Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2)

by Sam Hall

  He smiled, an honest-to-goodness, unguarded Mason smile, which was worth the price of admission, let me tell you, and then he scooped me up, much more gently this time, laying me back down on the ground as the tears started to well. My mates dropped down to their knees, then hands reached out and took mine, holding them tight, as if knowing I’d need their support to get through this. Mason didn’t pause when the first sob came, seeming to know, always know, when I was hurting the most what I needed.

  I needed him.

  He wedged himself between my thighs, rubbed the head of that hard cock through my slick, and then placed a hand on the ground by my shoulder and shoved himself deep.

  It felt like this with all of them, but sometimes, I got too caught up in the physical pleasure their bodies provoked. When they speared into me, they drove themselves into my heart, deeper and deeper with each stroke, so that by the time their knots bumped up against me, I opened. Of course I did. I couldn’t keep any of them out, needing it, needing that physical locking inside that replicated the one I felt in my heart, where that massing part slotted in, filling me, completing me.

  “Good, love?” he rasped, trying to keep his strokes slow and measured.

  I laughed at the manifest inadequacy of that word, feeling tears splatter on the ground around us before wrapping my arms around him, forcing us to slither together, unable to stop the terrible momentum growing inside us. I fit my mouth to his ear, let him hear the sounds of my gasps as he slowly unravelled me, only to be remade again.

  “You, them, this… It’s everything.”

  And it was. Something broke within him then, his eyes glowing bright as the moon as he started to plough inside me, forcing his knot to rub deep on that point that ached the most, my hips snapping to meet his stroke for stroke. I sobbed out my pleasure, heard his in return, getting faster and faster, a great tide that had been out too long surging back in.

  I saw Ulfric in my mind when I closed my eyes, unable to do anything other than focus on what our bodies did to each other. His face was terrible in its compassion, its brutality. He and my pack, we were the wolves that sang to the moon their eerie, harshly beautiful song, and as it rose in the air, so did we.

  Part of me held that feeling close, of the time each one of my mates had wedged their knots into me, taking me, making me theirs. And yet it was a surprise every time, my eyes flicking around as I came around Mason’s knot. He groaned as I strangled his knot with the pulses of my cunt, wringing every damn stuttering pleasure I could from his body. But that euphoric rush was nothing compared to what came next.

  I could feel him in the same way as I had all my mates, but this time, I felt them all. A circle of power, we sang now, connected so completely, it would never be sundered. The rush of pleasure, of happiness, of love, flooded into me, into him, into them, and it just kept on coming, almost terrifying in its scope and grandeur.

  Which was perhaps why I spiralled up, able to see the two of us rutting together on the mat, to see the way my mates connected with us. But I didn’t stay.

  This is it, what you need to see, Ulfric said, the dark voice on my shoulder.

  And summoned by his words, I did. The city, the state, I saw more and more of it as I rose, until finally, I hung over the whole of it, a glowing presence in the night sky.

  She sees, she knows what is done to her daughters, he said. She watches. Across the landscape, pinpricks lit up, each one an ulva. But some flickered, fluttered, struggling with all their might before they went out. Including this one. The landscape faded away to show a view of a familiar place, Stevie sitting at her bar, frowning as she looked across at Selma and Aidan playing robotically at love as my aunt and his dad watched on.

  That seemed to trigger something, dragging me down, down, down at a pace that made me want to scream and vomit by turns. But it ended abruptly as I was slammed back into a body, but was it mine?

  “Hey, baby,” Aidan said, crouching naked above me, his smile so sweet, his eyes blinking as if he couldn’t believe he was seeing me. “You’re here?”

  I nodded on automatic, feeling his big hand caress the side of my face, my eyes falling closed at that, unable to think when he did so. I was drowned, in the feel of him, in his scent, at the sensation of him shifting between my naked thighs.

  “Fuck…” he breathed. “How? I’ve been in hell, babe, needing you. I thought one taste was going to be enough. I dream of you every damn night, wake up hard and aching.” He frowned, his vision going vague and unfocussed, but his mouth came down on mine, kissing me fucking senseless.

  “It’s working,” Nancy said, walking over to us and looking down at the two of us. “He thinks he’s in bed with that girl. Bring Selma in.”

  Aidan sunk into me, burying his face in my neck, nipping and kissing the skin there, and over his shoulder, I saw Marshall Peters looming in the doorway, his hand on a dead eyed Selma.

  “Shoulda done this differently, Nance,” Marshall rumbled, pushing my cousin into the room, her movements leaden and clumsy with reticence. “Should never have let the heir go. You primed her to want to mate with my son, spent all that time laying those impulses deep. From what he said, he damn near closed the deal. Maybe we should wait. She has to return at some point. A Spehr belongs in Lupindorf.”

  “Selma is heir now,” Nancy snapped. “As she should have been all along. You know that.”

  “Do I now?” he replied with a lazy smile. “Always the dog in the manger, jealous as hell.” She glared up at him, right up until the point he pressed her body against his, a hand cupping her jaw before he slammed his lips down on hers. “Made you a devil in the sheets when I’d come away from your sister’s.”

  “You were mine, are mine,” she growled out. “And now Aidan will be Selma’s, the way it always should be.” She turned to her daughter and said in a voice fairly vibrating with dominance, “Get on the bed and under him.”

  She sees, Ulfric insisted. She hears, feels the pain of her daughters. She watched us tear her first daughter to pieces in our incomprehension, and she learned. No more. His voice was a terrible growl, making Nance’s attempts at dominance sound like pitiful squeaking. Mothers, they have teeth, will eat the bodies of their young if they come out wrong. I looked over Nance’s shoulder, saw the spot of light from the bulb above them brighten and expand. She will rise.

  Selma shook her head, her eyes blinking, her feet planting into the ground in a way that I knew well. A strong stance helped you face down any foe, and my cousin, hers was rock solid. Her muscles tensed, her fists balled as she looked around her as if for the first time, a sharp wildness in her eyes that I’d never seen before. Marshall and Nance, they didn’t pay her too much attention, too focussed on pawing each other and congratulating themselves on their low-rent evil genius plans.

  “No,” she said, as if testing the word, getting a feel for it in her mouth. Her lips quirked before she said it again. “No.”

  That got their attention, the two of them pulling away from each other with looks of irritation, Nance about to open her siren song of a mouth.

  “No, Mum,” Selma said, definite, absolute, her eyes narrowing, her jaw firming. “No, I’m not going to slide under Aidan, let him fuck me and knot me, thinking its Paige. No, I’m not going to be your little facsimile of an heir. You’re on your fucking own.”

  Marshall stormed over, ready to lay one of those ham sized fists on her shoulder.

  “No!” she snapped, freezing him to the spot. Because the word has power, because she had never been allowed to say it. Because of all the times it had been squashed down, swallowed up, skated over. Because there was no fucking way she was going to submit to this shit anymore.

  Aidan looked down at me in confusion, Nance’s spell starting to fade, so I stroked the side of his face and placed a kiss on his mouth.

  “I’m coming for you,” I said. “I’m coming for the town, and I’m coming for those who murdered my father and I’m gonna put them into the groun
d. Just hang on.”

  His eyes glittered, something feral lighting within them before it all faded away.

  “So now you see,” Ulfric said, both of us standing now in the familiar darkness. “This is your purpose, all the ulva’s purpose. The balance must be restored, you need to help your sisters get free.”

  I was on my feet when the world faded back, the room, my mates all clustered in close. I tapped my fist to my palm, feeling my mate’s touches, the tension in my body. Power had lit within us like a fuse, and we were ready to go off.

  “Bring it on,” I said.

  Epilogue

  All around the world, women woke up, though they didn’t know that at the time. Some had no idea of their shifter heritage, some didn’t even know they were asleep, but for all, there was a shift. From turning around, looking at the people, at the customs that hemmed them in and wondering if they still served them, to women saying no, no, over and over, the weight of the Mother behind those words.

  Kailee stood outside the temporary arena, in the little tent that passed for a change room at these kinds of MMA fights. The ones where being human wasn’t a prerequisite and no one was going to complain about fur or fangs.

  “Here,” a tall man with long black hair said, taking her hands and winding the protective wraps around her fists, making her flex her hands to see if they were too tight. “You’re gonna slay tonight.”

  “Thanks, Ulf,” she said, bouncing up on her toes, moving to place a sisterly kiss on his cheek. But he moved, freezing still when her lips landed just centimetres from his. They stared at each other for a second, all the bundled up shit they carried around each day, but dared not put out there, front and centre in their eyes. She watched his tongue flick out, moistening those full lips, her eyes catching every movement.

  “Schuster, you’re up!” someone shouted from outside.

  She was up, away from her trainer, her friend, her shadow, her focus slamming back to the bout ahead. She could hear the crowd now, and they were baying for blood and she wanted to make sure it wasn’t hers. She smacked her fists together and then nodded to Ulf before striding out, up the dirt path to the cage beyond.

  “Ready to go down, little girl?” some lunk of pumped up muscle and testosterone said to her when they met at the centre of the arena. “I like my chicks on their knees so I can—”

  “Teach them a valuable lesson about steroid abuse and its impact on male genitalia?” she snapped back, her face a study of disinterest. “It’s OK, I know my clit’s bigger than yours, and I’m about to show you just how much.”

  “When you’se two are done?” the bored ref said, holding up a hand. “I’d say keep shit clean, but why bother. On my whistle, beat the fuck out of each other. I’ll drag the bloody corpse of whoever’s left out.”

  She skipped back to her corner, watching Clit Dick do the same, murder in his eyes. She just grinned, feeling the rush of adrenalin start to pump. That was OK, there ain’t no better time to come out swinging.

  Nance sat down at Adam’s laptop, logging in with the credentials she’d acquired some time ago. A relatively small amount of money to a hacker on the internet placed a keylogger on the alpha’s computer, the man too hidebound and technologically challenged to do anything as simple as run a virus check. She brought up the alpha networking software but wasn’t surprised to see the session was already running. Men looked up, peering at their screens at the sound of someone joining the video call, frowns the most common response.

  “I wasn’t aware that Lupindorf had appointed its next alpha,” Alpha Johnson said, leaning back in his desk chair, hands resting on his stomach.

  “They haven’t, Alpha Johnson,” she replied, tacking on the honorific a little belatedly. “I’m here as the representative of the Spehr family until one is chosen.”

  “Why?” another man asked, not bothering to soften the question. “Your brothers have been in contact. Apparently, your daughter is next in line, though they expressed some doubt at that. Young Jade has a partner selected, is ready to step up—”

  “No!” A quiet fell over the conference call, but it was in no way a benign thing. Instead, it felt tangible, oppressive, and not for the first time was she glad the meeting wasn’t held in person anymore. Those steely gazes, the thread of iron, the very tail of a whiplash which would cut so much deeper if they chose to. She remembered it all too well, cutting into her, cutting off her free will, her— “No,” she said, much more calmly. “Or rather, that’s not what I’m contacting you about. I realise this is unorthodox, me making contact, but we have a situation with a nix.”

  “Nix…” one man said with a sniff. “They’re a bloody nuisance, but we exile them as soon as they’re identified. The condition seems hereditary. Don’t need that polluting the blood lines.”

  “What about the nix?” Alpha Johnson asked, ignoring the other man completely. Nance felt the moment his attention sharpened, when several others did the same, marking who they were, which towns they were from, and how close they were.

  “I have reason to believe they are likely to pose more of a problem than they have before.”

  This was a cagy way of putting it. She wanted to throw some bait out, see what popped up, and what did confirmed exactly what she’d feared. Alphas didn’t fidget, their eyes didn’t dart around, their fingers didn’t tighten around mice, they didn’t clasp their hands tight to stop them from giving their irritation and their frustration away.

  “Not in my town,” the snippy alpha said, but Johnson and several others leaned forward. “I make sure—”

  “Enough, Mattias,” Johnson rumbled, the other man’s lips snapping shut in shock. Johnson’s eyes swung back to the camera, seeming like he stared down the optic fibre line and straight into Nance, something that filled her with a thrill she hadn’t felt for some time. “All right Nancy Spehr, you have the floor. Tell us about your little nix problem, and we’ll see what we can do about it.”

  Stalk me!

  Stalk me!

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