by T. S. Joyce
Riyah giggled. “Zip it,” she murmured, grateful that he was lightening up their conversation after her admission about her mother.
“I’m serious. Okay, imagine it. I’m lying right next to you. Kick the covers off.”
With a grin, she did and then laid back. “Covers are off. Root beer shirt is still on.”
“I’m running my fingertips up your ankle, up your shin lightly to your knee, over the curve to your thigh, up, up until I reach the hem of your shirt. I hesitate for just a second, and I’m looking right at you. I slide my hand under the shirt and grip your hip. Hard. I dig my fingers in and turn your body toward me.”
She turned and she could imagine him here, looking at her with those blue, human eyes, because here, in their world, she wanted to pretend he still had the dragon. She wanted to pretend they weren’t both damaged beyond repair. Tonight, she just wanted to be a regular girl in love with a boy.
“I hook a finger in the elastic of those panties and, slowly, I drag them down your hip, just enough to make room for my hand to slip between your legs.”
“Okay, this is really sexy,” she murmured, feeling flushed as she dragged her fingertip over her hip.
“We’re just getting started.”
She swallowed hard and murmured, “You don’t have a shirt on, and I’m running my palm down your chest, down your abs…”
“Mmmm,” Vyr murmured in a sexy, sultry groan. “Grab my dick. It’s so hard right now. I want to see your hand on it, stroking it. Slow. Do it slow at first.”
“I wrap my hand around you and push down, down, and you roll your hips, encouraging me. You keep us slow.”
“I’m cupping you between your legs, and you’re so fucking wet. I can feel it on my fingertips, and I’m desperate to be moving inside of you. My other hand…I’ve got it on your throat. I’m gentle about it. You give me this sexy, wicked smile because you know I won’t hurt you. You know I’m going to make you feel good. And I push my fingers inside you. Wet. So warm, I’m pushing my dick harder into your hand now because I’m getting desperate.”
“I bite your bottom lip to play. I like that you’re getting rougher but staying in control. I can feel a drop on the head of your cock when you pull back, and I want to taste it.”
“Fuck. Fuck, do that. Taste it.”
“You grip my hair, not hard, but with enough pressure that I know what you want. You pull your fingers out of me and push my face down toward your hips. And I slide my mouth over you.”
Vyr’s breath quickened, and God, she loved this.
“Keep going.”
“I put just enough pressure on you as I slide my lips down you as far as I can take, my hand gripping you, moving with my mouth. Slow at first, like you want. Slow, slow, and then your hand goes tight in my hair, so I suck on you faster. Faster and deeper, and you’re moving your hips with me.
“Touch yourself.”
Feeling wicked, she slid her hand down the front of her panties and pushed two fingers inside herself. She made a soft noise when she went deep enough to bump her clit. “Warm. Wet.”
“Oh my God, Riyah, I’m close. I want to finish in you though, so I pull out of your mouth and push you onto your back. Spread your legs for me. Do it now.”
She spread her legs wider and arched her back against the mattress, pushed her fingers into herself again and again.
“I’m between your legs now, kissing your lips but the head of my cock is right there, thrusting shallow. Barely pushing into you. Beg me.”
“Please, Vyr,” she whispered.
Vyr groaned a sexy sound, and she could imagine him stroking himself, thinking of her. This was the hottest thing she’d ever been a part of. “Fuck, I’m going so deep. I’m not gentle now. I’m rough and sliding into you fast, hard. Deep. Soooo deep. I’m close.”
“Me, too,” she whispered as the pressure built between her legs. “I wish you were really here. I want to feel you. Sooo bad.”
Vyr groaned again, and his breath was coming quick now. “Riyah,” he gritted out, just as she came.
Her body shattered around her fingers with such intensity she curled in on herself and screamed his name.
“I’m throbbing so hard, so deep in you right now.” His breath hitched, and she could imagine how warm it would be if he was spilling into her.
Her body twitched as her orgasm dragged on and on.
“You’re so beautiful. You know that, right?” Vyr asked.
Riyah smiled as her aftershocks slowed and faded. “You make me feel beautiful.”
“Good. I’m holding you now because you’ll want to flinch away from what I have to say. I’m hugging you tight, and you’re resting your head against my chest. I see you too, Riyah. I can see how good you are. I’ve read thousands of people over a lifetime, and no one has felt like you. I can immediately tell if a person is good or not. Doesn’t matter that they’re afraid of me. Everyone’s afraid of me. Fear is projected at me with this…dark energy, and I had to learn to absorb it. It’s poison and I’m a sponge, and I had to learn to just take it all into me. I hate fear the most. My soul can taste it, and it sickens me. But you…you’re light. You pull those shadows out of me and make each day easier. What happened to your mom—"
“You mean what I did to my mom?” she whispered in the dark.
“No…I mean what happened to her…that wasn’t your fault. Blame that fuckin’ crew if you want, but not yourself. Your mom made a sacrifice. She wanted you to be okay, and she told you to let go of what she’d given you. With each day you blame yourself? You take away from that sacrifice. Honor her, Riyah. Live a full life for both of you.”
She was tearing up a bit, but it wasn’t from heartbreak. She felt such potent relief that someone was giving her sanctuary from the guilt she’d carried for so long. But Vyr’s tone confused her. “Why does it sound like you’re saying goodbye?”
“Oh, I’m not. You’re stuck now, Badass Princess. You lost your broken dragon, but you gained a broken man. You’re mine. I’m yours. And when I get out of here, I’m going to try to be okay someday. For you.”
“Is that a promise you’ll fight for us?”
“Yeah, Riyah. For you, I’ll fight. Now go to sleep. I’m going to stay right here until you do. I’m not leaving you to the darkness. I’m here. Until you tell me to leave, I’m right here.”
She smiled sleepily. “I’m here, too. You aren’t in the dark either.”
“Riyah?”
“Yeah, Vyr?”
“Everything is going to be okay.”
Chapter Fourteen
The video footage of Vyr discovering the death of his dragon broke Riyah’s heart. She couldn’t even help her tears as she watched him stare at his reflection in The Dungeon. He screamed the most raw, heart wrenching sound she’d ever heard, and then he blasted his fist against the glass. He looked disgusted, then ripped his gaze away from the broken glass and slid his back down the wall. For the rest of her life she would never forget the agonized look on his face. She didn’t want to see it, but Emmitt was showing all the lower level teams how the cameras shorted out suddenly.
There was a three-man technical team involved, but so far, no one could figure out what was happening with the glitches in the lighting and cameras. Unfortunately, Emmitt kept playing the footage of Vyr breaking over and over and over again until it glitched, but by this point, Riyah couldn’t watch it anymore. The lights flickered, and the television blacked out, and this time it wasn’t Vyr’s power that was the problem. It was hers.
Shit. She had to settle down.
“Seriously?” Emmitt yelled. “We can’t even have a technical meeting without technical difficulties? I want this figured out! Now!”
Over a dozen people went scurrying for the door. Riyah was standing against the back wall, her arms crossed over her chest as people rushed past her. All were leaving but Emmitt and Hank Butte, who was sitting at a table near her, leaned back in the chair, staring at her with a feral, empty smile.<
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“Glitch, glitch, witch, witch,” he murmured softly. Emmitt didn’t seem to hear it from where he was trying to get the television working again.
“There was something going on with the ceiling right before it cuts,” Emmitt muttered.
But Riyah couldn’t take her eyes off Butte’s blazing ice-blue gaze. He wasn’t even trying to hide the shifter in him.
He had her card punched, so she felt zero percent rude asking, “What are you?”
“I knew of a witch once. A kid. She took everything from me. I suppose I should thank her, though. She made me what I am.” Butte stood and strode with inhuman grace to the door. And just as he passed her, he locked her in a hate-filled gaze. “Polar bear. Not many of us left thanks to you, bitch. Bitch, bitch…witch, witch.” He curled his lips back for a moment, exposing sharp canine teeth, and then he left Riyah there, feeling like she was right back in the woods with her mom all those years ago.
She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs burned for air, but she couldn’t drag any in. She stood there frozen. The lights buzzed and dimmed to nothing, recovered and dimmed again. One of the fluorescent bulbs popped, and glass rained down on the tables below. Before Emmitt could turn around, she bolted from the room.
Butte was gone, and she was alone in the hallway. She needed to kickstart the plans. There were a lot of moving parts, and Butte was going to be a problem. Fuck another six months for Vyr. For Torren and Nox, too. She needed the crew extracted as soon as possible, but they couldn’t just do a jailbreak. Things had to happen so Vyr could really be free, not spend his life on the run. Butte threw a huge wrench in things though, and now Riyah’s time in this prison was limited. Butte could out her at any time.
She bustled to her office, but when she got there, her door was open a crack. Furious, she threw it open to find Butte with his arms locked on the desk, staring at her tablet.
“You sure have your security settings up high on this,” he murmured remorselessly.
“Yeah, so dickholes like you can’t log in and see my online shopping bills,” she said coolly. “Now get the fuck out of my office before you end up like your crew.”
Fury flashed in his glowing blue eyes as he pushed off the table. He picked up the tablet and chucked it against the wall so fast, he blurred. The tablet shattered into a hundred pieces. He rushed her, but before he got to her, she lifted her hand, palm facing him, and froze him in his tracks. And as he stood there, helpless and with a rage written onto every facet of his face, she told him how it really was. “Your crew killed my dad when he came to ask them to leave us alone. They just…mauled him. The police found him in pieces. And then your crew came after me and my mom, and I lost her, too. We’re fuckin’ even, you self-righteous asshole. And if you ever come at me again like you just did? You will be ash and dust.” She twitched her fingers, and he flew out her door and slammed into the wall on the other side of the hallway so hard the wall caved inward around his body. With the flick of her fingers, she slammed her door, locked it, and closed the blinds. She didn’t give a single fuck what his reaction was to her. He could throw his tantrum elsewhere. Right now, she had a call to make.
Hands shaking, heart fluttering, chest heaving, she pulled the new burner phone out of her purse and dialed Clara’s number. It was Damon who picked up, though. “What’s happened?”
“Our timeline just changed. Beck Anderson of the Boarlanders. Can we trust her to get things rolling?”
“She’s the best at shifter relations. She’s got teams across the country waiting for the word from us, and Cora Keller of the Breck Crew is a well-known news anchor who can have any video footage you collect edited within hours. She can get us in front of a big audience. We will go to war publicly with the New IESA and what has been done to Vyr the second you say ‘go.’ We’re all here. The Ashe Crew, the Gray Backs, the Boarlanders, the Lowlanders, the Breck Crew, the Bloodrunners, the Blackwings, Red Havoc, all of them, watching you. Waiting on you.”
“I will testify to everything. I’ll expose exactly what they are doing here, and I’ll get footage today, but everything needs to happen now.”
“Right now?”
“Right fuckin’ now, Damon. Your son lost the dragon. He lost it, and he’s trying to stay strong for me, but I saw the footage of his face when he found out the dragon was dead. He won’t be okay in here much longer, and I can’t watch this anymore. I…”
“Say it.”
“I love your son. I’ve been watching them break him, but it stops now.”
“Okay. Okay,” he repeated. “Riyah, you have to stay safe while we’re handling things on the outside. It’s about to get real tense in there, and you are a new hire. They’re going to be looking for a mole, and they’re going to look right at you first. If we lose you, we have no platform to call the shifters to arms. Do you understand?”
“Yes. You need me to testify. You need me to get good footage of what’s happening in here. Need me to expose everything from a firsthand account. Get Vyr, Nox, and Torren out of this place free and clear. And to do that, I have to be okay.”
“Yes. And also…”
“Also what?”
“My son…you love him. You’re trying to help him…and because of that, you’re very important to me. You have the fealty of the Blue Dragon. I know what happened to your family. I’ve known about it for a long time, and I can guess how you must feel. You aren’t alone in there, though. You have Vyr, you have the Sons of Beasts, but you also have all of us. Riyah, you have the biggest crews in the world at your back. We’re ready. You are commander on this. Even if your man is down right now, you have dragon’s fire at your disposal. Me, Dark Kane, Roe, Harper, Diem…we’ll blow that place out of the water if harm comes to any of you. Use us the second you need us. I’ll call Beck and Cora right now. Turn on the news tonight and see what you set into motion. We’re going to get you all out of there. We just need time, and until we can, you have to keep the Sons of Beasts safe.” His voice dipped to a whisper. “Keep my boy safe.” And then the line went dead.
The lights buzzed and dimmed to nothing, and Riyah had to close her eyes and focus to stop the power from streaming out of her. Something was happening. She was getting stronger. Maybe it was being threatened by a polar bear shifter again, but she suspected it had more to do with Vyr. Was she leaching power from him like she’d done to her mom? Or was he giving it to her?
Eyes still closed, she concentrated and let the wall down, let Vyr into her mind. “I’m not even using spells to give me more power, and I’m getting stronger,” she whispered.
“Good,” Vyr said. “You’re strong enough to control it, you know? I can see you are. They’re bringing me up from The Dungeon. Can I see you?”
And just like that, all the stress of the meeting, Butte, the phone call, and the pressure of everything lifted. Vyr had that uncanny ability to make things seem doable, even when they felt impossible.
“Last night when we talked, when we were…together…you seemed okay.”
“You saw video?”
“Yes. You broke the window when you saw your reflection.”
“I want to protect you from that stuff.”
“I think…” She looked down at the broken heart doodle she’d drawn the other day. At the bubble letters that spelled I love you. “I think it’s time to stop protecting each other from the real stuff and lean on each other instead. Let me shoulder it with you. I’m tough.”
“And getting tougher. I can feel it. Beautiful Badass Princess.”
Pain blasted through her head and landed behind her eyes.
“Butte?” Vyr growled. “Butte tried to hurt you?”
“Heeey, don’t steal memories. That’s against the rules.”
“How would you like me to kill him?”
“If it comes down to that…with fire.”
“Riyah,” Vyr warned. “I don’t have that anymore, and I don’t want to keep talking about it. That won’t help me. It’ll keep me o
n my knees.”
“Here is a memory for you,” she murmured, recalling the phone call with Damon. “Your dad didn’t put you in here without a plan.” She winced as stinging pain rippled through her head. Vyr was quiet. Too quiet. “Are you okay?”
“I feel betrayed. I’m quiet about it, but my dad…my own father…helped put me here. I’ve been down here for six months thinking he didn’t care. Been down here for six months going through hell, hurting every day, thinking I’m expendable to the man I want to be proud of me the most. And he tells you right away about his plans, but gives me no explanation. You want real? No. I’m not okay.”
“I’ll be here when they bring you up from The Dungeon. I’ll be here always, okay?”
But the headache was gone, and so was Vyr.
Crap. She dug around her purse for the tiny plastic baggie Nevada and Candace had given her this morning and pulled out a tiny video camera. It was disguised as a gold star sticker, so she stuck it on the back of her clipboard and pressed it once. There was a soft beep that told her it was on, and then nothing. It just looked like she’d decorated her clipboard, and now she had twenty-four hours of memory on this little camera to gather footage against this prison and against the New IESA. Riyah rushed to put the burner phone in her purse, locked it in the bottom drawer of her desk, locked her office, then speed-walked toward the elevators that would take her down to the lower levels. In a daze, she swiped her security card at each reader and moved deeper and deeper toward the lair.
She was still walking in that daze when someone knocked insanely loud on one of the windows of the cells. Riyah was shocked to see Nox Fuller and Torren Taylor in one of the all-white rooms. Nox was plastered against the window with the biggest grin on his face, and Torren was lying in the middle of the floor, all spread out, looking like a giant starfish. The dark-haired man was massive. And so was Nox, who was knocking again. He made a series of hand gestures, but Riyah couldn’t understand sign language. “I don’t know sign language,” she said loud enough for him to hear through the glass.