by Ophelia Bell
“No. But, holy fuck, I want more. Why won’t you just fuck me?”
“I will as soon as I find your limit.” He moved his hands back up and grabbed the top of my shorts, tugging them down over my ass. “Or my own,” he said almost to himself when my ass was bare. Then he bent down and dropped a kiss at the peak of my cleft. His lips felt hot, and a zing of awareness shot up my spine. I’d have preferred to bathe before he got up close and personal with my ass, but at this point, if he didn’t care, neither did I.
My shorts slipped the rest of the way down on their own. Gray exhaled a long breath that gusted over my hot pussy, and I let out a whimper and another plea.
“Sweet Mother, April. Your aura is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Every time I tease you, more magic floods into you, but there’s always room for more. Dragons always have a limit. Not a small one but still a limit. Look at my aura.”
I cast a blazing glance back at him. “What about it?” I snapped. His aura was completely red now, without a hint of silver, and pulsed with a steady beat that mimicked the throbbing sensation between my legs. When my gaze dropped to his groin, he hooked his thumbs in his boxers and tugged them down, allowing his magnificent cock to spring free. It stood rock hard and weeping, and he gave it one long, slow stroke, gathering the moisture at the flared head and rubbing it around until he glistened. He was more than ready, so why wasn’t he inside me?
“My aura’s completely red, isn’t it?”
“Completely. Is mine like yours?”
“Nothing like it. Yours expands, whenever I touch you, the red increases, but the green glows brighter too.”
He grazed his fingertips down the crack of my ass and worked two fingers into my pussy, pushing deep and stretching me enough to make my head spin. Then he stroked, twisting his fingers and thrusting in and out until I rocked back and forth to the same rhythm, the pleasure swelling through my body to the point of bursting. Just when I thought he’d finally let me have relief, he stopped.
“Fuck! Why are you doing this? Am I just some experiment to you?”
“No, baby, I think you’re everything. I think you might just be the perfect woman.”
That was rich. Now he was making excuses to get me to allow for more torture. This crazy bastard evidently got off on edging, but it really wasn’t my thing.
Frustrated and annoyed, I dropped my hand between my legs and started rubbing my clit, desperate for some relief from the building need. My entire body throbbed with it. I couldn’t see my own aura no matter how much I tried, but I could absolutely feel the magic gathered around me like a heavy blanket now, slipping over my hypersensitive skin.
“April, just a little longer,” Gray said, grabbing my wrist and pulling my hand back up, pressing it flat to the counter and covering both my hands with his to hold them down. His cock brushed against the crease of my ass, and I pushed back against him.
“Just let me feel you inside me,” I begged. “I need that big cock inside me.”
He’d turned me into some kind of nympho. The need became a living thing, like an enormous balloon between my legs, stretched to the point of breaking but somehow still growing beyond my ability to comprehend. The world had gone red, my vision clouding and my breathing ragged. My thighs were drenched with my arousal, and the weight of his cock pressed against my ass didn’t help. He slid his length slowly down my crease and back up, growling as he pulled me back against him. But he still didn’t push inside.
“Fuck, I can’t wait any longer,” he muttered, and I had just enough presence of mind to mentally rejoice.
Rather than shove into me, he pulled me up and spun me to face him. His mouth crashed down onto mine as he hooked his hands behind my thighs and hoisted me up. I wrapped both arms around his neck and my legs around his waist, but he did the rest of the work. He angled his cock to my entrance as he braced me against the counter, then my world split apart in a blast of ecstasy as he finally, finally, slammed home.
I arched back with a rapturous cry, twisting my hips on his cock as he jacked hard into me. With a cock that huge, there should have been some discomfort with how hard he fucked, but it all felt perfect.
His hand slipped up my back to cup the back of my head, and his mouth worked over my jaw, down my neck and back up. His eyes were fevered orbs of white fire, and his teeth clenched in a grimace of utter pleasure. He fucked me with frantic, fast thrusts, each one filling and stretching me so perfectly I was caught between marveling at the sheer pleasure and simply feeling it. I’d already been close to coming, but I forced myself to hold back, to wait, because I wanted us to lose ourselves together.
When his expression broke and his mouth fell open with a rough yell, his aura followed suit, exploding in a cascade of red light. The magic seemed to flood straight into me so fast I was momentarily struck senseless, hovering at the edge for a split second before my orgasm took hold. My voice joined his as I flew over, body shuddering in his arms, hips bucking violently.
He held me through several minutes of tremors, his gaze never leaving my face. When I finally had the self-awareness again to return to reality, I gave him a satisfied grin, but it faded when his attention shifted behind me, and his tender smile disappeared.
Gray’s jaw clenched spasmodically, and his eyes suddenly blazed with anger. My skin prickled uncomfortably with awareness of a familiar, unpleasant energy that had filled the studio.
Footsteps approached, and shattering sounds reached my ears from the annealers and the shelves as all our work from the day self-destructed. Not even the afterglow of the most amazing orgasm I’d ever had could overcome the certainty that something was very, very wrong.
“Graziano, it’s been a while.” The voice had an unpleasant, reverberating pitch that made my skin prickle uncomfortably.
“I don’t work for Chaos anymore,” Gray said, clutching me tighter to him. “So what the fuck are you doing here, Vesh?”
7
Gray
April tensed in my arms and shivered, clinging to me. Her mind was still open and filled with a rambling stream of inner thoughts. One thought stood out among the rest: “Not again.” I glanced down at her with a frown.
“Has he bothered you before?”
She twisted to look over her shoulder at the tall, black-suited man who’d appeared out of thin air in the middle of her studio. She shook her head. “No, but that feeling…” She shivered again and grimaced. “I’ve felt it before. A couple days ago. It’s what threw me off my schedule. Now I have to start over again.”
“I’m not here for you, Gray. I’m here for her. Give her to me, and you can go,” Vesh said in his deep monotone, his voice seemingly dredged from the depths of an abyss. April trembled again.
“If I’m here, it damn well does concern me. She’s mine. Whatever Chaos wants with her, he’ll have to take up with me, in person.”
Vesh’s heavy brows tilted inward, and dark veins erupted around his eyes. “I obey his orders, not yours. Don’t make this harder on yourself. If you don’t give her to me now, you’ll have my brothers to contend with too.”
The uncomfortable crackle of chaos magic grew around me, accompanied by the dissonant sounds of wrenching metal and shattering glass. The windows behind me blasted out into the night, and cold, wet wind flowed in over my bare skin.
I gritted my teeth, allowing some of my human form to fade. The scales April had only been able to feel earlier became visible as silvery ripples across my skin. April inhaled sharply, her eyes widening.
“Vesh,” I warned in a voice deepened by my guardian power. “You are no match for me, and you know it. What do you want with her?”
The shoulders of his dark trench coat lifted, and he sneered at me. “Andrew Vincent is a thief and a liar. He owes Chaos millions, and managed to slip away before we could catch him. He continues to elude us. But I see his daughter is the real treasure. Chaos has been searching for a creature with a mix of power that strong. He will gladly take her as
settlement of Vincent’s debt.”
I looked down at April, worried she’d make a desperate choice. But the flash in her eyes and the clench of her jaw told me otherwise. She pushed me back a step and slipped off the counter, turning to face our visitor
Her shoulders back and head tilted defiantly, she said, “I’m not giving my dad up, and I’m sure as shit not surrendering myself either. You can tell your boss to go fuck himself.”
I grimaced. As Chaos’s enforcers, Vesh and all the brothers Bane didn’t give an inch to resistance. If anything, it made them push harder. But this was the first time I’d ever been so close to a target of his before. Despite my warning, I honestly had no clue whether I was strong enough to beat him. It was only a guess.
He withdrew his hands from his pockets, and black tendrils snaked around his fingertips, small, tongue-like things that snapped out like lashing whips tasting the air around him.
“What the fuck?” April muttered, recoiling.
I hooked an arm around her waist and shoved her behind me. “Let me handle this.”
Vesh took a slow step closer, the cloying magic wreaking havoc on my concentration. “We don’t have to do this, Gray. Courtesy is not usually my thing, but we’ve worked together before. Just step aside.” But I wasn’t about to let him have April.
“I take my job as a guardian seriously,” I warned, letting my hold on my human shape fade, relaxing into the shift as my body grew and scales replaced my skin.
“Do you usually fuck your wards? As I recall, you and your fellow bodyguards kept the fornication between the six of you. I wasn’t even sure if you liked women.” He kept advancing, and the aura of chaos around him made the line between rage and panic waver. I had to act soon or risk going mad. I gritted my teeth, glanced back to make sure April was okay, then lunged.
Heaving myself on top of the counter, I shifted in midair with a roar. Vesh backtracked, lifting his hands, but what might have looked like a defensive maneuver was an attack. The black whips of magic sliced at my scales, making them ripple and shift to half dragon-scale, half-human skin. Then he sliced again, and pain burned into my chest.
I bellowed in his face, and he spun away, narrowly missing the cascade of white fire I breathed at him. The tails of his coat burst into flame, fizzling out and leaving a trail of smoke behind when he spun to face me again with rage contorting his face.
“You had your chance!” His hands whirled through the air, the whips of chaos spinning in a void that he shoved straight at me. The air around me wavered and distorted like a surrealist fantasy, the floor tilting and undulating like it was made of taffy instead of hard concrete. I spread my wings to keep my balance, grasped the edge of the counter with one claw, and launched at him, my mouth wide enough to swallow him whole and fire turning my throat molten.
My flames managed to push him back, and sweat broke out on his face. The front of his coat was peppered with fire-rimmed holes burning wider and threatening to consume it entirely. With a curse, he shed the coat, and I took the opportunity to swipe at him with one claw. I caught him on the shoulder, and he stumbled before righting himself and lashing out again with a long tendril of crackling violet chaos magic.
The tongue of magic lashed around my throat, instantly constricting. I let out a croaking roar, and my eyes bulged as he cut off my air. I scrabbled at the length of black that tethered me to him, but my talons passed right through it. Vesh’s hold claimed control of my own magic, forcing me into a shift until I was human again and on my knees in front of him.
“I guess you were wrong,” he said, sneering down at me. “I always wondered how tough you guys really were. Chaos should’ve had me and my brothers guarding his precious songbird instead of you useless lot.”
A flicker of movement caught my eye from behind Vesh as April appeared, naked and glorious with her long steel punty held in both hands like a bat. She swung it at him, the glowing end making an orange arc through the air aimed straight at his head. I summoned what little breath I had left and managed to force one more gout of flame through the narrow passage of my throat, blasting it at his face just as she made contact. The punty smacked hard into his neck, the sizzle of flesh drowned out by his howl of pain as he went down. His power interrupted, I reclaimed my dragon form and jumped, slashing his throat in a single, neat sweep of my talons.
His body instantly went still and ice-cold, his skin turned black and hardened. I jumped off him, shifting back again, and pulled April into my arms. She buried her face in my shoulder as Vesh’s body shattered in an explosion of obsidian shards that pelted my back and fell tinkling to the hard floor like tiny bells.
April shuddered against me, turning her face to peek past my shoulder. “What the hell was he?” she breathed, finally relaxing a little and pushing back to stare around at the destruction. The ground was littered with the black rubble of his remains, and the kitchen counter I’d vaulted to get to him had been knocked back into the wall behind it. The kitchen was destroyed, and somewhere underneath the rubble were our clothes.
“I’ll have to explain later. For now, we need to get the hell out of here.”
“But you killed him. Shouldn’t we call the … ” She cut herself off, frowning, and I picked up on her thought.
“The human authorities can’t do a damn thing.” I took her hands and looked into her eyes. “April, this isn’t the end of it. If Chaos is after your father, he won’t stop until he finds him, and it sounds like they’ll happily take you as a substitute. Do you know where your father is?”
Her eyes were wide with fear, and she shook her head. “He just said he had to go off the grid. I had no idea he’d pissed off…did you say Chaos?”
“I need you to think about where he could be, and in the meantime, is there anywhere close where we can hide. Someplace we can lay low.”
Her brows drew together, and she blinked into the distance, biting her lip. Her thoughts broadcast a hazy image of a house overlooking the water. An island covered in trees. “There might be one place we can go,” she whispered. “But if they’re magic, can’t they follow us?”
“They aren’t omniscient, and they’re really bad with technology. They probably followed your dad to Seattle, then found you. Where’s this place? Is it where your dad went?”
She shook her head, nudging at a chunk of Vesh with one toe and wrinkling her nose. “No, if he were going there, he’d have told me. It’s on an island in Puget Sound. The property itself belonged to my mom’s family. Dad and I lived there with Mom until she left us, then we moved to the city. They were never married, and we haven’t heard from anyone on that side of the family for years, but it’s remote, and you can only get there by boat.”
I scrutinized her face, surprised by her lack of concern over half her family, but time was slipping away from us. “Which direction is it?”
“I guarantee there’s no way we’re getting a boat out tonight. We can go back to my apartment until morning. It’s right next door.”
“I want to put as much space between us and this mess as we can. Vesh isn’t really dead. He’s a Bane brother. He’s the offspring of Chaos. All we did was cut off one head of a creature that has dozens, and when you cut one off, two more grow back. Needless to say, killing him wasn’t ideal, but I needed to give us time to run before Chaos sends more of the brothers after us. He’s bound to know about Vesh already. They’re probably already on their way.”
She gave me an irritated look. “Well, short of sitting on a dock somewhere and waiting for dawn when someone wakes up, I don’t know what you want from me. The estate is a three-hour boat ride northwest of the city, on an island nobody goes to anymore. What do you want to do, swim?”
I quirked my mouth at her and shifted just enough to stretch my wings. “No, April. Naturally, I plan to fly.”
8
April
Gray’s sense of urgency didn’t really hit home until he refused to let me even go to my apartment to pack a bag.
With a huff of frustration, he nodded, but held me back when I started for the door. As part of my residency, I also had the small apartment above the shop next door to the gallery, so I wasn’t afraid to do a naked sprint up the back stairs to get clean clothes and throw some other things into an overnight bag. Instead, he blew out a longer breath, causing thick, white smoke to billow around me. When it settled against my skin, I stared down in alarm. Warm clothing slowly materialized over my limbs, right down to a pair of pale suede Ugg boots on my feet. The outfit of jeans, a sweater, and down jacket was too much for the studio, but with a scarf and knit cap for my head, perfect for a high-altitude jaunt.
“You’re still naked,” I said as he tugged me out the door, glancing both ways down the empty alley.
He turned toward me and backed a couple feet away, then the air shimmered around him as he grew into the dragon I’d witnessed him shift into just a few minutes ago.
I gawked up at him, still just as stunned to see him in all his dragon glory as I was the first time. More, even, since I wasn’t distracted by a crazy man attacking us. He bent low, stretching out his front leg as if bowing, and folded one wing closer to his body.
“Climb on,” came a deep, rumbling voice that vibrated deep into my core.
My heart in my throat, I stepped gingerly up onto his foreleg, swinging one leg over his broad shoulders. He was twice the size of a large horse, so I had to sit forward, just between two ridges of the thick protrusions that ran down the length of his spine.
“Someone’s going to see you.”
In answer, his scales rippled with a faint whispering noise, turning a reflective silver rather than opaque white.