by Hettie Ivers
FEAR THE HEART
Werelock Evolution, Book 2
Hettie Ivers
Copyright © 2013 – 2016 Hettie Ivers
www.hettieivers.com
Edited by Sandra J. Judd
Ebook Formatting by www.gopublished.com
Cover Design © 2016 Feather & Frame.
Cover Photo: Sam Edwards/Caiaimage
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9973429-1-8
WARNING
Please be advised that this book contains sexually explicit scenes and graphic language. If such content offends you, please do not read.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I’d like to extend an enormous THANK YOU to all of my longtime online readers who have both followed me and propelled me along on this journey. This was never supposed to happen and would not have happened without your ongoing support and enthusiasm for the story. It has truly been an engaging, zany, frustrating, and delightful ride, and I can’t thank you enough for all of your inspiration, participation, and contribution to my creative process. Thank you for all of the many hours of fun and laughter!
DEDICATION
To my husband, for being my best friend and beta reader. You’ll always be the original bad boy in my life. Thanks for putting up with me and all of the time I’ve spent playing with werelocks recently.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
CHAPTER ONE
Destiny was an asshole.
My imminent canine metamorphosis wasn’t enough to sufficiently wreck the rest of my life, apparently. Nope, said emerging canine had to go and up the cataclysm ante by recognizing Alex’s stupid, perfect face as the mystical, missing puzzle piece in the road map of my soul.
Alcaeus carried me to his home. It had taken a fair amount of his newfound borrowed powers, I suspected, in addition to what had likely been some kind of horse-tranquilizer sedative from Kai, in order to subdue me first, as my hysteria had quickly spiraled out of control and I’d gone from screaming, to punching Alex, to telekinetically throwing café tables and chairs at him.
My aim with a café table proved not as accurate as my aim with an antique vase, though, as the only table I managed to hit Alex with was the one he’d stepped in front of in order to shield me from injuring myself.
I was feeling markedly less homicidal now as I enjoyed my fifth chocolate chip cookie, nestled in an oversized leather armchair that was more the size of a couch, in the living room of Alcaeus’ cottage in the woods. Well, compared to Alex’s palatial estate it was a mere cottage. It was four or five times the size of the home I’d grown up in. Regardless, it was a vast improvement upon my previous living situation in Alex’s quarters, and I’d decided I was never going back there. I was pretty sure I’d announced that decision to the room already, but just in case …
“I am never leaving here!” I declared in my outdoor voice, spitting bits of chewed-up cookie all over myself, as well as my chair companion.
“Yep, got that memo, honey,” Alcaeus acknowledged with a huge grin and a salute in my direction as he took a moment to pause in the side bickering in Portuguese he was engaged in with Kai, Remy, and Alex.
“Sorry!” I apologized in a loud whisper to my attractive chair companion, spitting more bits of cookie onto Jacques in the process. Or was it James? Jim perhaps?
He was some sort of person in charge of Cujo security or something. Right now he was my chosen babysitter, it seemed. Alcaeus had handed me over to him soon after our arrival at the house.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, turning to give me a quick, formal nod.
“Sorry,” I repeated.
“It’s okay,” he said again, his eyes trained upon the other occupants of the room, even as a smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
I was definitely staring at him again. I’d been doing so earlier for at least five minutes without realizing it until my new BFF Guadalupe had none so subtly called me out.
Guadalupe was Alcaeus’ longtime human housekeeper, and hands down the single coolest person I’d met in Brazil so far. Upon our arrival, Alcaeus had introduced her to me as the love of his life, to which she’d responded, “Take your fucking shoes off, I just cleaned these floors, cocksucker.”
She’d pretty well earned my eternal admiration at cocksucker, so everything after that was icing on the cake. It only got better from there, because we’d barely gotten inside the front door before she was waving her hand in front of her nose and complaining to Remy that he reeked of “pussy juice.” She followed that up by advising Kai he should see a “real” doctor soon about the baseball bat still jammed up his “brown-eye.”
I was cackling like a drunken hyena before she’d even laid into Alex, so I nearly pissed myself when she whisper-shouted to him that the whole metrosexual Ike Turner persona he seemed to be trying on for size this week was making her clitoris soft.
“Are you single?” I blurted the question to Jason, still gawking at his profile.
He really was good-looking. And he seemed super decent for a werelock. Since meeting him he hadn’t killed or shagged even one single person in front of me—which I felt was a rather good indication of his superior character. He didn’t have an accent, and he looked like he could be American, which meant we probably had loads of things in common! If I stared long and hard enough, maybe my emerging inner wolf would change her mind and want to mate with him instead of Alex? It was worth a shot.
Cujo Security Hottie cleared his throat. He looked uneasy. Maybe a little scared? He probably did have a girlfriend already. Figures. I persisted in staring, nonetheless. I was considering asking him if he had any nice werelock guy friends he might introduce me to, preferably ones younger than a century, when he started turning red and wincing.
“Cut it out, Alex,” Alcaeus said.
I swiveled my head to find Alex glaring at Jeremy, his lips pulled back from his teeth. A low, sustained growl emanated from his chest. My idiotic inner wolf practically purred at the sight of him. Stupid slut.
“I said stop, Alex!” Alcaeus ordered.
Jeremiah gasped beside me, coughing and wheezing as he gulped air into his lungs like he’d just surfaced from holding his breath underwater for an extended time.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded, but didn’t look at me.
“Can we please just get back to the discussion at hand?” Remy spoke up from across the room.
“Yes,” Alcaeus said, “if Alex can refrain from trying to kill Kaleb. And if Kaleb’s face could stop being so distracting to Milena.”
Kaleb? Who was Kaleb? Oh! Kaleb. Right—that was it.
A
sharp whistle drew my focus from Kaleb’s profile back to the center of the room, where a grinning Alcaeus was holding court. “Milena? Would you please try to pay attention, honey?”
“My father and I met Joaquin Salvatella in Asunción, Paraguay, at the end of 1868,” Alcaeus continued his macabre, depressing tale, “just prior to The Battle of Avaí in the War of the Triple Alliance. Joaquin was fighting on the wrong side—hoping to get himself killed, it seemed.”
I’d already learned that prior to Alex arriving on the scene, Joaquin Salvatella was the cool kid on the werelock block, who, by the tender age of twenty-two, boasted more badass magical power potential than any one single werelock in existence at that time possessed. Though he was young to bear the mantle of an Alpha, his family, a well-respected ruling werelock clan in Argentina, was unfortunately comprised of shameless braggarts and egotists who relished flaunting his talents to the rest of the supernatural freak community and therefore had thrust him into the limelight before he was even seventeen.
Yet just as he was showing so much promise to take over the world in the Salvatella name, he did the unthinkable. He fell in love with a lowly human girl named Sofia. Adding further insult to this insidious injury done to his pretentious family was the fact that he proclaimed this human girl to be his true mate.
His family was appalled, fearing Joaquin’s great powers and abilities would become diluted through such a shitty merger, as the way it worked was, in addition to turning her into a werewolf, he’d inevitably have to share some of that warlock mojo he was hoarding with her, in order to protect her from the enemies who’d presumably come crawling out of the woodwork—or woods, more likely—to off her. Joaquin’s family viewed that as a tragic waste of badass werelock power.
They did not believe that the human was his true mate, but simply a pretty girl he’d become besotted with—a schoolboy crush at best. And should they conceive any children, the offspring could only be substandard compared to what Joaquin might’ve created with one of his own kind.
So his family chose what they considered to be the only logical course of action to take to prevent such a calamity once they learned Joaquin was planning to abandon his disapproving family and pack, if necessary, in order to elope with Sofia: They murdered her in cold blood!
While that gruesome and disheartening conclusion to the star-crossed love story of Joaquin and Sofia would’ve been enough to make me reach for two or three more cookies, the horror didn’t end there. Joaquin’s family had slaughtered Sofia’s entire family as well in order to leave no witnesses behind, employing hired assassins and attempting to make it look like a vicious burglary, some random, unfortunate attack in the night.
They didn’t fool Joaquin, however. And they had been wrong about Sofia not being his true mate, as, despite his great breadth of power and unsurpassed magical ability, after Sofia’s death, Joaquin’s health deteriorated rapidly, devastated and consumed with grief as he was over his loss.
Beyond formally confronting and disinheriting his family, however, Joaquin did nothing to avenge the murder of his mate and her family. Or so everyone thought. He simply left. He abandoned his pack and disappeared.
And while Joaquin’s parents and siblings were somewhat distraught over their gross miscalculation, they consoled themselves that they had still done the right thing and had acted in the best interest of the Salvatella clan at large. For while losing Joaquin was a tremendous setback to them due to the concentrated power he’d wielded in their name, as well as the concentrated power his future offspring would’ve been likely to possess, upon his death, that power would undoubtedly pass back to them.
That was how the mojo system had worked up until that point. Warlock powers could be honed, developed, expanded, and accumulated throughout a lifetime, but they traditionally stayed within the coven, and were typically dispersed among the next of kin upon death. Given that Joaquin had no children, his brothers and his parents fully expected to absorb the greater portion of his magic once he’d passed. But, to their horror, the opposite seemed to occur, as upon Joaquin’s death, his siblings’ powers diminished, as did his parents’ … as well as his cousins’ … and their cousins’, and so on.
The unprecedented occurrence, which became known as the Salvatella blood curse, spawned widespread feuding within the family, extended family, and entire pack, as everyone sought a culprit. While they knew, of course, that Joaquin was the true perpetrator, who had somehow bested them from beyond the grave by seizing what mattered most to them in retaliation for his loss, they also knew that his power, along with their stolen powers, couldn’t have simply vanished into thin air.
He had to have hidden it somewhere, bequeathed it to someone in order to keep it from his own family. And in their desperate search to recover the Alpha blood magic of Joaquin, sibling turned against sibling, and father turned against son.
“Joaquin was a nice kid. A bit deranged and warped by grief by the time I met him,” Alcaeus recounted, “but that was understandable, given his loss. All told, we spent less than two days with him, during which time he said a lot of crazy ass shit that, to be honest, I didn’t take too seriously at the time.
“He did tell us he’d fashioned a blood curse to avenge his mate, but didn’t provide any detail beyond that. At least not to me.” He gave Remy a pointed look. “Joaquin had private conversations with my father that I was not privy to. As the story goes, Joaquin managed to get himself killed days after our meeting in the Battle of Avaí.”
Alcaeus turned to me then, most likely to see if I was still awake and paying attention. “Now, because my father and I happened to be amongst the last, if not the last, of our kind to see Joaquin alive, a few years later we became prime suspects in the Salvatella pack’s witch-hunt to retrieve the Alpha blood magic of Joaquin. You see, three years after Joaquin’s passing, a baby werelock was born possessing many of the same characteristics and abilities Joaquin had displayed as an infant, and then some.” He jerked his head in Alex’s direction.
Alex was standing still as a statue by the fireplace, his arm draped casually over the mantle, his jaw clenched, his eyes fixed upon the floor. Damn it! Down, girl! I drew my eyes back to Alcaeus.
“As Remy mentioned, they accused my father and I of somehow taking Joaquin’s powers from him before he died, and then passing them to Alex. Crazy, right?” Alcaeus spread his arms wide, palms up in disbelief. “Like I’d just toss away super badass powers like that on a baby brother?”
He sighed, tugging at the back of his neck. “Obviously, we denied their outlandish claims. We’d never had any quarrel with the Salvatella pack prior to that, so we did what we could to reason with those fuckers, despite their incendiary allegations.
“But they wouldn’t let it go. And unfortunately, the Salvatellas, being the natural-born assholes they are, went straight to spilling blood. Alex’s.”
Alex’s?
As in baby Alex’s blood? My heart tripped a beat. I quelled the impulse to raise my hand again, as I fought to keep my errant eyes from seeking Alex’s face. I set my sights on my uneasy chair companion’s profile instead.
“But … but Alex was just a baby?” I questioned under my breath. “He can’t actually mean … when he was a baby? Right?”
Kaleb coughed into his fist, nodding rapidly, his nervous eyes focused forward.
“Yes, Milena.” Alcaeus’ rich voice echoed through the room, offering the clarification I’d sought from Kaleb. “The Salvatellas went after baby Alex.”
I swallowed. Don’t look don’t look don’t look …
But I did. He looked so troubled … so far away. So lost. So inconceivably … hot.
Damn it! I should’ve just stuck out the temporary dog blindness thing a little longer. Would it be too much to expect him to throw a shirt on if he had to look all forlorn and tormented like that? As it was, he stood by the hearth appearing every bit the perfect portrait of an anguished, misunderstood bad boy. An anguished bad boy with an eigh
t-pack.
Well, he wouldn’t win my sympathy vote, no matter how well defined his abs or tragic his childhood tale! My inner bitch, however, already yearned to kiss and lick his whole face until he cracked a smile. Such a humiliating cliché she was proving to be.
I needed another cookie.
“Their initial attempt on Alex’s life was alarming, but a failure, of course,” Alcaeus continued. “It succeeded in sparking a long, bitter war between the Reinoso and Salvatella packs, though, as the Salvatellas proved tirelessly persistent in their vicious and increasingly crafty, covert attempts on Alex’s life over the next several years.”
My eyes seemed to possess a will of their own, repeatedly straying from Alcaeus to sneak peeks at Alex’s face. His eyes remained downcast and he appeared lost in his own thoughts while Alcaeus relayed yet more evidence to support why I was going to wind up dead meat at the hands of the Salvatellas if I didn’t somehow convince Alcaeus to keep the power that went with this cursed blood of Joaquin running through my veins.
“Many loyal Reinoso pack members died protecting Alex’s safety before he’d taken his first steps. ’Course, we took out our fair share of their operatives and underground army as well. Regrettably, part of the fallout from the feud was that eventually it bred mistrust within our own pack, as the Salvatellas were successful in either buying off or coercing a few members of our own into assisting them with their twisted mission.” Alcaeus delivered his next words to me. “Helps at least to explain how Alex got to be so paranoid, eh?”
Sadly, it did help to shed light on why he was so controlling and unreasonable all the time. He was born into a world where enemies were trying to kill him from day one. But it still didn’t excuse his behavior.
“As a pack we became less tolerant of anything remotely perceived as a betrayal, exacting swift judgment and rigid penalty for any and all acts of treason. But it wasn’t enough to thwart their efforts.” Alcaeus’ eyes lowered to a spot on the chair beside me. “During Alex’s fifth year, he was attacked during the night by one of his own nannies. A human nanny.”