Yet, she still said, “Yeah.”
She listened to Erik shuffle his feet by the door. The creak of the knob told her he would leave. But she didn’t hear the door open.
“Listen, Bree. I don’t think you’re okay,” Erik said, suddenly standing in front of her.
She reared back as he tried to take her hand. A gap of space opened between them. Her own speed surprised her.
Erik sighed and said, almost to himself, “Oh, this isn’t going to go over well with anyone. Could I be a bigger fuck up?”
Bree looked into the face she’d been yearning after for the past six weeks and wondered what the hell was going on. She raised both hands. “Look, I appreciate you taking me home. I even appreciate the first aid, but I think it’s time we part ways.”
The words physically hurt to say. She couldn’t explain why she didn’t want him to leave, though. It was a feeling, a tug in her heart that wanted him to take her into his arms.
Logic screamed that she didn’t know this man. The rest of her yearned for his comfort until he opened his mouth again.
“This is going to sound absolutely batshit,” Erik said. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but when I bit you, I think I…I changed you.”
He said change as if it meant something else to him. Time changes everyone. She’d read somewhere that a every cell in a body changes after seven years, meaning she wasn’t the same Bree she was seven years ago. The way Erik said it, she wasn’t the same woman she’d been the night before.
“It was just a bite. While I will never understand why you bit me, I’m okay with moving past it. You can go your way, and I’ll go mine. We’ll never have to talk about this again.” She marched over to the fridge, suddenly ravenous.
She yanked on the fridge door and the whole thing rocked forward. She yelped, let go, and leapt back. It crashed back to the floor. A box of cereal that’d been on top fell and spilled its contents.
“Fuck,” Erik said under his breath. “I turned you into a dragon.”
She whirled on him. “In what language would that have made any damn sense?”
“There’s a lot in your life that isn’t going to make sense. You’re going to have to get used to everything I say being a step away from gibberish.” He quirked a smile that she wanted to slap off his face.
She flung her hand toward the fridge. “The airlock was too tight. That’s all.”
“I take it you want to play dense and ignore all the warning signs?” Erik asked. He strode forward, grabbed a chair and spun it around before sitting down.
Bree put her hands on her hips and glared at him. Distracted, she glanced down to find that her bracelets were all gone.
“I didn’t think you would appreciate them in case they were actual silver. You’ll find that silver will make you sick to your stomach now.”
She rolled her eyes. This guy must have roofied her. That, or he doped her up with something crazy. She’d heard of junkies doing impossible things while on weird drugs. She didn’t feel high, but she definitely felt a touch off.
Just to prove him wrong, she marched back to her bedroom and found her bracelets carelessly thrown onto the floor. She bent to grab a bangle and jerked back when the metal burned. A voice in the back of her head growled.
Bree clutched her hand to her chest and stared down at her silver bangles. The voice in her head faded. When it vanished, she could tell herself that she’d imagined it. She didn’t try to touch the bracelets again, though. Instead, she straightened and went back to the kitchen.
Erik watched her like a hawk.
Bree shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing them?” he fired back.
She fought to keep from wrinkling her nose in annoyance. “I need to take a shower. Why would I put my bracelets on before showering?”
Erik leaned back as a look of confusion flitted across his face. Bree thought she was finally free of him when he stood. Instead of leaving, he approached her. She backed up until her spine hit the counter.
She glared up at Erik as his nostrils flared. The confusion left his face, but an eerie glow filled his eyes. Her lips parted in awe at the sight of them. The voice from earlier growled again, but this time the sound was more appreciative than angry.
Erik leaned into her. He braced himself against the counter by putting a hand on either side of her, so she was locked where she stood. Instead of pushing him away, she glared up at him.
He bent over her, the tip of his nose grazing her neck and sending shivers down her spine. She heard him inhale. Her knees went weak as her core heated. Suddenly, Bree wanted nothing more than to grab Erik and hold him tight. She wanted to wrap her legs around him and never let go.
Erik froze where he stood. A rumbling sound filled him and shook his chest. He pressed closer. She felt his lips touch her neck, but she couldn’t find the will to push him away. She wanted more. Craved more.
What was happening to her?
His lips left her skin only to be replaced by his teeth. Bree should have feared this after what had happened, but a plea for more nearly left her lips.
“You smell like dragon,” Erik growled against her skin.
Dragon?
All of this was utterly insane. And yet, she arched her back into him as a small moan slipped out of her. Her skin felt alive. Everywhere Erik’s skin brushed hers felt like a connection to a live wire.
Bree snaked her hand between them and pressed it to his chest. She meant to push him away, but her body went limp. She wanted to lie down for him and let him take her. While her desire for Erik had always been intense, she’d never felt like this before. Never had she ever been so ready for a man.
Finally, she found the strength to shove him back. His eyes still held that glow. She watched his chest rise and fall as he stared her down. For a moment, she thought he would pounce on her.
“Out,” she said. At first, the word was as weak willed as she felt. Then she gathered herself and stood straighter. “Get out of my apartment.”
Erik’s features rippled with a series of emotions that she couldn’t catch until finally, he nodded and turned away from her. The door swung open and slammed shut behind him.
Bree slumped, exhausted. Too much had happened in the past twenty-four hours. She ran a hand through her hair and glanced at the clock, which said that it was already three in the afternoon. Stifling her groan, she snatched the box of breakfast cereal from the floor and went to find her phone so she could call work.
Her mind wandered. She thought of Erik and the lies he’d tried to tell her. When she reached her bedroom and saw the bracelets again, she paused. The dry cereal in her mouth turned to ash on her tongue.
What if…?
She shook her head. There was no way any of it could be true. She was having the worst trip of her life. Someone must have slipped her drugs. Bree really hoped this had all been one big hallucination. If she was lucky, she would run into Erik another day and he would look at her like she was crazy when she mentioned this morning—ah, afternoon.
Holding her phone to her ear, Bree prayed she wouldn’t lose her job after disappearing the night before.
***
Bree didn’t want him around. He could tell. So, he forced himself to walk away from her when his beasts wanted nothing more than to go back and take her. The dragons filled his head with all the ways he could make her scream his name. His chest heaved as his breath quickened.
He had to stop and shake himself outside her apartment. The temptation to go back and finish what he’d started nearly lured him inside once more. Instead, he forced himself to keep walking.
Though he’d smelled dragon on Bree, he couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t smelled his own beast. Because of the two that lived inside him, his senses were often muddled. He’d never gotten used to the scent of his second beast. If the creature had been close to the surface while he’d approached Bree, then he could have
easily smelled himself. Though he hadn’t been aware of the beast, it was shifty and unpredictable.
Erik huffed a sigh of annoyance. Everything about him was a mess. He’d done his best to keep his shit together while living under Zander, but the clan leader had seen through Erik. Zander could tell that Erik was damaged goods. Always had been. Always would be.
A mess.
A monster.
Good for absolutely nothing.
Erik put on his sunglasses and tried to keep his chin high. He told himself that he hadn’t changed the poor bartender, that he’d only bitten her like a complete asshole. He sighed again. The weight on his chest tried to press all the air from his lungs until he couldn’t breathe. It was a familiar weight, though.
He always carried guilt around with him.
Though Erik didn’t have memories of his twin brother, he would always know that his lack of memory was his own fault. Erik had killed him in the womb and absorbed not only his body, but his beast. The beast loathed him, like it could remember a time when it had its own body. Now it was just a reminder that Erik had killed before his first breath.
He wouldn’t mess up Bree’s life like that. The feisty bartender didn’t need him hanging around. Yet, the things she’d asked him made him wonder if she thought about him more than he’d ever thought of her.
Once again, guilt rose like a tidal wave. It slammed into his shoulders and tried to make him hunch.
How many women had he met at the bar? How many had he gone home with while Bree watched with longing? Erik couldn’t stop fucking up. Not for a moment.
His phone vibrated. For a second, his heart leapt. Why he thought it could be Bree begging him to turn back, he didn’t know. He’d never given her his phone number.
The message came from Gavin, calling another family meeting. Erik did his best to shake off all outward evidence of his guilt and think about Isabella’s macaroni and cheese. He’d noticed the ingredients in the fridge. If she didn’t make it today, he would whine and cry until she did.
Then, Dillon would try to kick his ass for bothering Isabella. They would inevitably break the lamp that had already been replaced six times in the past five weeks, and Isabella would beat Erik with a wooden spoon.
At least there were some things Erik could count on.
Chapter Three
Bree hadn’t lost her job. Her boss hadn’t been happy, but some of the bar patrons had reported seeing her being carried out of the bar looking hurt. Everyone had assumed that Erik had been helping her. From what they said, Erik had been afraid for her. When she got to work, Monty said it had something to do with the way Erik moved, the expression he wore, the way he watched her.
She chewed the inside of her cheek as she grabbed beers and popped the caps.
“Are you sure you’re good to work?” Monty asked. He nodded toward her bandaged hand.
She flexed her fingers and clenched her fist, but nothing hurt. Not like it had the night before when fire climbed up her arm and enveloped her entire being.
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “Let me change my bandages.”
Bree slipped away with a strange suspicion lurking in the corner of her mind. She flexed her hand again and again, and yet still felt nothing. If anything, the only discomfort she experienced was the gnawing hunger in the pit of her stomach.
On a normal day, Bree had an English muffin for breakfast and ramen with an egg for lunch. Usually that was enough before she got to work. Even though she’d woken up at three in the afternoon, she’d devoured two bowls of ramen and three eggs. Now, her stomach clenched and demanded more. Right now, she couldn’t steal a moment to ask the kitchen staff for food.
In the breakroom, she found the staff first aid kit and set it on the table before reaching for the bandages around her hand. The red marks and fresh blood from the night before filled her mind. They should be scabbed over and itchy right about now.
When she peeled away the gauze, she found her skin was unblemished. There were faint white scars where Erik’s sharp teeth had pierced her hand, but that was it.
“What the actual fuck?” she muttered under her breath.
When the door behind her opened, she startled and covered her hand.
Her boss, a portly man with a bad hair piece, gave her a questioning look. “Worse than you thought?”
She shook her head. “I’m healing faster than I thought.”
He gave an appreciative nod, like he cared. He’d never been the kind of boss to show support to his bartenders. She knew he cared more about the kitchen staff dealing out of the kitchen and how he could get his cut of it.
Bree waited for her boss to leave and quickly wrapped her hand up again to keep up appearances. If she walked out of there with her hand completely healed, people would start asking questions, and she did not have the answers for them.
The night went on like any other night, save for the amount of appetizer extras she conned out of the kitchen staff. Bree munched on her third pizza log and scanned the crowd for Erik. She didn’t understand what was going on with her body, and the things she’d shrugged off earlier that day no longer seemed as strange.
Erik would be able to tell her exactly what was happening to her. He had to know.
The night stretched on. Erik never came to take his usual seat at the bar. Instead, an older gentleman and his wife took the spots at the end. Bree went to ask them what they’d like for the night, but the wife served her with a glare that brought her to a stop.
A growl started in the back of her mind as her anger rose. The wife sneered as her gaze dipped to Bree’s low-cut shirt. The growling in Bree’s mind grew louder. When the wife looked up again, she jerked back. Her fingers tightened on her husband’s shirt until he, too, looked up from his phone. The sight of Bree made him recoil.
Confused, Bree glanced toward the mirror behind the liquor bottles. Her stomach dropped. Her reflection looked back at her with glowing grey eyes. They swirled like silver, completely inhuman and inexplicable. She wished she could claim they were contacts, but she knew she hadn’t looked like this earlier.
Once again, she searched for Erik. Where was he? Normally as dependable as clockwork, he’d vanished from her life.
Bree ducked her head and approached the scared couple. They scrambled out of their seats and left before she could even tell them about what was on draft.
“What was their issue?” Monty asked.
Bree didn’t look up, still afraid that her eyes hadn’t yet gone back to normal. “The man said something about irritable bowels and needing to go home,” she lied.
She did her best to work the rest of her shift, but her regulars could tell she was distracted. Everything she did was just a little too much. She shook her drinks a tad too hard. She shattered a few bottle necks trying to pop the caps. When she shoved through the kitchen door to get something for a patron, it slapped the wall and left a dent.
Her coworkers were too busy with their own lives, with dealing drugs out of the kitchen or flirting with patrons. She knew she was alone in this. It left her feeling adrift. She wanted to fold her arms around her middle so she couldn’t touch anything else.
An endless fountain of frustrating energy poured inside her, too. She couldn’t stand still. She needed to move, to shake off the excess. When the night shift finally ended and the bar was as clean as it could be for the next day, she ran out without waiting for Monty to split the tips.
Erik never showed. She had no idea where to find him. He knew where she lived, but she didn’t even know where to begin looking for him.
She let out a string of curses as she walked down the street. The lonely light was the glow of the tattoo shop, The Grumpy Sailor. The pink-haired woman inside wouldn’t be able to tell Bree how to find Erik.
She spun around and crashed into someone. Rocking back, she quickly let out an apology. The man she’d stumbled into stared down at her with confusion and disbelief. His nose twitched, like he could smell her.
> What a weirdo—Then Bree realized she could smell him, too. The aroma of wet earth and rich pine resin hovered in the air around him.
Confused, she blinked up at him. An undercurrent of smoke drifted through his scent and reminded her of Erik. She scowled and tried to remember if she’d ever seen this guy with Erik.
The man wrinkled his nose, sniffed, and rubbed it with the back of his hand. She got the sense that he’d caught something offensive on the air. Maybe it was the spilled beer on her boots or the liquor mixers on her jeans.
As the man sidestepped her, she ran a hand through her hair. All the things she’d been nose-blind to were growing unbearable. What was worse was the constant discomfort just under her skin. It was getting on her nerves and setting her teeth on edge.
She glanced back and wondered if that man was like Erik and that was why his smell reminded her of him. Whatever they were, she was becoming like them.
Bree shook her head. No, that couldn’t be. She must have been tripping on drugs still. She pinched her nose and tried to breathe through her mouth. This bad day would come to an end, and in the morning, everything would go back to normal.
Instead of lingering, Bree decided to head home. The entire way there, she thought of Erik. She flexed her hand while thinking about how he’d carried her home and made sure she was safe. Sure, Erik had bitten her and caused the problem in the first place, but he’d taken care of her after.
Her old feelings for him warred with the strange events of the day. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, but she didn’t think the energy crackling inside her would let her get any shuteye. It made her fingers twitch and her heart-rate skyrocket. When she slammed the door behind her, the walls rattled.
Bree let out a frustrated groan. The energy demanded more, but it wasn’t like she had a treadmill. She walked around the apartment, grabbing snacks and trying to do lunges, but still it bothered her.
What is going on? Why won’t this end?
Chapter Four
Restoring The Broken (Rogue Dragons Book 3) Page 2