"Your mate is insane," Marisa spat, apparently displeased by his rejection of her. Although what she expected when, she’d said it herself, mate… The clue was in the title, dammit!
Did she think he'd find her less repulsive now he was mated? If that was the case, it was backward in its logic.
He frowned at her statement. "What are you talking about?"
"She just attacked me."
Trip, though he didn't like her, had to admit the arrogant bitch did look shaken. "Attacked you, how?" When it came down to it, Marisa was a Lioness. El was very much a human being. Unless…
"You never told us she was one of us," Marisa hissed, darting her gaze back and forth in a way that made her look beyond crazy. It was like she'd fallen into conspiracy and had no idea how to leap back out of it again.
His frown hardened. Though the cat’s remark had unease slithering down his spine, he ignored it and asked, "What happened?"
Marisa, for all she had a hideous character, was actually a beautiful woman. She had long blonde hair, bottle green eyes, skin like gold, and a lithe and slender form that spoke of her fitness. Not only as a human, but as a Lioness. It had always amazed him that in the face of such beauty, he’d always been underwhelmed. A fact she hadn't been able to comprehend either. It didn't stop her from trying though.
As was the case now.
Realizing she had his full attention, she straightened her shoulders subtly, gently arching her back and pressing her heart to the sky in a way that shoved her tits in his face. She couldn't just reply, oh no, she had to pout. Pursed her lips as though every move was made to entice him.
Some cats just didn't realize when to back off.
"Cut with the shit, Marisa. I said tell me what happened or fuck off." It was the least polite and politic thing he could have said, but she was getting on his nerves.
He was mated. Ryan, to his Triad brothers’ astonishment, had spent the last few hours introducing their mate to the upper echelons of Pride society.
What more of a clue did the woman need to realize she was getting nowhere fast?
At his words, she let out a hiss that was pure Lioness. Maybe, had he been a lesser male, he'd have been concerned. As it was, his lips twitched in amusement.
Seeming to sense that, and no longer feigning her rage, she spat, "She forced me to submit."
Scowling, Trip studied her. She didn't look under the weather or worse for wear. When Marisa had spoken of an attack, Trip had figured it was of the physical variety. But domination?
El had made Marisa submit?
Marisa, who came from an inordinately strong line, and who was renowned for her prowess on the lower challenge fields…? A woman who, by sheer strength alone, would make her way onto the council without her family name helping her up the rings…?
Trip scratched his head and looked blindly down at the ground.
Totally unsure of what to say, when this was so beyond anything any of them had expected, he dismissed Marisa with, "You must have deserved it. Now you are aware of our mate’s power, and her strength, you should know not to mess with any of us. And by mess, you know exactly what I mean, Marisa. Leave Marc alone."
Marisa scowled, her brow puckering in a way that was most ugly. "I wasn't talking to Marc when she attacked. Mother have mercy, does the woman have rights over all the males in the Pride now?"
Curiosity pricked, he asked, "Who were you flirting with? The male attending as our guest?"
Marisa firmed her lips. "Yes. The male named Shawn. I didn't realize he had a ‘hands off’ sign hanging around his neck."
Wanting to sigh with relief over the fact El had made a move to open communication with Shawn, but realizing that that might seem an unusual reaction to her statement, Trip just stared blankly at the female. “Now you’ve felt her bite, I remind you, Marisa, to watch your back."
Bristling, the cat spat, "I'm strong enough to defend myself. I don't need your help, Trip." And with that, her nose popped into the air again and she swayed off into the crowd, her stride slowed by her incessant need to look sexy.
Mother, if the woman popped her hips any more, she'd end up dislocating the damn joints.
"What was that about?"
Ryan's voice broke into his heavy thoughts. He turned to his Triad brother, grimacing as he admitted, "I have no idea. How much did you hear?"
"Enough." Ryan rubbed the back of his neck. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
Trip shrugged. "Certainly seems like Marc was right. At least… I don’t know, man. This is beyond weird."
"She's a pain in our fucking ass, but Marisa is damn strong. You and I both know that. I have no idea how El could make a female as strong as Marisa submit if she was human."
"If?" Trip sighed. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his loose linen pants, he hunched his shoulders. "This is insane, man. We have no proof yet. We have to wait for the DNA test results to come back."
Marc surprised the shit out of both of them by murmuring, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." He lifted the glass of champagne to his mouth and took a sip as he eyed them both.
Ryan grunted. "You been listening all along?"
Marc's grin was wry. "You get to my age, you pick up a lot of interesting habits."
"Eavesdropping was all you picked up in over a hundred years?" Trip snorted. "You didn’t waste your time on this planet, did you?"
His Triad brother snorted. "Jealous much?"
"That's enough. We have bigger shit to be dealing with than you two starting a pissing contest. If El really did manage to make Marisa submit, which I still can't get my head around considering how strong Marisa actually is, then there's no need to wait for the DNA test results. We have our answer. She’s a shifter. There's no doubt about it."
Marc let out a deep sigh, and his grip on the champagne flute grew perilous as he muttered, "The question is, just who the fuck is her mother?"
The rage flooding through El's body was more than she could stand. In fact, she felt certain it was the most she'd ever felt in her life.
Perhaps that might have seemed like an over exaggeration, but El had felt a lot in her thirty-one years. She'd been betrayed, she'd felt loss, she'd felt a terror unlike most people could even begin to comprehend. She had felt hurt and rage. She'd felt the gamut, like every human being had. But her experiences and her circumstances had always been extreme. So much so, the average person couldn't understand.
And that wasn't El believing herself to be superior than anybody else.
It was a fact.
How many people's grandfathers threw them to the wolves after they died? Locked them up in legal battles, tied them in loopholes that made them the enemy of every single person in their family? How many people had been kidnapped? How many people had had a friend betray them, and then be killed before their very eyes?
No, she wasn't being superior. Because if she believed those experiences made her fortunate, she’d belonged in an insane asylum. Not a psychological unit in a hospital. But full on Bedlam.
There was no way that her experiences made her a better person. Or that she was lucky to have been through everything she'd been through.
Hell, no! But still, when she said an extreme emotion freaked her the hell out, she really meant it.
The emotions ricocheting around her body were more than she knew how to contain. Her hair felt as though an electric charge was frazzling it. She wouldn't have been surprised if she'd looked in the mirror for her hair to be standing on edge.
She probably looked like something out of the Addams’ family! She certainly felt like it.
"El?" Shawn's voice was wary. "Are you okay, honey?"
How did she answer that she wasn't okay? She felt anything but. This anger and the rage, they were pinging her insides like they were top ping-pong challengers for the United States. Olympic level.
She made to speak. Then, when she opened her mouth
instead, she gulped down a breath. Words wouldn't form. Her mouth couldn't make the sounds like it did every other moment of every other day.
It was like she had no control over her responses. Which didn't exactly calm her down any.
She gasped down some more air, and just when she thought she could speak, the sound that escaped her mouth wasn't a word. It was a shriek of pain. Because, out of nowhere, agony sliced through her.
All of her nerve endings felt like they were under attack. She had no idea what to do with herself at that moment.
Every part of her was going into meltdown. Every. Single. Part.
There was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. The pain had her slamming down onto her knees. The soft grass protected the joints, but it still shook her up. Her brain felt like it was in a mixer. In fact, every part of her did. Except, instead of a whisk, there was a blender attachment hooked up. Because that was how it felt. Like knives were slicing into her.
She gulped back another scream, and as she did, she felt the ground beneath her shake a little. The vibration was minute. Barely there. Certainly not a tremor or a quake. But to her battered senses, those vibrations might as well have been an earthquake that maxed out the Richter scale.
She couldn't look up. Her neck wouldn't allow her. Instead, a scent filled her senses. It was Shawn. His earthy manliness calmed her down somewhat, but his words didn't. "Oh my God, El! What the fuck? What the hell is going on here?"
If he was terrified, then, she knew she should be too.
Before she could do little more than whimper at the terror in his voice, an ice-cold blast of agony slipped through her veins. The whimper morphed into a scream, and the scream transmogrified into a roar.
And just like that, her world fell apart and everything she knew burned to dust.
Chapter 16
The roar had everyone in the party freezing in place. Shifting at one of these events was verboten, everybody knew it.
Triad ceremonies were usually open to everyone. Every walk of life within the Pride. However, Angel was a councilman's son and that changed the state of play. A shift by a lower caste member of the Pride would probably be forgivable. But with such high caste families wandering around, an unauthorized shift was beyond contempt.
Marc, Ryan, and Trip all glanced around. Their gazes darting between Pride members as they sought out the scent of the fool who had broken Pride law. The roar had been close by, too close for safety.
The rumble of panic wasn't spreading among the partygoers, so danger wasn't close at hand. But it didn't ease Marc’s concern when he realized El was no longer by the refreshment stand as she’d been moments before.
When had she disappeared from there? He’d figured that was where Marisa and she had had their ‘tête à tête’, but she was no longer in the vicinity.
"Where the fuck is El?" Marc demanded, trying not to let fear rule him at his mate's absence.
Trip scowled. "She was getting a drink." Before he'd finished speaking, he was pushing through the crowd. Uncaring who he disturbed along the way. Council members glowered at him, the wife of important men squealed if he touched them a little roughly. Marc and Ryan had no choice but to follow him. They drowned in the wake of the chaos he stirred.
The partygoers, sensing their leaders were disturbed, began to chatter among themselves. The new wave of concern rumbled among them, but the Triad ignored it and their people.
It didn't take a genius to figure out that the unauthorized shifter might very well be their mate. And Trip’s nose always had been the best among the Triad brothers.
Within seconds they were at the dais where Ryan had officiated Angel Garcia's ceremony. The scent of Shawn's terror perfumed the air like shit in a hot room. That was nothing to the essence that dominated the atmosphere.
It was El.
But it was also more.
Trip watched Marc shudder as all his guesswork, his reading between the lines, suddenly came to fruition. El was, without a doubt, a shifter.
And didn't the Mother work in the most mysterious of ways? Because standing beside Shawn like a tame pussycat was a panther. Not a lion. A fucking panther.
Ryan nearly stumbled to a halt as he saw the wildcat. Marc grabbed hold of his shoulders to steady him, understanding his Triad brother’s astonishment.
"What the fuck?"
And didn't Trip’s epithet just sum up the past two weeks perfectly? Not even tonight, but the mindfuck that had been the coming together with their one and only.
"I prefer to talk to her alone," Shawn stated firmly.
That he expected to be obeyed was a testament to the man's arrogance and self-belief. In his many years, Marc had dealt with plenty of arrogant men. His Triad brothers weren't exactly humble, after all. Still, he could appreciate a male who stood toe to toe with him in defense of their mate.
With each passing day, Shawn proved himself to be a male worthy of El. Which was no small compliment.
"I’d agree," Marc started, took a sip of bourbon then continued softly, "if it weren't for the fact that she just shifted for the first time. All four of us around her complicate matters. She feels at ease around me, and she has known Shawn too long not to feel at ease around him, even if she is still mad at him." He shoved his hand into a pocket, preparing himself for a battle. "Trip, Ryan… I think you should go to bed."
"If you seriously think I'm leaving her, you have another thing coming."
Ryan folded his arms across his chest. "What he said."
Marc shook his head. "Think of her. We only just managed to get her to shift back." And hadn't that been harrowing?
Once the Pride had sensed the source of the chaos, they'd converged on the ceremonial platform. He, Shawn, and Trip had shielded El from the crowd. Well aware that one wrong move from any of them could have spelled disaster.
Thankfully, El had been traumatized—that was a verb and an adverb he'd never thought he'd put together in the same sentence—by the situation and had stayed cowering behind their protective wall, allowing them to shield her from the Pride’s gaze.
Not that that had been enough, of course. Only Ryan's dominance had cowed them into action. That little display had inadvertently saved Ryan from any potential challenges this year. That he'd managed to subjugate the Pride’s most powerful members in a time of unmitigated stress was indicative of his increasing strength.
Only a fool would ignore what had happened tonight and challenge his Triad brother regardless.
So, while the situation had been as effective as killing one bird with two stones in that regard, actually getting El back into her skin had been another issue entirely.
The three of them had had to shift then revert back to human form four times before managing to coax her back to them.
The minute their beautiful mate shifted, she passed out. Shawn had one brief tussle over who would carry her, and had trudged back to the lodge with her in his arms and had lain her down in her bedroom.
The four of them had retreated to the main lounge to discuss the next step.
"Her shifting for the first time in that kind of scenario was harrowing. She’s not going to want to be surrounded by us.
“Anyway, somebody needs to go and talk to her father. While you're at it, you can head to Pantera House, tell them to back the fuck off our mate. It's obvious they've been trying to steal her back from under her family's nose. Proof or no."
"Surely it would make more sense for Shawn to deal with Joseph?" Trip retorted, stacking his hands on his hips with irritation.
Shawn dropped down onto one of the sofas. "I'm not going anywhere. El and I have been at crossed purposes for too long. If we have any chance of making this work, I need to speak to her now before it's too late." He shot each of them a dark glance. "Don't forget, my bond is like yours. This Mother of yours has sanctioned what you have with her. Mine is some freak of nature that you're all too ashamed to discuss with the rest of your Pride.
“At the minute, I'
m a dirty little secret. That fucks me off because I have loved that woman too many years to let her go."
Marc was amazed to see the proud man was shivering a little with the power of what he was feeling. It was a strong man who could admit to such a weakness, but Marc could understand. El was their singular weakness. Just as she was supposed to be. A mate and kids were all that counted in this life. Wealth, power, prestige, position… It all meant nothing in the end. It was bullshit that clouded what really mattered.
Trip shook his head at Shawn's words. "You're wrong, you know?"
Shawn scowled at him. "What are you talking about?"
"You think our bond with her is stronger than what you have with her. That's not true. All bonds are sanctioned by the Mother. Just because yours is unusual doesn't mean that it's weaker. If it was weaker, we wouldn't allow you to be here. You wouldn't be a part of this conversation. The fact that you are is a testament to the power of the bond uniting you with El, and as a result, you with us."
"He's right."
Marc’s agreement had Ryan nodding. "Yes, he is. And let's just get this cleared up, you're not a dirty little secret. But the time to reveal something like this isn't at a Triad ceremony. Tonight wasn't our night. We'd already hijacked it slightly because of the newness of our bond. The Pride’s curious. The Triad ceremony normally attracts, what?" He looked to Trip and Marc, hands open and inviting answer. "Fifty? Sixty people, most?"
Both brothers nodded. And seeing that, Shawn frowned. "There had to be over five hundred people there tonight."
Ryan snorted. "Exactly. When I said we'd hijacked tonight, I really meant it. I didn't want to make it more about us when the ceremony was for Angel. It wasn't a slight towards you. Jesus, I only introduced El because I had to. I didn't want to," he explained ruefully.
Marc chuckled. "Ain't that the truth."
Shawn grimaced slightly. "I'm not going to lie. That does make me feel better about this situation. I know my being here is like a freak show, you guys. I'm sorry about that, but I can't change it, and I wouldn't want to."
Finding Luna: A Lion Shifter Reverse Harem Romance (PRIDE Book 1) Page 23