Bound Guardian Angel

by Donya Lynne

  She didn’t have to wait long for an answer as she zipped after him into a dead-end alley and rematerialized . . . only to have a titanium-tipped arrow rip past her, slicing through her jacket. She didn’t feel the metal cut into her arm, but she heard the fabric rip and smelled the scent of her blood. Shit. Another article of clothing to mend and another wound to add to her dossier.

  Who did this guy think he was? A superhero? The Green Arrow? Were the next words out of his mouth going to be something along the lines of how she’d failed this city?

  Well, fuck that shit. If he wanted to play DC Comics’ next superhero, she would gladly play his kryptonite.

  Another arrow whizzed toward her. She dodged, slapping it away as she beat feet toward him. This asshole was going down.

  He nocked another arrow, but she was already on him. Before he could fire, she launched her shoulder into his chest, sending them both to the wet pavement as the rain pounded down harder.

  They grappled, fabric tore—hers or his she couldn’t tell—and a gloved fist smashed into her lip. She tasted blood, but at least she didn’t feel the pain, which allowed her to return the favor, plowing her fist into the side of his face, cracking the cheek of his form-fitted mask.

  They rolled, and Cordray briefly gained the upper hand, shoving Skeletor to his back and popping him twice more in the jaw before he fisted her jacket and tossed her over his head.

  Her teeth rattled as she slammed into the ground.

  “Oomph!” Her vision winked out and back in.

  She didn’t need to experience physical pain to know when her body would be black-and-blue and look like it had been in a fight with a saliva-flinging rodeo bull.

  Briefly disoriented, she blinked through flashing lights.

  Her momentary lapse of lucidity gave Skeletor the opportunity he needed. He spun on his heel and leaped onto his waiting crotch rocket. The engine ignited with an angry whine.

  “Until next time, sweetheart,” he called over his shoulder as she wobbled to a crouch and fought her blurry vision to try and figure out which of the three guys she was looking at had just spoken to her.

  Which meant she had a concussion.

  Lucky for her she was a vampire and didn’t need to worry about the complications head injuries caused humans. Her tissues were already mending themselves back into pristine condition even as she felt the deli sandwich she’d grabbed a couple of hours earlier threaten an encore.

  Unfortunately, she wouldn’t heal fast enough to catch Skeletor. But she did catch the shit-eating wink he gave her, as well as his throaty, self-satisfied laugh before he gunned the accelerator. Rubber burned as the fat rear tire spun, sending up white-grey smoke and gravel as the whine of the engine reverberated off the damp brick walls. Then the tire caught the pavement, and he rocketed out of the alley, leaving her in an angry daze.

  The buzz of the motorcycle’s engine quickly faded, and then the skies opened up in earnest, adding insult to injury. Large, fat drops poured down, soaking her within seconds, plastering any hair not in braids to her cheeks and forehead.

  Could tonight get any worse? She hadn’t been able to follow up on Grudge Match. She’d been bested by a goddamned cat burglar. She was caught in a monsoon. And now she was late to meet that jizz stain, Micah, and his peckerwood sidekick, Trace.

  She checked her watch, thankful for that whole waterproofing feature now that God had scooped up an ocean in a supersized cup and was dumping every last drop of it directly on her.

  Shit! Had a whole twenty minutes passed since she’d spied Skeletor scaling the outside of the Sentinel? They say time flies when you’re having fun but this was ridiculous. And there was nothing fun about being left sitting in an alley, in a growing puddle of piss-scented water, nursing a concussion, with the taste of blood in her mouth and a fat lip.

  Pushing to her feet and wobbling unsteadily for a few seconds, she tried to gather her bearings. Where exactly was she? Better yet, where was her Range Rover? She’d parked it on the side of the road near the Sentinel, but for all her effort, she couldn’t cut through the brain fog to calculate what direction that was, given the little stars and birdies still fluttering around her head. What she did know was that she needed to hurry and get to the pickup location before Micah did something to get on her last nerve, such as move Trace without her permission.

  Trace was hers for three months. He didn’t even get to take a shit without her saying it was okay. But she knew Micah thought Trace belonged to him. And being that Micah was, well . . . Micah . . . and that he was prone to doing whatever the hell he wanted whenever he wanted as if he were the sun and everyone else were just planets caught in his gravitational field, he was bound to do something stupid that would piss her off all the more.

  So yeah, she needed to hurry before that skid mark did something above his pay grade. The good news was, if he did and took Trace without her sign off, she would have an outlet where she could take out the night’s frustration.

  As she staggered toward the mouth of the alley, she considered that maybe Micah should take Trace without her permission. Because, yeah, she could use a good fight right about now. One she could win.

  Chapter 3

  Mother. Dead. His fault. It was his fault.

  Trace shivered on the floor of the holding cell. The memories assaulting him had shattered him to within an inch of sanity, and they’d done it in less than sixty minutes. He’d been fine when he arrived at the processing center, but with one casually flung insult—Freak!—he was on the verge of crossing the threshold into mutancy.

  Curling into a tight ball, his teeth chattered as he fought for control.

  Where was Micah? He needed Micah.

  He barely held on, his mind racing with rampant thoughts from both the near and distant past. He was lucid enough to know where he was, but not by much.

  Brak. Father. Dead. No . . . alive. They survived. Would never forgive him. Fire. His fault.

  If only he hadn’t flicked the razor blade to the floor in his dungeon cell, he could use it now. Maybe that would have been enough to prevent the scales from tipping.

  Where the hell was Micah? Trace needed his master, and he needed him now.

  Mother’s cries. The fire.

  Tears broke against the seams of his tightly scrunched eyes, and he cringed through another muscle spasm that ran from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.

  Micah, where are you?

  He needed his friend and master now more than ever.

  * * *

  Micah scowled into the pouring rain, seething, then checked his watch again.

  “She’s fifteen minutes late, for fuck’s sake.” He turned toward the sock puppet dressed in the king’s guard uniform behind the industrial desk set up in the small lobby.

  The guard lifted his gaze from the screen of his laptop, where he was probably playing Solitaire or some other seemingly useless and nonproductive game.

  “The instructions are explicit, Micah. Trace is to be released into Cordray’s custody. Only Cordray’s.”

  Micah was up the guard’s nose in two strides. He slammed the laptop closed and slapped his palms on the cool, rubber-topped desk. “And she’s just going to sign him over to me five seconds later, asshole, so we might as well dispense with the middle man.” Or woman, as the case may be. Or it. Because who the hell really knew with Cordray?

  The guard’s brow bunched and lowered over his eyes. “You don’t hold jurisdiction here. Now, sit your ass down and wait. Or leave. I don’t give a shit. Just get out of my face, or you’ll be the next one in King Bain’s dungeon.”

  Micah slowly straightened and loomed over the little shit with balls of steel. Or perhaps he thought hiding behind the royal insignia gave him some kind of protection. If only he knew. Micah wasn’t beyond doing what was necessary to protect those he cared about. If that meant wiping the floor with this overly confident turd stain so he could get to Trace and get him home, he had no problem with t
hat. After all, Micah believed in acting first and asking forgiveness later. And while the threat of the king’s retaliation might send lesser males quaking in their footsies, Micah wasn’t so squeamish.

  Still, he backed off. He would give Cordray five more minutes. If she didn’t arrive by quarter past, he was going in for Trace even if he had to take a bullet to get to him.

  He paced toward the door and glared out at the diffuse light from the city reflecting off the torrential rain as he thought back over the conversation he’d had with Sam before leaving AKM thirty minutes ago to come here. He’d been a nervous wreck. Still was. This was Trace, for God’s sake. His best friend and the first true submissive he’d taken on in what felt like a lifetime.

  “Quit worrying,” Sam had said as he let out a heavy, concerned exhale.

  “I’m not worried.” He had tried to lie to her but she knew him better than that by now.

  Sam had made a noise as if she was trying not to laugh, and he imagined she had one of her perfect, loving smiles on her face. “You’re like a kid with a shiny new BMX bike on Christmas.”

  Where did she get these analogies? “Are you saying I’m excited, Mrs. Black?”

  “Baby, I thought we’d talked about this. Just because you put a ring on it doesn’t mean you can call me Mrs. Black. We still aren’t officially hitched.” The amusement in her voice made him smile.

  “We are so hitched. You’ve no idea.”

  A moment’s silence crossed the line, and he could almost see Sam’s cheeks turn rosy as she grinned from ear to ear and stared at the ring he’d given her in February. She’d told him that even though he was a vampire and she was now immortal, she wanted a proper human wedding. She’d been married once before to that abusive asshole, Steve, and Micah suspected she wanted to wipe the slate clean and mark a new beginning by marrying him, even though vampires didn’t get married. They mated. Big diff. A marriage could be terminated. A mating couldn’t. At least, not without consequences.

  Micah knew firsthand how hard losing a mate was. He’d lost his first mate centuries ago and had barely lived to tell the tale.

  He shoved his thoughts of the past aside. “If I remember correctly, you told me when I gave you that ring that I could call you Mrs. Black.”

  “Baby, a woman will say anything when a man gives her that many diamonds.”

  “I’m no man. All male, baby. Right here. Male.” He tapped the tip of his index finger against the center of his chest. He loved teasing her over her constant use of the term man instead of male. Human males were men. A vampire male was a male. Nothing human or manly about him.

  She groaned good-naturedly then giggled. “Yes, you are. All male. Down to your pinky finger.”

  “Don’t you forget it.” He could live off these playful exchanges. “So, are you saying that you lied?”

  “Lied?” She considered it a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “When you told me I could call you Mrs. Black?” He tsked. “How quickly you forget.”

  “Oh, we’re back on that.” She sighed endearingly. “No, I didn’t lie, but my ability to think rationally was severely compromised at the time.”

  He kicked back in his chair. “I see.”

  For centuries, his life had been barely more than a shadow, but then Sam had shown up and given purpose to his soul again. She was his life’s blood. He was alive because of her.

  Well, because of her and Trace.

  Trace was his best friend and self-designated guardian angel. He had taken on the role of living shield, caring enough for both of them to watch over Micah when he hadn’t given a shit whether he lived or died.

  He loved Sam and Trace more than anything in the world, but he loved them each in different ways. There was a part of him that needed something Trace could give him that he refused to take from Sam. The debasement that resided deep in his soul desired a kind of control and submission even Sam, who was one of the strongest females he had ever known, wasn’t able to provide. That wasn’t the kind of play he engaged in with her, because it was too demanding, too severe, too harrowing, rife with the potential to scar her mind. Only a hardcore submissive could take that kind of treatment.

  Trace.

  That wasn’t to say that Trace’s submission was a requirement for Micah to have a full life. If Trace hadn’t come along, Micah would have been perfectly content to live the rest of his days as Sam’s mate without a thought to his BDSM past and the extremes he’d gone to in his dungeon. His life would have felt full. But in the way a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, he couldn’t go back to the way he had been before sampling a taste of the fulfillment Trace could provide. Trace had given him wings again, and there was no going back from that.

  This was why he was like the kid with the new bike on Christmas morning. Because the moment he took possession of Trace, the scene would begin. Trace would need him after two weeks in lockup. And, once more, Micah was ready to don the Master hat to give Trace what he needed. His dungeon was already set up in his basement. Ready and waiting for Trace to fall to his knees in subservience and become Micah’s slave.

  He and Sam had talked about what would happen once he got Trace home, so she knew the importance of what was about to happen. Trace needed Micah in a way Micah hadn’t allowed anyone to need him in a long time. For decades, he had practiced BDSM as a Dom, and a damn good one. Other Doms wanted to be him. Submissives had practically thrown themselves at him. The leather lifestyle had provided an outlet for Micah’s tormented side, but also for the long-repressed side of him that had once—almost a thousand years ago—been a strong, trusted leader.

  After a while, though, it had become too hard to reconcile himself to reality, and he grew disenchanted. Being a Dom began to lose its luster. Submissives came and went, and humans were too weak to take what he could dish. Vampire submissives were in short supply, and to be honest, he had wanted a more permanent arrangement, not one where the sub only used him to get off on the pain and degradation. Domming a vampire who wasn’t his mate had begun to feel like blasphemy, and he eventually backed away from the lifestyle on all fronts, especially after harming a submissive during fireplay. Something he would much rather forget.

  Then Sam came along. She rekindled his desire to pull out the proverbial flogger, but even though she could take a lot, she wasn’t a true submissive and never would be. She was too strong willed. With her, he enjoyed playing—tying her up, spanking her, even mindfucking her on occasion—but he liked her more hands-on than he would ever allow a true sub to be.

  Enter Trace. The perfect solution.

  Not only did Trace want to be Micah’s submissive, but he also needed Micah’s strong hand to keep his mixed-blood superpower shit under control. The fact that Sam approved and had hinted that she wouldn’t mind participating gave him a mental hard-on.

  And didn’t that just make no sense whatsoever. As a mated male, he should be furious at the idea of Sam participating in a scene with him and Trace.

  In fact, he should be enraged that Trace even watched him make love to Sam. But his and Sam’s relationship with Trace seemed to balk at traditional vampire biomechanics. Trace watched, and Micah got turned on.

  So did Sam.

  So did Trace.

  The three of them formed a bizarre love triangle where voyeuristic and exhibitionist tendencies overruled biology. Trace never touched Sam inappropriately, and she hadn’t touched him since the incident at Mistress Diamond’s scene party last February.

  But Micah had to be honest with himself. He didn’t think he’d mind if they did touch each other. But that wasn’t what their three-ways were about. Trace never did more than watch, and Sam never did more than perform. And Micah got off on all of it.

  “You’re excited about picking up Trace,” Sam had said to him earlier. “I can tell.”

  He had responded by telling her he was excited. And nervous.

  “Why nervous?” she’d asked.

  “Because it’s b
een a while since I took on a true sub, and despite society’s idea that all Doms are confident control freaks who never doubt themselves, that’s not how it really is. There’s a lot at stake here. A lot could go wrong.” What an understatement.

  Vampires didn’t live by the same biological rules that humans did. What if Micah got into his dungeon with Trace and Sam, and then suddenly went all mated male batshit crazy out of the blue. It hadn’t happened, yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t or wouldn’t. Trace could touch her, or she could touch him, and that could ignite a rage that would make human jealousy look like two-year-olds playing in a sandbox. If he hurt Trace, he would never forgive himself. If he hurt Sam, he would kill himself.

  But mated-male rage was the least of his worries. What if Trace’s mixed-blood powers backfired under the intense working over Micah gave him? None of Trace’s previous Doms had been able to do what Micah could, and they both knew it. He had a power over Trace that no one else ever could. He could feel that power every time Trace looked at him. Every time Trace lowered his eyes and called him Master. But what if Trace’s powers boomeranged under such a strong hand and tipped Trace into going mutant simply from the overload.

  Anything was possible, and Micah had to take great care and patience to explore Trace’s boundaries, especially since he couldn’t see inside Trace’s mind. He couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.

  Sam had ended the call by telling him she and Trace both had faith in him, and that she would be waiting for him afterward, ready to give him her body the way she knew he would need after the scene with Trace ended.

  Damn, he loved that female. She always knew what he needed, because one thing was for damn sure. After he took care of Trace’s needs, he would have needs of his own to fulfill. Ones reserved only for Sam.

  Lightning flashed, and Micah blinked as he frowned himself out of his thoughts. He brushed back his long black hair and glanced at his watch again.

  Twenty past the hour.

  Satan’s mistress’s time was up.

  He was taking Trace out of there right now. If Cordray didn’t like it, she could kiss his fist. As he slammed it into her mouth, of course. Because, God, he owed that scag for the shit she’d put him and Trace through in the last two weeks.