by Marcy Jacks
Sort of.
He honestly thought he was going to explode, but once again, Seth spoke up and saved the day.
“I’m not killing him, and that’s final. Jesus Christ, Marxus, are you out of your fucking mind? You can tell it’s not just him anymore.”
Marxus shoved himself out of Lucian’s arms, marching out of the library without another word.
It wasn’t what Seth said that got Lasius paying attention more. It was the way Warren tensed in the corner.
“What?” Lasius asked. “What’s going on?”
Seth blinked at him, as though he didn’t understand. He looked at Warren, then back at Lasius, then Warren again. “Does he not know?”
“Know what?” Warren asked, his eyes so wide and panicked that Lasius was honestly worried for him.
Now Seth sounded incredulous. “Do you not know?”
“Know what? What’s going on?” Lasius found himself looking at Sorin just then, as though the other vampire would be able to give him the answers he wanted. Sorin shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t do anything!”
“What’s happening?” Lasius looked to Seth. He was the leader of this clan and a couple hundred years old. Was there something he was picking up on that Lasius hadn’t? Was he able to sense something that Lasius had missed?
“Is he sick?” Lasius thought about how he hadn’t been giving his mate a lot of blood. There had been a couple of reasons for that, but now it just seemed overly cruel of him to have been denying the man, and it left him with a rush of guilt that whatever it was that was wrong with Warren might very well be his fault.
Seth, for the first time since Lasius had known him, honestly looked as though he was being put between a rock and a very hard place. “I can’t believe this. Really? You’ve been alone with him this whole time and you couldn’t tell?”
“What? Tell what?” Lasius looked back at Warren, searching for anything on him that might be wrong, and aside from being a little pale in the cheeks, which was to be expected from a vampire who wasn’t getting regular blood feedings, there was nothing.
He was still pretty. He had a glow about him, but Lasius attributed that to the fact that he was mated to the man and that he was going to always want him, no matter how much he might hate what Warren was.
Seth looked up to the ceiling, as though he was searching for patience. “He’s pregnant.”
Chapter Seven
Lasius needed that repeated to him. He looked at Warren, and even though he couldn’t see the man’s fangs at the moment, it was very clear to him that Warren was a vampire, and not a shifter.
“Uh, did you just say pregnant?”
Seth, looking equally confused, glanced back at Warren, and then he threw his hands into the air. “I don’t know what to say about any of this! I thought you would have known! And you!” Seth pointed menacingly at Warren. “You’d better not be lying. You’re serious that you didn’t know either?”
Warren’s hands rested on his belly. Lasius wasn’t sure if the man was aware he’d done that.
Warren shook his head. “That’s not…no.”
“But he’s a vampire,” Sorin said. “Vampire’s can’t get pregnant.”
Seth wouldn’t look away from Warren. To be fair, Lasius couldn’t look away from the man either. It was all so fucked up.
“You’re not just a vampire, are you?”
Warren’s throat worked in a clear swallow, and the floor tilted beneath Lasius’s feet. It was honestly a small miracle that he’d managed to keep himself standing at all.
“No.”
Lasius reached up and grabbed at his hair. “Are you serious? What the fuck? How many other things are you keeping from me?”
Warren glared at him. “That’s not even sort of your business.”
“It damn well is! You’re my mate!”
“Fuck you, you don’t want me for a mate, and I don’t want you either!”
Those words knifed Lasius right between the ribs, catching him in the heart. He sucked back a deep breath, trying his best to not growl at the man, but it was hard.
Because he did want Warren. He just couldn’t admit that to him.
“All right, fine, be that way, but you’re going to tell me right now what the fuck you are.”
“Or what? You’ll get me in bed and make me not have an orgasm?”
Lasius was very aware of the way all heads in the room turned to him.
He growled at them, keeping his eyes on his stubborn mate. “If I have to. You liked it well enough when I was doing that to you anyway.”
“Shut up.”
Lasius couldn’t. He felt as though he’d just pushed a heavy boulder down a steep slope, and there was no stopping it now. The only thing he could do was let it continue to its destination and watch it crash. “You all but begged me to put my dick inside you and fuck you, and then you held me and kissed me and begged me to do it again, so don’t pretend that you think I’m some kind of predator when you’re the one who likes to run around doing the work of the bloodsuckers.”
Lasius barely noticed the way Sorin slowly rose to his feet from his chair and then inched his way to the door.
Lasius was sorry for making him feel bad and for using words that he was honestly trying not to use around him, but the crash that he’d set in motion was bound to cause a lot of damage.
He’d apologize to Sorin later. Right now he kept his eyes on his mate. His very stubborn mate, who glared at Lasius as though he was the worst person in the world.
It wasn’t until he saw a blurring of those pretty eyes that his guilt went to level nine thousand.
The anger Lasius had been stuck with, the suspicion, and even the touch of hatred, melted away, and he saw, for the first time, just his mate.
Not a vampire, not a thief or an assassin, not someone who was evil.
Just a guy. A guy who really did not want to be here.
Warren didn’t seem to notice he was crying until the first tear fell down his face. He jumped a little, as though startled, then abruptly turned around and furiously began wiping at his eyes.
Lasius could sense his embarrassment. The disbelief that he could ever cry over anything.
Lasius knew that feeling. He’d experienced it the few times in his life when he’d lost control and started to cry.
Seth cleared his throat. “I guess I just noticed it because I was looking for something. You’re in the middle of your mating heat. You’d only be focused on the smell of lust, and you’ve both been denying yourselves, which also isn’t good.”
Seth grabbed a tissue box from the corner of his desk. He held it out to Warren, who noticed it and waved his hand, not accepting the small gift.
Another action that Lasius could sympathize with.
It was one thing to cry. It was another thing to do it in front of other people who, with their well-meaning intentions, tried not to draw too much attention to it.
Seth put the tissue box back on the desk.
“I could be wrong, but I’ve been asking James about this, and he seems to agree.”
“What?” Lasius looked to James, the half-werewolf, half-dragon hybrid, who also used to work for Varrick.
He’d been an assassin, as well, though still little more than a slave. Lasius hadn’t been in this house when James had come and stolen Taylor from out of his bed, but he’d heard the stories. He also sympathized with the man to a degree.
As either a full-blooded dragon or wolf, he would have been a slave either way. He wouldn’t have had the choice in what he was forced to do.
And it was then that something clicked in Lasius’s brain, and he looked to Warren, who still had his back turned.
Vampires couldn’t get pregnant. Only shifters could get pregnant, and vampires loved having sex with omega shifters, be they wolves, foxes, cats, and, even rarer, dragons.
If Warren was a half-animal shifter, that could only mean one thing.
James spoke up. “I smell wolf in him. I
t’s not his dominant trait, but it’s there.” James looked to Lasius. “It could be why he doesn’t need as much blood as Sorin does and why he’s so scarred.”
Warren flinched.
Lasius had told everyone about the scars.
The worst kind of shame flooded him, and he looked at Warren, or, rather, Warren’s back, with a new light.
“Are you a slave to Varrick, Warren?”
Warren shook his head. “That’s not your business.”
His voice didn’t exactly catch, but it also didn’t sound quite so strong. Defiant, maybe, but strength? No.
And another knife was added to the growing collection, the blade deep in Lasius’s heart.
“Are you part wolf?”
Warren rubbed his face then glared briefly over his shoulder. “My mother was an omega. That’s all you need to know.”
“Your mother…” Lasius thought about something, and then, to his shock, it was Sorin who spoke up.
Sorin had come back, as though he couldn’t stay away, and was standing in the doorway.
“Who was your father?”
Warren said nothing at first. He looked at Sorin as though it was no surprise at all to see him back. Then, he finally did answer. “I have no father.”
“Who was your father?” Sorin demanded again, stepping forward, the fear in his voice making Lasius afraid.
Lucian came and put his hands on Sorin’s shoulders, preventing him from going any farther, but it didn’t matter.
No one could take away the focus and attention that was on Warren now.
In a small voice, he answered, “Varrick is my father.”
* * * *
Warren turned just then, aware of the way Lasius had fallen to his knees, the way the man stared at him, wide-eyed and mouth dropped, as though he’d just watched Warren snap the necks of an entire litter of kittens in front of him.
He couldn’t blame the man for looking so shocked.
Warren had never allowed himself to say those words out loud before. Not in his entire life.
It was true only to a degree. Varrick had impregnated his mother, but that was the extent of it. Warren was not like Sorin. He’d never been a pampered little prince. Never had the chance to be openly kind to the omegas.
He was meant to be a warrior, and he barely remembered his mother’s face as he was taken from her when he was…he didn’t he know how old he was at the time.
Sorin, instead of looking angry, instead of glaring at him and hissing how it wasn’t true, flew at him.
Warren turned, the instinct to back away very much there, but he couldn’t as he was already cornered in, and Sorin flung his arms around Warren’s neck and shoulders.
“I have a brother!”
“W-what?” Warren sputtered. For the first time in years, the shock outweighed his ability to recover. He pushed at the other man, trying to get him off. “I am not your brother!”
“Yes you are!” Sorin still sounded much too happy for Warren to be pleased with.
Warren glared at the man, needing to get this through his thick skull as soon as possible. “I am not your brother. If you want to get technical about it, then I’m your half brother, and barely even that! I’m the son of a slave, and I worked in the dungeons!”
“I don’t care about that!” That happy smile didn’t leave Sorin’s face, and he refused to remove himself from Warren’s personal space. “I don’t even know who my mother was. You’re…you’re my family. You’re the only family I have now other than Lucian.”
Now it looked like he was going to cry, and Warren didn’t know how to take this. He didn’t know what this man expected from him.
“I’d never even seen you before you came to live in Varrick’s second home.”
Sorin blinked. “You saw me there?”
“I was in uniform.”
Sorin smiled, panting for breath as though this revelation was taking away all of his energy.
“Holy shit,” Lucian said. “So you’re my brother-in-law now, are you?”
Warren snarled at the man. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are,” Sorin insisted. “And now you’re going to have a baby, and we’re all going to be together and this…this is amazing!”
Warren couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed harder against Sorin’s chest, breaking the connection the man had on him, and he sneered hard. “You think that’s how this is going to work, do you? You? You’re a spoiled brat, and until you were taken as his mate”—he pointed at Lucian—“you’ve never known a hard day’s work in your life. Varrick will spare your life when he catches you, but he won’t spare mine. He’ll skin me alive over an open fire and dig this thing out of me and crush it under his boot.”
“Thing?” Lasius asked, rising wobbly to his feet.
Warren hated this. He hated everything about this, and he didn’t know why he was the only one who seemed to have some sense around here.
“Yeah, thing. Do you really think that vampires will see it as anything else? Do you really think that I would bring a baby into this if I could help it?”
Lasius’s eyes flashed. Warren was used to that dangerous look by now. He was also getting used to the pain that flared within him every time he saw it.
“If you cared for this child, you’ll let me carry it to term, take it, and send me back home. Pretend I was never here and it might have a chance.”
“You’ve got to be fucking with me!” Now it was Lasius who ran forward, grabbing him by the shoulders hard. The dragon shook Warren hard enough that his teeth clacked. “I’m not doing that! Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“No! I’m the only one who’s thinking clearly!”
He hadn’t known he was pregnant. He honestly hadn’t, but if an alpha dragon, and an alpha wolf and dragon hybrid had been able to sniff it out in him, then he was going to do something about it.
“If I don’t go back, he’ll eventually kill me. If I do, I might have a chance, and so will the child.”
Provided Warren was as far away from it as humanly possible.
“Don’t do that,” Sorin begged. “Don’t go. You don’t have to. We’ve been making it work here.”
Warren rolled his eyes. “Right, and how many times have you been attacked, all because your alpha doesn’t want to give up this land?”
“It’s my land,” Seth growled.
“I don’t care,” Warren snapped. “I don’t care what belongs to who, I don’t care about your dead parents, and I don’t care about your petty squabbles. You’re going to get yourselves all killed, and no one in this house seems to care.”
“I care,” Lasius snapped, shaking Warren hard again.
Warren wasn’t buying. “No you don’t. You hate me.”
“I don’t hate you! I’m just…I was angry with what I thought you were.”
“Right, and you know you’re not that far off the mark, right? I never took pleasure in the omegas. They hated me for what I was, but I still came from them. I couldn’t openly protect them the way Sorin could, but I still kept them from escaping. I still went on my missions against Varrick’s enemies. I am still a bad person, and just because you found out that I was born from slaves, all of a sudden that absolves me? That makes you feel sorry for me?”
Warren wasn’t sure whom he was trying to hurt more, Lasius or himself, but it seemed to be working in equal measures, and he snorted.
“You’re all pathet—mmph!”
His spiteful, hateful, poisonous words were cut off when Lasius kissed him hard on the mouth. Those warm lips shut him up faster than anything else could.
And just like that, he lost the train of thought he’d been going on. He had no idea what he was about to say because there was nothing else except for the touch of Lasius’s mouth, the grip of Lasius’s hands on his shoulders.
God, the man held him so tightly that Warren knew there would be bruises left behind.
Not that it mattered. He had enough bruises from when th
ey’d made love for all those hours earlier today.
Because even though Warren hadn’t wanted to admit it, even though he barely knew this man in front of him, and even though he was still technically a prisoner in this house, it had been lovemaking.
He couldn’t deny it anymore. The mating was real. Its impact was real, and he was now and forever going to be bound to this man.
This man who hated him, and it made Warren’s eyes heat up and blur all over again.
Lasius pulled away from what was more of a crushing of their mouths than a kiss with what seemed like some reluctance. Warren couldn’t face him. He couldn’t look up into those eyes and see pity.
Or disappointment.
“Just let me go,” he begged. “You can have the child. I’ll leave, and I won’t come back. I can…I can help to protect your clan from within Varrick’s home.”
It was a stupid and desperate plot, but he couldn’t help himself. He would still do it. He would pass along information to Seth and his clan that would keep them safe if that was what they needed.
Lasius shook his head. “No, baby. You’re staying here with me. I’m not sending you back to that, and I won’t let anyone come here and hurt you or the baby. I’ll protect you.”
Warren wanted to argue that he didn’t need protection. He was a trained warrior. He wasn’t as strong as the dragons in this house, but he was also outnumbered.
He would be outnumbered again when it came time for his death. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself. He wouldn’t be able to defend his child.
“They’ll kill us.”
“No they won’t,” Sorin said. “We protect each other. You belong here. You’re my brother. You’ve been here for two weeks, and I barely know a thing about you. I want to know more about you.”
“Same here,” Lasius said. “I love you. I want to keep you safe.”
“Love.” Warren’s nose curled at the word. “You don’t love me. You’re mated to me. Your hormones are making you behave this way.”
“I love you.”
“You know nothing about me.” This time Warren did look into Lasius’s eyes, challenging the man to prove him wrong.
“Okay, I know you’re strong, clever, stubborn as fuck, and you’ve been through some fucked-up shit in your life.”