by Sabrina Rue
Her hand pressed against his chest. “No…”
“I assure you, my death is preferable and safer for everyone should I lose you. My kind, we’re powerful in ways the Lesser Kingdoms don’t truly understand. When we turn, cave to the dark place inside our minds, we have the ability to harm countless innocents.”
“You wouldn’t. I-I can see from your memories that you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
Long fingers raked through her hair and held the back of her skull. “Desiree, I am one of the oldest of my people. Fewer than a handful are longer lived than I. For two thousand years, I’ve voluntarily placed myself in a deep sleep in another dimension to pass the time, waiting for you. Sometimes a single decade, other times, nearly a century.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
“The first Purist wasn’t a Daemon filled with hate for all those of the Lesser Kingdoms, Desiree. It was a male of my kind so filled with chaos and confusion, that he saw certain things as messages. Much like human religious fanatics, he slipped into a place of blind devotion to what he interpreted as signs indicating what he must do to find his Mate.”
Eyes wide, she whispered, “No…”
“His confidence swayed others in similar states of desperation. When Mates weren’t found, their goals and interpretations changed to match their anger.”
Turning, he walked to the log and sat, pulling her down to sit beside him. “As the centuries passed, their growing fanaticism about those of the Lesser Kingdoms surpassed their desire to find their Mates.”
Titus wrapped his arm around her shoulders and she leaned against his side.
“They could be killing their own Mates,” she whispered brokenly. “Don’t they understand?”
“It’s happened. If a Purist finds their Mate among those marked for death, his or her brethren will often turn on both, slaughtering the couple in a rage.”
“Why?”
“There are too many who don’t have Mates and their resentment of those who find what they cannot is violent. They’re poisoned to reason, to hope, to love.”
His other hand took hers and she stared at his fingers wrapped around her own.
Terrified, she confessed, “Two Purists are being held at Texas Pack. Confined to iron cells.”
“I know.”
Jerking her gaze to his, she whispered, “You do?”
“Harmony wants to rehabilitate the Daemons she captured. Their shock at her ability to do it is rather amusing. Hers is a worthy goal. One I believe will succeed.” He smiled at her. “I trained the sisters to fight my kind because I knew the Kassis sisters would be strong enough. My sister had a vision of the Purists many centuries ago. She saw the twins.”
“You have a sister?”
“Tatiana is my only remaining family. Younger by several decades. She sleeps now. Her mind began to deteriorate rapidly after World War I.”
“Is there nothing to be done? To help them find their Mates? To lessen their emotional pain?” She frowned. “I don’t understand…are your Shamans too weak?”
His eyes met hers in surprise. “There are no Shamans among Daemon kind, Desiree.”
She frowned. “You mean, they must rely on luck to stumble across Mates? You’re so powerful, how has no one among your kind developed a way to locate your life partners?”
“It’s one skill that remains beyond us. Those among the Purists consider it a curse for coming to this world and allowing the creation of the Lesser Kingdoms.” He stared into her eyes. “Perhaps you and I will discover answers others have been unable to find.”
“I think…the young twins will be helpful in that regard. After all, they connected us almost instantly.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I keep tabs on the Kassis bloodline because it’s an anomaly among the Others. I was in stasis when they were running.” He stared into the darkness of the forest. “It shames me that I didn’t help them when they needed me most.”
Turning, he gazed into her eyes. “So much happens to Were kind, to humans, during a single decade. I forget how quickly time passes. Slade was one of the best friends I’ve had in my lifetime and I failed him, I failed his children.”
“No. From what Harmony has told me of him, I’m sure he would have understood.” She smiled. “His daughters are safe, happy now. Stronger than ever because of their trials.”
“It gives me immense relief.” He hugged her closer. “I brought myself out of my sleep when I had my first vision of you. You were with a very old Wolf. A woman at the end of her life. She was struggling to remember her Mate, their children.”
“Mattie Longwood. She was almost two centuries old. Few of our kind live so long.” Swallowing, she fought tears that burned behind her lids.
“H-her Mate died forty years earlier but she kept going to help care for the children her sons and grandsons had with human women. Most of the mothers didn’t survive. She was tired and her mind began to drift.”
“You helped her. She passed from this world smiling with the lost memories you found firmly within her grasp.” Lifting his hand, he raked his fingers through her hair. “It makes you sad to think of her. Why?”
“Hope’s Mate is many decades older than her. When I hugged her goodbye at the West Texas compound, I absorbed her fear of losing him.” She stared at her lap. “It…made me frightened, uncertain.”
She took several deep breaths. “Where she will watch her Mate leave her in less than two centuries, his Second soon after, I will watch as every person I know ages and dies.”
Closing her eyes, she fought tears. “Every human, every Were. My mother, my brothers, their Mates, their offspring. Two hundred years from now, every member of my family will be dead as I live on and on.”
Titus bent, lifted Desiree, and settled her over his lap. Wrapping one arm around her back, he raised his hand and cupped her face.
“I understand loss, my beautiful Mate. Even to my kind, death is no stranger.” Tears slipped from her control and he wiped them with his thumb. “I know you expected, hoped, for a standard Were Mating. A typical life and normal years as many you know.”
“I-I…”
“No, little Wolf. I understand. There’s nothing I can do to prevent the pain of the losses you’ll feel. I can extend their lives with my blood but not indefinitely. I can heal their wounds but not bring them back to life if they are lost.”
“I know. I know,” she whispered.
“I can give you children who will be as long-lived as their parents. They’ll give you grandchildren one day. You’ll watch the descendants of your brothers grow and we’ll protect your family together into the future.”
Nodding, she dropped her head and sobbed against his shoulder. He hugged her tightly, smoothing his palm over her hair and down her back.
“Right now, I know it’s hard to see, to understand what your life will be. It’s hard to fathom a Mating to one of my kind, to adjust to the extreme changes it will mean for you.”
He pressed his cheek to her hair. “I’ll do everything within my power to keep you safe, to keep those you love safe. If I fail, I’ll help you through the pain of it.”
Desiree inhaled the scent of him, absorbed the strength in his body that rivaled even that of her father, her older brother, and read the powerful emotions racing through his mind.
His willingness to be patient. Even if she held him off for decades after thousands of years of waiting.
Sitting up, she stared into silver eyes outlined in deepest black. He wiped her tears even as his body maintained a steady vibration of need for her.
“Dawn approaches, Desiree.” His voice was low, deep. “You should return to the house.”
Instead, she wrapped her arms around him tightly and cupped the back of his head. His hair was the finest silk, reflective in the low moonlight.
His arms crushed her against him and he moaned her name, his face buried at her neck.
“All these things you use to assure me, you negl
ect to include your very presence. You overlook the comfort, the love, the peace I’ll always find with you. Daemons must be as stately and cultured as you are beautiful.”
She smiled with her face in his hair. “Weres are less refined. Wild at heart, untamed in spirit. We’re quick of temper, strong-willed, and less concerned with propriety. We watch our parents, our siblings, our friends go through Heat, through Matings, and never shy from the wildness, the being that coexists inside us. A primal creature whose needs are simple and few.”
Leaning back, she noted silver eyes that glowed, sharp teeth fully extended, and was not afraid. Raking one hand roughly through his hair, she brought the other forward and cut the pad of her thumb on his fang.
He gasped.
“One year, Titus. I will come to you willingly, happily, and take my place as your Mate within one year. I vow this in blood.” She brushed her thumb across his full lips and left a dark stain there.
He licked it away and suddenly they were across the clearing, his body pressing hers against a tree, his cock wedged at the juncture of her thighs, only the fabric separating them.
The silver of his eyes was as bright as the moon. She stared into them, her hands holding his face.
“Desiree.”
“Yes, Titus?”
“I…transitioned us to my home before I regained control. I apologize.”
“You move that fast?”
“Faster.” He inhaled slowly, deeply, and released a growl that made her entire body stretch for him. “Now, you must go. The flavor of you on my tongue causes a flame to burn bright in my mind, my body. My teeth ache, my blood races, my cock throbs.”
She could see the glowing blue of her own eyes reflected in the silver of his. “A kiss. Then I’ll go.”
“No. I’m not strong enough.”
Desiree stroked her thumbs along his jaw. “No one has ever kissed me. Are you sure?” Her Wolf tempted him closer. The male she knew belonged to them. “Perhaps you’re stronger than you imagine.”
“This close to you, feeling the heat of your body against me, our shared scent blending with that of your pussy, it’s taking every ounce of my will to keep from taking you with near violence against this tree.”
His eyes landed on her mouth before lifting to lock gazes. “If I kiss you, my instincts as a Mate will easily dominate every other part of me. I won’t stop at a kiss. I won’t stop until you’re soaked in the evidence of our pleasure and wearing my Mark.”
Placing her gently on her feet, he was suddenly across the clearing. “Run from me, Desiree. Allow me to give you the year you require.”
“You’ll come back?”
“Nothing could keep me from you.”
Without moving her eyes from his, she untied the robe and let it drop. She could see the shaking of his body from where she stood.
“Until tomorrow, Titus.”
Moving into Change, she walked to him, rubbed her body over his legs, and lightly bit the back of his thigh.
Eyes closed, he stared at the sky as his hand moved through her fur. “Go, my love. Before I take choices and time I have no right to take from you.”
Then she was running toward the house. Faster than she’d ever managed, stronger than she’d ever been, her senses sharper.
After a shower, she fell into her bed and reached out to a mind she knew would never be far from her.
Stroking over his mind with her own, she touched herself, explored herself, and let him feel it.
Only when she finally allowed herself to come did she feel a backdraft of pleasure from her Mate.
“Goodnight, Titus,” she whispered to the dark room.
Desiree…
CHAPTER THREE
The night Desiree met young and horrifically abused Juliette Kassis, she voluntarily siphoned off rage, pain, and fear that should not have existed in a child of any age. Much less one barely three.
It was alarming what the little girl had seen, endured, and set in motion by force in her short life.
Desiree, for the first time, laid hands on emotions she’d never personally experienced. Horror she’d been carefully guarded against since she was a child herself.
Her one minor slip with her brother’s Mate had shown her a glimpse of what it was like to never rest, to never feel safe, and the intense isolation involved when one was separated from Pack.
From Juliette, she experienced evil. Not from the girl, not from her. But it had lived inside her, taken up residence as a way for her to protect herself.
Much as animals went feral in the wild, Juliette had retreated to her baser instincts to survive.
Many of their kind believed empath abilities were fleeting but they were wrong. The memories from Jax, Harmony, and Juliette lived inside her now.
Part of her as if she’d lived them herself. It was something she never discussed with others. Never let them know that all of them, the horrible and the beautiful, lived inside her as a copy.
Desiree carried many lives within the confines of her mind, cordoned off in compartments she built to keep them from blending together.
Set away in a feat of mental strength to prevent her own mental breakdown from the strain of others’ joys, losses, loves, and pains living inside her side by side by side.
Most of the time, these places in her mind laid dormant. She could visit them if she wished, wander the remnants of another’s life, feel as if she was reliving a personal moment or experience.
She felt it was invasive, wrong on so many levels, and kept them locked away. It was her personal code.
As the only known Were empath in the Western hemisphere, she’d learned much about her abilities and the etiquette involved in using them through the journals of those who lived before her.
She perfected her own systems and wrote about them extensively should another empath be born after she was gone. Always, she’d followed her rules, her code.
Until the day she didn’t.
When she returned to Texas Pack, she trained even harder with Harmony. Where before the trip to Montana she’d put up mental blocks to guard against accidentally accessing her sister-in-law’s memories, she now let them through.
Carefully concealing it, she read the life of Harmony Kassis like a book and returned often to places she wanted to examine in greater detail.
Specifically, her sister-in-law’s years of training with her father. The powerful and dynamic Slade Kassis.
Starting from when his daughters were younger than Hope’s twins, he’d drilled into them the art of battle.
It was those memories Desiree absorbed, earmarked, and later explored thoroughly.
She walked through Harmony’s life day by day until she ran from her old Pack at sixteen with her siblings.
Desiree hid the fact that she did so.
During the day, she learned every physical skill Harmony showed her about evasion, silence, and covering her tracks.
At night, while the compound slept and she waited for the moon to rise so she could visit Titus deep in the Texas Pack forest, she trained again. This time, in the specific skills Slade taught his girls.
Dealing death to those who posed a threat.
Of course, the Kassis twins didn’t realize they were learning to be weapons of destruction when they were children. To them, they were games, ways to pass the time, a chance to spend more hours with their father.
He made them strong, clever, and dangerous.
Something Desiree had never been. Traits she never would have been allowed to learn under any circumstances. No matter how much she ached to be independent and self-reliant.
Until Harmony arrived at the Texas Pack compound and turned the world she’d always known upside down, Desiree had existed within a specific set of roles.
Pack princess, only daughter, gentle empath, a beloved female Blackwell, and not much else of importance.
Desiree had always wanted to be stronger but the path to it had always been closed to her.
&n
bsp; Over the past two months, she’d gained the tools, the training, and the ability she hadn’t known to ask for, never would have attained without cheating, without stealing what did not belong to her.
She felt guilt but she was resolved to carry on.
With the Mate the universe had seen fit to pair her with, she could not afford to be weak.
She would not be weak. She refused to be a liability to her Pack any longer. Someone to be protected with a dozen men during a dangerous mission as her Alpha female destroyed their enemies.
Titus was powerful. He deserved a powerful Mate. She was determined to shed the last of her old life and walk confidently into her new one.
At any cost.
When she acquired the memories of others, specifically her brother’s Mate, Desiree’s body reacted as if she’d trained as long and hard as her Alpha Female did.
A shortcut, to be sure. There was no doubt the eldest Kassis had put in years of brutal training to attain the skills Desiree was slowly, steadily copying.
Naturally, it was Harmony who noticed.
* * *
As the rest of the females consisting of full Weres, half-breeds, and humans dispersed after their two hours of training, Harmony smiled gently at her Second.
Then she attacked her.
Shocked, Desiree went on the defensive. Harmony gave no quarter, driving her around the side yard and leaving her no choice but to defend herself or be truly injured. This was no sparring session.
For ten minutes, Harmony fought her Second as she’d once fought her Alpha’s Second. Unlike Jax a few short months before, Desiree fell quickly to the fierce woman’s onslaught.
On the ground, breathing hard, she stared up at her Alpha female. She didn’t speak.
She knew her secret had been discovered…
Hands on her hips, Harmony murmured, “Someone learned a shortcut. I’m not sure if I’m pissed or hella impressed, to be honest.”
“Harmony, I…”
“Save it. You’re not talking to a simple male or your mom. I know what your skills were when we started, I know what I’ve taught you, and just saw the evidence that you’ve learned much, much more. There’s only one way you could have done it.”