … they were more vicious and terrifying than any hound I had met, and I loved them more than I thought I should. Something about them seemed so familiar, yet … I couldn’t place it. I didn’t know where I had seen them before because it definitely wasn’t in this lifetime. I’d remember it if it was.
Storming to a house at the border, where we kept spare clothes, Ares grumbled to himself and tugged on some pants. He snatched up my hand and led us in the opposite direction, toward Pink Moon Tavern. “I’m meeting with Alpha Vulcan about the necromancer in the south. He’d better have fucking information about this shit because I don’t want to fucking wait.”
“Hopefully.” I picked up my pace, trying to keep up with his long strides.
“We are going to my father’s for dinner,” Ares said to me. “I need to figure out why they’re targeting the lunas of this pack. They targeted my mother, and now, they want my mate. And I will never let them have you.”
I swallowed hard, believing that there was more than just that. The hounds were planning something; we just had to figure out what that something was. It wasn’t like hounds to ever have a plan. They were ruthless. They were volatile. They were like Ares—personified into demonic hell-dogs. They didn’t think before they acted …
But the hound who rose the dead seemed to have a plan. He’d waited and watched as I killed one of his minions. He was calculating, researching, trying to understand … me.
Chapter 8
Aurora
Wolves from different packs gathered inside of Pink Moon Tavern, hooting and howling with each other. Ares led me into the neon-pink-accented building and around the groups of people until we saw Adrian. Typing on his phone and sipping on a chocolate milkshake, he sat alone in a teal booth.
Dark purple claw marks from last night decorated his throat.
When he glanced up, he dropped his phone and held his hands into the air. “I promise I wasn’t going to try anything with Aurora. She just asked me to meet her here for—”
“You don’t have to explain yourself, Adrian,” I reassured, pushing Ares into the other side of the booth and sliding in next to him. I narrowed my eyes at my mate. “Ares has something to say to you. Don’t you, Ares?”
Pressing his lips together, Ares flared his nostrils and refused to speak. I elbowed him hard in the ribs, remembering that Marcel had said it was his weak spot. He winced and cleared his throat.
“I … apologize for how I acted last night,” he said through clenched canines. When Adrian’s eyes widened in surprise, Ares added, “But I don’t regret it because you shouldn’t be ogling your luna.”
I glared at Ares’s profile. “What he means is that he let himself lose control and that it will not happen again.” Or else he would not get any of this pussy, even after the Luna Ceremony. “Isn’t that right, Ares?”
After Ares grumbled, he sat back in the booth and crossed his arms over his chest, making them look so damn thick that I had to tear my gaze away before my wolf urged me to rip his clothes off right here and now.
A light inside a charred mason jar swung above the booth as some rowdy kids behind us knocked into theirs. I steadied the light and sipped the water that Adrian had gotten for me.
“So, I wanted to talk to you about underground tunnels. There is a war coming that we can’t stop, and I want our pups to be safe.”
“Your pups?” Adrian asked with wide eyes. “You’re having pups?”
My eyes widened, cheeks flushing. “No, not me.”
“Not yet,” Ares added.
“Not ever, if you don’t want to fuck me,” I reminded him through the mind link.
I blew an annoyed breath out of my nose and pulled up the blueprints for my old pack’s underground tunnels on my phone. “I mean, the pack pups.” I handed him the phone. “This was my old pack’s blueprints for the tunnels. We had a central shelter under the pack house and some various tunnels leading from different areas of the pack. Since this pack is much bigger, we need to make improvements.”
Adrian studied the blueprints for a couple moments, and then nodded. “Who mapped this out? It’s very detailed and a smart idea for protection.”
Unable to hold back my grin, I beamed in my seat. “I did.”
“Damn, I’m impressed.” He sipped on his milkshake and handed me back the phone. “Send me these, and I’ll see what I can do under the landscape we have already. What kind of improvements do you want to make?”
“More hidden entry points, so hounds can’t find them. Also, I need you to evaluate the landscape to make sure there are no tunnels already underground. When we went to the cave, we saw hounds in an underground lair. If there are already tunnels within fifty feet of our property—whether or not they belong to the hounds—I want the walls to be made of cement, not dirt, so the hounds can’t claw their way into it.”
Ares placed his hand on my thigh, golden eyes glimmering under the dull light. His rageful red-tinted eyes from earlier had disappeared and were replaced with softer, prideful ones. “You’ve really thought this out.”
“Of course I have.”
I’d had so much time at my old pack to think about improvements. To be honest, that was all Mom let me do. I thought that she thought of
it as busywork to keep me out of her hair. But I believed that having a hidden escape was essential, and it’d proven to be.
I wished Mom had made the improvements before the hounds attacked our pack, so we could’ve saved more than a handful of pups. But things would be different this time around. I was now a pack’s luna. I vowed to protect them as much as I could even if that meant with my life.
“This project needs to be done as soon as possible. How long will it take you?”
“If I stop all production we have elsewhere”—Adrian paused to think—“and there aren’t tunnels underground already, I would say it’d take six months because we’re on a huge plot of land.” He furrowed his brows and leaned back. “But I think—and I’m not positive—that there used to be a bunker underground after the fallout of 1754, during the War of the Lycans. If there still are some tunnels, it should take significantly less time. Say … two months, max.”
I glanced over at Ares. “Are there tunnels already under your property?”
“I believe that there is a bunker under the pack house, not sure if there are tunnels.”
“Start work on this immediately. Drop all your other projects. We need this done as soon as possible. We don’t have time to waste. If there are already underground tunnels or even just bunkers, expand on them. We need a safe space within the next few weeks. We can broaden the tunnels sections later, if we have time.”
Behind us, the Pink Moon Tavern door opened, its bell jingling. Adrian glanced up, his pupils suddenly dilating. He sat up in the booth, pushed his shoulders back, and inhaled deeply, canines emerging from under his lips—not in a vicious way, but a hungry one.
I glanced over my shoulder at Elijah, who stopped in the middle of the packed diner and stared at Adrian with lustful eyes under his thick-lensed glasses. Pink neon lights glimmering against his dark skin, Elijah pushed his shoulders back and recomposed himself.