Craved: A Chosen Ones Novel

by Davenport, Nia

  My stomach rumbled at the same time he asked if I was hungry. He looked at my midsection in amusement. “I’ll take that as a yes. I made omelets. We can talk about what we overheard last night while we eat.”

  “Fine,” I grumbled still half sleep. “But I’m still mad at you.” As fervently as I tried to say the words, they came out almost deflated.

  A night’s sleep and time to digest the temporary change in my lodgings and the reason behind it had me seeing things clearer than the previous night. Chase was right. Me staying at my apartment only made Whitney a target and going to my grandparents would only make them one too. Chase could take care of himself against the Brethren better than I could. He’d been trained to do so, had been hunting them down for years, and had survived this long. So clearly, I reasoned with myself, he knew what he was doing and was good at it. That bit of logic was supposed to calm the unsettling feeling in my stomach I got whenever I thought about him having to face off against one like we’d seen at Fusion. It didn’t do its job one damn bit.

  While we ate we talked about how from what and the active Nephilim patrolling it. Bennett needed to be warned so that he could in turn inform the Atlanta Sect of the Brethren’s presence and do what he could to prepare the active Nephilim for the now highly likely possibility of encountering one.

  We finished eating, dressed, and headed for headquarters.

  ******

  Bennett sat on the edge of his desk looking at us. He blew out a slow, controlled breath. The thick vein across the middle of his forehead told me that it did nothing to calm him.

  “Can they be killed by Nephilim or is it just you Chosen Ones that have the ability to kill them?”

  We’d told Bennett everything, including cautioning him against speaking or thinking the Archangel’s name. His threat towards me if I told Chase what I knew of the prophecy was enough to raise his suspicions too, as well as elicit a streak of curse words a mile long that ended with him promising to ask Charissa if she’d ever come across a way to kill an Archangel incorporeally in her studies of our origins and our history.

  “We have abilities that Nephilim do not that makes it easier for us to kill them, but Nephilim can kill them. They’re as vulnerable to silver as daemons are. Knives, blades, bullets, steel-tipped stakes, it doesn’t matter, they will all do the trick. They will be hard as fuck for you to kill because they have the ability to instantaneously heal themselves, but if you inflict enough damage in a short enough time the fuckers will go down. I suggest using guns against them. You can inflict the damage from a longer range, which is the only way you will have a fighting if you encounter one. They are ten times stronger and faster than any Nephilim. You all were made to fight daemons not them. Only Archangels and us Chosen Ones rival them in strength.”

  A second vein joined the first one in Bennett’s head. He hated not being totally in control of a situation and he hated not having the upper hand if the situation was threatening or dire even less. He picked up his phone and sent a mass text which I got on mine immediately to the Atlanta sect that there would be a mandatory meeting at 6pm before patrols began. He told us he didn’t call for an immediate one because he needed time to get with the weapons contact he had to have additional weapons delivered to the house. Knowing Bennett, the equivalent of a military base’s arsenal is what would be arriving. He asked Chase if he’d mind spending more time around headquarters during the day and training with the Society members in rotating groups. Bennett had heard what he’d said about shooting from a distance being a Nephilim’s best bet, but we all knew that sometimes shit just didn’t go in your best interest. He wanted the active Nephilim to be as prepared as they could be should they encounter one up close and personal. He wanted them to at least have some kind of a fighting chance. Chase agreed and Bennett said they could hammer out the details after the meeting.

  “Like I told Bennett, the best chance a Nephilim has against a Brethren is to shoot the fucker from a distance. But Bennett is right. Sometimes you don’t get that lucky. Brethren are faster and stronger than the average Nephilim so to take one of them out from a shorter range you need to be just as fast and just as strong as they are,” Chase said to me.

  We were on the basement level of headquarters in one of the training rooms killing time until the meeting. We were using it so Chase could give me a few personal pointers before we went out on patrol later in the night.

  He pulled his shirt off and tossed it in a corner. It wasn’t missed on me how his muscles bunched and flexed with the movement. He sank back on his heels into a defensive position. “Come at me with one of the knives you have strapped to your body.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Are you crazy? You almost bled out on the street and died two night ago.”

  He offered me a crooked self-assured smile in response. “I didn’t fight back then. I’m going to fight back now. You won’t get anywhere near me.”

  “You sure about that?” I smirked. My innate competitiveness had me rising to the challenge.

  “I’m positive,” he scoffed to goad me. It worked.

  “Fine.” I yanked a knife out of the boots I wore. “But remember that you insisted.”

  I closed the distance between us. For all of the bravado of my words my knees knocked slightly together and the hand holding the knife shook as I did. I tried to thrust at him with the knife, I had every intention of doing so, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. My hand raised up then fell limply to my side.

  “I can’t,” I said as I took a step back.

  Almost too fast for my eyes to track Chase moved out of his defensive stance and went on the offensive. He grabbed me and spun me around. One arm banded me around my belly, forcing me back against him and rendering me unable to jerk free. The other pressed harshly into my neck, cutting of my air supply. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe and I was completely at his mercy. I’d been in a similar position before and the bitter knowledge of that made something inside me snap. I shifted my weight to throw my center of gravity forward then reached back with a brutal elbow to his ribs. He grunted, but held me firm. I stabbed at the fleshy part of his thigh with the knife I held. The pressure eased off my neck and he caught the knife in his hand by the blade, effectively stopping it from sinking into him.

  Blood didn’t pool around the blade as I expected it to. Instead blue light encased it. The room became unbearably hot and the knife’s weight felt considerably lighter in my hand. The blue light disappeared and the temperature in the room returned to normal. Chase’s arm moved back to applying pressure to my wind pipe. I was left holding nothing but the hilt of the knife. Its metallic blade in a melted pile on the floor. Chase pressed down on my throat hard enough to elicit a jolt of pain.

  “Your windpipe was just crushed,” he whispered into my ear then abruptly let go of me. He shoved me hard from behind and I stumbled a good few feet away from him.

  “Again!” he barked then attacked once more.

  This time I was ready for him. My knees didn’t knock together and my hands held steady. I didn’t know how he planned to subdue me but I knew I wasn’t about to find out. I ducked under his reach and threw all of my weight behind a jab to his gut. I heard the whoosh of air leave him, but he remained upright. He kicked out and swiped my legs from under me. I fell on the mat, my head hit then bounced off of it when I did. The dagger I’d pulled free from its concealed spot at my back as I fell, grazed his chest enough to make a point but not enough to puncture the skin as he blanketed me. He yanked the dagger out of my hand and threw it across the room. It hit the cement wall with a thud then clattered to the floor.

  “Not good enough,” he snarled into my face. “If you had thrust the knife into the spot, even as vulnerable as a human I’d still live. I shifted my weight at the last second and you would’ve missed my heart and any other vital organ. A Brethren won’t make it easy for you to kill them. It won’t be a walk in the park like it is with you for daemons. Doing so will take mu
ch more than a steady and accurate aim. You will have to out think and out maneuver him at every turn. When I shifted my weight, you should have anticipated the maneuver and altered the path of the dagger accordingly.”

  His head moved as fast as a cobra’s when he bit down hard on my neck. It didn’t break the skin but a stinging pain burst forth from it nonetheless. It hurt but the pain wasn’t the only thing I was feeling and it certainly wasn’t the reason for the little bolts of electricity firing across my body. I ground my teeth together, not because I would cry out in hurt but because I feared I would cry out with a much different emotion.

  “You’re dead. Again. Either from being drained dry or from having your throat torn out or a combination of both. Both ways are equally unpleasant to experience though the latter is swifter than the first.” His words lost some of their bite by his voice dropping an octave.

  They flowed through me like warm honey and I knew it was time for him to get off of me before things got carry away.

  I bucked my hips against him to throw his weight, but he was as unmovable as a mountain of granite. I bucked again, harder this time. He didn’t move but his jaw did clench together. I remembered that I had hands and that they were free. I inched my left one up my side to the spot where the mate to the first dagger he’d thrown across the room lay sheathed.

  His fingers closed around my wrist before I touched its handle. He forced the arm connected to it up and over my head, pinning it in place on the floor. My right hand twitched. He caught the movement in his peripheral and did the same thing he’d done to its counterpart. He looked down at me and his eyes darkened. But then he breathed in heavily and they returned to normal. “Again, not good enough. You’re still thinking like you would if you fought a daemon. Daemons can’t do this.”

  He struck at my neck again and bit down on the tender spot covering my jugular so hard that I saw stars. But the pressure didn’t immediately ease this time. He kept my tender flesh clenched between his teeth and a warming sensation joined the stinging in the spot. My flesh grew hotter and hotter until it felt like not just the spot he bit down on by my entire neck was engulfed in flames. Saying it hurt like hell would be an understatement. I yelped out at the pain and it abruptly dissipated.

  “Shit. Sorry. That was too much,” Chase mumbled against the spot. His lips brushed it as he spoke and the pain immediately lessened.

  He pressed his lips into my flesh and a cooling sensation began to assuage the burning feeling. It felt so good that my head turned, further exposing my neck to him, and arching it into him. I thought back to the way he’d kissed, and licked and nibbled his way down my neck at the nightclub. That had felt good but whatever he was doing right now felt like heaven. I opened my mouth to tell him that it was enough. I felt better but all that came out was a nearly soundless and breathy moan. I felt his tongue trace slow circles around the spot even as his lips continued to move against it.

  It was then that I became fully aware of the very intimate way our bodies were entangled. His covered mine, my hands were pinned above my head, and he had one knee wedged in between my legs keeping them spread slightly apart and completely useless to use against him. He used his hands to brace himself above me and support his weight, keeping it from bearing down on me. I bucked against him again to dislodge us. It didn’t work. I decided to switch tactics. He had my wrists pinned, but not in a way that made my arms rigid and unable to move. I dropped my left shoulder and pushed up with the top half of my body instead of the lower half. My right shoulder connected with his elbow and knocked it out from under him. He collapsed on top of me. I capitalized on the moment by rolling my hips and using my own strength to roll us both over so that I would end up on top of him. The roll forced him to release my hands and I yanked at the dagger’s mate as we rolled. When we came to a stop he was flat on his back and I straddled him with the dagger’s tip poised perfectly over his heart.

  “Gotcha!” I shouted in triumph.

  “Better,” he growled out.

  His eyes were weird again and glinted with something I couldn’t quite identify. I called him out for being a sore loser at the same time that I shifted my weight on top of him. My body slipped down his a little and I felt the real reason behind the growl and the weird look and the tension he’d gone rigid with.

  It made my face contort into a weird look of its own and before I could blush, or get off of him, or pretend like I didn’t feel what I felt, he reached up and pulled me down into a brutal kiss. His hands tangled in my hair and mine went to his bare chest that I’d been dying to feel. Our tongues tangled and clashed and dueled with one another and my hands explored his hard pecs, his defined abs, and then his sculpted biceps.

  “This is one sided,” he murmured against my lips then paused kissing me long enough to pull my tank top up and over my head.

  His fingers played along the edges of my bra strap, then the underwire of it and finally slip beneath it. One hand cupped my left breast as the other held me firm against him. He massaged it and kneaded it and teasingly brushed the pads of his thumbs across its nipple just as he’d done in the club through the leather of my corset. It felt just as glorious as I thought it would in the absence of the leather barrier. He rolled my nipple between his fingers, dragging out a soft, hotly feminine sound from me then payed the same attention to my right breast.

  My hands moved from his biceps, back to his chest then down to the planes of his stomach again. I skimmed my fingers down the happy trail that started just below his navel and decided to explore just how far down it continued. I followed it down past the waist band of his jeans and realized with a start that he wasn’t wearing anything under them. My body jerked a little in response, breaking the contact of our lips.

  “I sleep nude and I didn’t want to wake you as early as I woke up and got dressed this morning. I made do with whatever I had clean in the laundry room,” he explained. I’d say he looked sheepish about it if I didn’t know any better.

  He locked his lips with mine again and his hand continued doing the mind-bending things they did to my breasts.

  I continued my exploration. The happy trail traveled just as far south as I thought it did. Temporarily made out of my mind while also feeling emboldened by the things his hands continued to do, I gripped him in my hand at the base. His hips jerked upward, urging me on and making me feel even more brazen. I moved my hand up and down, awkwardly at first but eventually finding a rhythm.

  “Fuck, Alex,” he groaned when I brushed my thumb over his head.

  I felt a bead of moisture form and an idea popped into my head that left me flushing from the tips of my ears all the way down to my toes. I wanted to lick it away. I wanted to taste him on my tongue. I wanted to take him into my mouth and do with my lips what my hand was currently doing.

  Loving the thrill I got from the jerk of his hips and the guttural sounds he made into my mouth as we kissed, I focused my attention on the tip, moving my thumb in lazy figure eights around it. He groaned again then leveraged his weight against me and rolled us so that I was on my back without warning. He kissed me one final hard time then pulled his lips away.

  My tongue darted out between mine to lick over them in their absence. They felt swollen and full. He brushed his lips down my cheek and the side of my neck. Over the swell of my breasts spilling out of the demi-cup of my bra and left a blazing trail from the juncture between my breasts to my navel. His tongue darted in and out of it and I quivered beneath him. It didn’t stop there though. It kept moving farther down and when his hands tugged at the black cargo pants that I wore my hips lifted to assist him with removing them on their own accord. He pulled them and my underwear off in one smooth motion along with my boots.

  “Fuck Alex, you’re beautiful,” he whispered reverently but nearly inaudibly. His sapphire eyes met mine. “Last night I wanted to taste you so bad it drove me just short of insane not being able to.”

  I shuddered at the admission. If he would have said
the same thing the night before, I would have let him do what he was no doubt about to do now with a public audience and all. I had been that far gone, that far lost in the heat and the lust of the moment. I would have been mortified about it in the morning, but I would have welcomed him replacing his hand with his head buried between my thighs at the time.

  “I need to taste you Alex. I’ve wanted to since the night I met you. Will you let me?”

  I bit down on my bottom lip and shook my head yes, unable to find words at the moment. I’d never been so exposed to anybody in my life. I hadn’t lied to Chase the previous night. I wasn’t a virgin, but my experience was also limited to a couple of times with a single person and at eighteen things had never been this intimate or this intense.

  He gripped both of my ankles spreading my legs farther apart, baring me to him further. Then his hands slid up my legs and wedged themselves underneath me to grip my bottom. He buried his head between my legs and thrust his tongue inside me. My back arched and my hands tangled in his short curls. I wanted to cry out but I remembered where we were so I tempered the sound to a whimper instead. Like he did to my neck, he licked and tasted and kissed and nibbled on the most intimate part of me. I writhed beneath him as he did so. I closed my eyes against the mounting pressure building inside of me. Then he speared me with his tongue again and slid one then two fingers in behind it. I gasped as my eyes shot open. He picked up the tempo from blissfully slow to relentless in the pursuit of what he was after. His tongue thrust in and out of me in sync with his fingers building the pressure to maddening proportions. I squeezed my legs together, further trapping his head between them, not ever wanting him to move. I called out his name at the same time his fingers made their way to the sensitive spot hidden within my folds. It sent a jolt of an electrical current zinging through my body. He pressed down on it at the same time his tongue and fingers thrust into me powerfully and deep. The dual sensations overloaded my nervous system and I tried, I really, really tried not to shout out his name but it happened anyway as every nerve within my body short circuited and damn near exploded.