Bloodright

by Karin Tabke

  “Falon,” he said roughly, pulling away from her.

  “This is what you want, is it not?” she demanded. What had taken hold of her made the very bed she lay upon shake, but more than that, it ate away at her resolve. The only emotion she felt for Lucien Mondragon was lust. Lust she could not shake. Her attraction to him confused her. Terrified her. How could it be when her heart belonged to a man who, even now, sought another?

  Was she destined to love one man but lust for his brother?

  She looked the cunning dark brother in the eye. Yeah, Lucien was an alpha to be reckoned with. He was powerful. He had a way of making a woman forget things. If his blood did not race through her veins, maybe she could ignore him as she so desperately wanted to. But that was not the case.

  “You give yourself to me freely?”

  Yes, she’d give herself to him. God help her, but she would honor the Blood Law as well as Rafael’s sacrifice for her life. Falon threw his words back in his face. “I don’t have to love you to fuck you.”

  His full lips tightened into a grim smile, but he nodded. “That is good enough for me.” He pushed her back onto the bed, covering her body with his. He was beyond warm. His skin burned hers on contact. “Though love does not bind us, make no mistake, Falon, you are my true mate now. My seed will take root inside your womb, and once it does, even if my brother comes crawling back to you on his hands and knees, you will remain mine.”

  Hot tears stung her eyes. How could Rafael release her?

  “Because his duty lies with his pack first,” Lucien answered.

  Falon gasped. How had he—

  “You died in my arms, Falon. To restore your life, I gave you my blood to replace what you had lost. There are no secrets between us.”

  Was there more to his desire for her than revenge? Would it make a difference? She needed to know. She searched his deep golden eyes for the truth. “Why me?”

  “Because you were my brother’s.”

  Lucien’s honesty cut like a knife. She respected him for the truth, but the truth that she was simply a means of revenge gave her no hope for any reasonable future with him. Why did that hurt more than his words?

  Lucien lowered his lips to hers. “And because you are beautiful and strong.” He kissed her. Falon closed her eyes, trying to hold back the tears. She didn’t want his last words to mean something to her. But in the tumult that was her world, they did.

  Even if they were lies.

  Lucien broke the kiss to look hard at Falon. “I will never lie to you, Falon, even if you will not like the truth.”

  Falon stretched out against Lucien’s long body, liking the hard warmth of him, despite her dislike of him. “Here is my truth, Lucien: You may be able to force my body to desire yours, but you will never be able to force my heart to love you. Because every time I give myself to you, I’m doing it for Rafael and the promise he made to save my life.”

  She slid her hands down his back and pressed his ass to her hips. “Now show me just how much of an alpha you really are.”

  Lucien snarled and grasped her hands. His fingers entwined with hers as he raised her arms over her head. The heat of his breath singed her cheeks. His teeth scraped along her jugular, the wide head of his cock pressed arrogantly against the inside of her thigh. “You want truth?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” she gasped.

  “Here is your truth,” he breathed and slid into her. Falon screamed, the feral sound as terrifying as it was mournful. In that inscrutable instant, her body no longer belonged to her. It belonged not only to Lucien, but by accepting Lucien into her, she let go of pack Vulkasin and accepted Mondragon. Shame that she had succumbed to Lucien and disrespected her true love was overridden only by a longing so deep for the man inside of her, she could not deny its existence.

  In the distance, the long, sorrowful howl of a lone wolf filled the night. “Rafa.” Falon sobbed.

  “Say his name again, and I will cut your tongue out of your mouth,” Lucien growled as his hips slammed into hers. The violence of his action took her by surprise. His hatred and jealousy was monumental in its depth. Falon cried out as he pushed deeper into her. His body filled her, and hers, God help her, accepted his violence with a violence of its own.

  It was manic, fierce, macabre, and in a way she refused to admit, the most earth-shattering experience of her life. Lucien’s golden eyes glowed in satisfaction when she squeezed her fingers around his. He threw his head back and roared with triumph when her body, traitor that it was, unraveled.

  Falon bit her bottom lip to keep from crying out as the orgasm blindsided her. She would never give Lucien that satisfaction.

  “You belong to me now, Falon,” he said roughly. His body tightened. His fingers dug into hers. He sank his teeth into her neck as he came in a torrential frenzy. Falon’s body answered. Her vaginal walls fisted around his cock and milked him dry. Sobs tore from her chest, knowing, now that he had taken her and marked her, despite Rafa’s promise to his brother, he would never take her back.

  “You bear my mark and now my seed, Falon,” Lucien said against her breast. He rose and looked down at her, his laconic golden eyes mesmerizing in their intensity. “I will kill any man who so much as looks at you with desire.” He pushed his hips against hers. His thick cock swelled possessively inside of her. And God help her, her muscles just as possessively embraced him. He nipped at her bottom lip and held it between his teeth. “If you look at another man, I will make you regret the day you were born.”

  Falon shoved his body from hers and rolled off the bed and turned on him. Never in her life had she met such an arrogant man. “You are the biggest asshole on earth! How dare you threaten me like that?” She moved to the edge of the bed and shoved him. “Do not dare follow through on your words or mark my words. I will walk away from you, your pack, the rising, and every other damn thing remotely related to you!” She shoved him again. “Do you understand me?”

  His lips twisted into a wry smile. “Do you threaten your alpha?”

  “Oh, fuck you, Lucien, and the high horse you rode in on.” She leaned into him and poked him in the chest. “It’s the twenty-first goddamn century. Get with the program.”

  “I am alpha; you will abide by my rules!”

  “‘I am alpha,’” she mocked, shaking her head. “Well, guess what, almighty alpha, so am I! Oh, and guess what else? I have powers you don’t, so go to hell!”

  He reached out to grab her. She smacked his hands away. It was all she could do not to laugh at his shocked expression. Lucien Mondragon had met his match. “Touch me again, and I’ll shred you.”

  Lucien stared at her for a long, drawn-out minute before he stood and began to dress. As he zipped up his jeans, he shook his head and raked his long fingers through his hair. “I made my mark. Until you are willing to return it, we will have no more intimate contact.” He shrugged on his shirt and began to slowly button it. “Not even a kiss.”

  “We’ll both see hell before that happens.”

  Lucien’s eyes glowed as a smug smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “We’ll see.” He pulled on his leather boots, then strode from the room, leaving the door wide open in his wake. Falon slammed it shut and flung herself against it. Crossing her arms over her chest, she narrowed her eyes.

  “Lucien Mondragon, I’m going to make your life so miserable, you’ll wish you had let me die.”

  Two

  LUCIEN STRODE DOWN the steep metal stairway from his rooms on the third floor of the large warehouse that served as the pack’s lair, down to the ground floor and into the large common room. Anger eroded his triumph. She had accepted his mark but it meant nothing when she longed for his brother!

  Damn, Rafael! Damn it all to hell! Since he could remember, Rafael had been the golden son. Firstborn, Rafael was the heir apparent, the one their father groomed for alpha. The fair-haired son their mother found no fault with. While Lucien never had trouble finding a warm body at night, Rafael was the
one surrounded by females. Lycan and human.

  Rafael always got what he wanted. Most of it handed to him. It was why Lucien could not, would not accept Rafael’s slaying of his chosen one. She had been his. She had loved him! And Rafael destroyed her for that transgression. The golden son would pay as long as Lucien drew breath.

  What better revenge than to take the one thing his brother loved above all others?

  Lucien laughed bitterly. But revenge was a double-edged sword. While he could force Falon into his bed, he could not force Rafael from her heart.

  As much as he did not want to admit that he wanted the woman upstairs for himself more than as a means for revenge, he would not deny it. From the first time he touched her in his brother’s bedroom on that fateful day last month, his desire for her had become as addictive as his thirst for vengeance against the man who possessed her. Falon’s blood flowed in his veins. Like cocaine, the feeling was euphoric; he wanted more. Needed more. Would have more. He would have it all.

  “I don’t like to be kept waiting,” Sledge, the new Viper leader, said.

  Lucien scoffed at the outlaw biker and the handful of his men that flanked him. Like all Vipers, Sledge defined skinhead. Tatted, shaved head, and Aryan, he was a bloodthirsty bastard that would kill his own mother for a ten-dollar rock. If Lucien was mortal, he would be afraid, but he was neither. “The day I care about keeping you waiting, Viper, is the day the world ends.” Lucien strode past him and his thugs to the large open kitchen and snatched a beer from the fridge. He did not offer the biker one. He never entertained pleasantries with Vipers. While the Slayers had their own purpose for the miscreants, Lucien had his as well. They served one purpose for him and one purpose only, a means to keeping his brother entertained.

  “You owe me for a dozen men,” the Viper said, striding toward him.

  Lucien twisted off the bottle cap and tossed it into a nearby trash can. “I don’t owe you for shit.”

  For a human, Sledge had the balls of a Brahma. He moved into Lucien’s space posturing like a damn ape. Lucien’s lips twisted in a contemptuous sneer as he drew a mental line that if Sledge stepped over it, the biker would be eating worms with Gordo, the previous leader. A few weeks ago, in a throw down, Lucien and Rafael had taken care of Gordo, along with a dozen other Vipers. It had been like old times when as brothers they fought side by side. For a few minutes as they kicked Viper ass, Lucien forgot they were sworn enemies. But unlike the old times when he would have come to his brother’s aide regardless of the odds, Lucien told himself at the time, he only intervened with Gordo to preserve one of his prized possessions: his tricked-out chopper, the same one his brother had taken without asking. But in truth, the real reason he came to his brother’s aide was to keep him alive so that when his turn came for revenge, Rafael would have the physical and mental wherewithal to be destroyed by it.

  “After what happened on the mountain road and the warehouse with your brother, my numbers are down. I can’t hurt a fucking fly with what I got right now.”

  Lucien shrugged. “Not my problem.”

  “The fuck it ain’t!” The biker sneered. Flexing his burly arms, he stepped over Lucien’s line.

  Lucien shoved the six foot four, 270-pound biker so hard, his heels dug into the wooden floor, leaving sawdust in their wake as he flew backward into the wall. Lucien took a long swig of his beer and calmly looked across the room at the downed biker. “We have no business, Sledge. If I see you anywhere near here again, I’m going to rip your throat out.”

  “I came with an offer from Corbet.”

  Lucien’s head snapped back. He knew the Vipers did business with the Slayers, but messenger? Corbet must be getting desperate. “I wasn’t aware you and Balor Corbet were so chatty.”

  “Our relationship with Corbet’s people is no secret.”

  “Indeed.” Lucien took another long swig of his beer. “Corbet funds your meth labs and keeps the cops off your back; in exchange, you run his dirty errands so he can keep his hands clean.”

  “Look, dude, he’s been gone for a while, he’s back and wants to talk.”

  “About what? In less than two months he will be dead.”

  Sledge shook his skinned head as he stood. “Your arrogance is going to get you all killed.”

  Lucien laughed and took a long pull from his beer, then leveled his glare at the tall biker. “My ‘arrogance’ is fueled by what I know as fact: Corbet can hire every mercenary on the planet and he will still lose the war.”

  “You’re the only one of your kind to believe your bullshit. No fucking way will you survive the rising.”

  Lucien did not acknowledge the biker’s comment about the rising. He wasn’t going to bullshit the biker that Lycan were a figment of his imagination, but that Corbet would divulge such proprietary information as the rising to a mere mortal infuriated him. But he kept his cool and said, “That’s because I am the only one of my kind that understands the power I hold.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m here to relay a message: Corbet wants to meet and discuss an arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?”

  “Something to do with positioning you as the leader of all the packs.”

  Lucien snorted his contempt. “I don’t need Corbet for that.”

  “Why not hear him out?” Falon’s husky voice said from behind him.

  Lucien stiffened and slowly turned around. His eyes widened, then narrowed as his blood pressure shot up one hundred points. He swiped his hand across his chin. Jesus Christ! The woman had bigger balls than he did.

  Lucien glanced at Sledge and his temper spiked dangerously. He could deal with Falon butting in on a subject she had no understanding of, but what he refused to accept was the reason for the biker’s hungry, slack-jawed look. Fury exploded inside of Lucien, not for Sledge’s reaction but because of Falon brazenly calling his bluff. If he challenged her here and now, he would look the fool. If he—Lucien’s blood shot straight to his dick. Holy mother of Jesus, she was going to pay for this.

  Butt-ass naked, Falon strode past Lucien to the fridge. She tossed her long hair over her shoulders and yanked open the door. He watched helplessly as the frosty air swirled around her nipples and the way they pebbled in reaction. Sledge choked back a strangled sound. The rutting sounds of Vipers spurred Lucien’s pack into action. They growled low, pressing closer around the bikers.

  Lucien knew his pack smelled his mark. But more potent than that was the sex scent clinging like a heady aphrodisiac to Falon. Tonight would be a wild lusty orgy the pack had not seen in over fifteen years. When—not if, he told himself—Falon marked him, her womb would be ripe for his seed and then, his line would be born. His cock thickened at the thought. She was a magnificent specimen of woman and Lycan. Their children would be strong, lusty hybrids, capable of leading the pack into the next millennia.

  The cloying scent of their lust swirled around the room. The urge to push her to the floor on all fours and take her from behind as his pack witnessed his dominance over her was overpowering. But Lucien tempered it with his promise that he would not touch her again. He also tempered it with his silent vow to respect her wishes that he not eviscerate any man who looked at her like Sledge and his dirty pack of jackals did at that moment. It took every ounce of self-control Lucien possessed not to rip out the biker’s throat.

  Lucien’s face tightened. How had she turned this around on him? He had vowed not to touch her when touching her was all he wanted. He swore to kill any man who looked at her with lust. And yet, there Sledge stood drooling onto the floor like a starving dog over a bone, and Lucien did nothing to stop it.

  He realized in the unlikely circumstances that he could seduce Falon without touching her, without her even knowing what he was about. But it would be an empty victory because fucking her was easy. Winning her trust and respect was the true challenge. In another place and another time, he would woo her relentlessly.

  He sneered. And
would that not be the ultimate revenge? More than possessing Falon’s body, but possessing her heart? That victory would be worth all of his defeats combined.

  Lucien shook his head. Falon had cast some kind of spell on him, because he was thinking crazy. What did he care about love? He cared about two things: destroying Slayers and rubbing salt into his brother’s wounded heart.

  His eyes narrowed to slits. She was a witch. She’d tempted and beguiled his brother to distraction, and now she was doing her damnedest to do the same to him. He opened his mouth to tell her to return to his room but when Falon grabbed a beer and twisted the top off, Lucien’s vigilant gaze raked her from the top of her dark head to her face, then down the long graceful column of her neck. She stood straight and proud, her tits sitting up firm and high. The pebbled pink tips strained toward him. She put her lips to the bottle and tipped her head back and drank. In silent awe, every man in the room stood rooted to the floor and beheld the spectacular sight. His hot gaze swept the long length of her. Yeah, she was worthy of any alpha. Of a king. And she was his. In body only, but that was enough—for now.

  “Fuck me,” Sledge whispered, taking a step toward Falon.

  Lucien flung his fist backward into the biker’s chest, the force sending him crashing to the floor. His patience gone, Lucien grabbed Falon by the arms, her beer flying out of her hand as he flung her over his shoulder and stormed upstairs to his room. Angrily he tossed her onto the bed. She popped up snarling, tossing her wild mane over her shoulders ready to fight.

  “Do not ever interfere in my business,” he commanded.

  Falon threw her head back and laughed. Then narrowed her eyes at him and demanded, “Am I not your chosen one? As such, I demand to stand beside my almighty alpha.” She bowed to him as if he were King Shit. “By rights, I am entitled to not only interfere in pack business but to be a part of the process.”

  Lucien refused to answer her. As his chosen one, she was entitled to everything he had. And by agreeing to the council’s terms, she was in every way his chosen one. But that was not what spurned his anger. Her wanton behavior in front of the biker disrespected not only his pack but Lucien personally. “I warned you what would happen if you tempted another man!” Lucien knew how ridiculous he sounded, but jealousy gnawed viciously at him.