by Sophie Stern
When I stepped out of my room and heard them downstairs, I was instantly turned on just by their scents. They mixed together in this intoxicating perfume that was both fantastic and wonderful.
I knew that Reece was going on a walk so he could relax. His time in Fablestone hasn’t been simple or easy and Reece, perhaps more than anyone else, needs time to himself. He needs time to learn how to cope with his new normal. He was stolen away from his old life, and he was hurt, and he even tried to hurt someone else.
He was stopped in time, but that seemed to be the breaking point for Reece.
Everyone has forgiven him but sometimes, I don’t know if he’s forgiven himself. Sabrina seems to be helping with that on so many levels. While the rest of the world seems cruel and unkind, she is a beacon of hope that lights the way for him. Even when Reece feels like he has nowhere else to go and no one else to talk to, she’s there for him in so many ways.
She’s a kindness.
She’s perfect.
And she’s here in our home.
Gently, reluctantly, I start to move away. Reece’s eyes pop open and he looks at me for a second before quietly speaking.
“Going out?”
“Clan business,” I whisper.
“You sure?” He raises an eyebrow and gestures to the woman. “I think she’ll wake up soon and we can have some more fun.”
Is it terrible that my cock is hard just thinking about it?
“Trust me. I would much rather bury myself in her for hours than go deal with the monsters.”
Reece stills, and I know what he’s thinking.
He’s probably thinking he should be coming with me, helping me. He’s often suggested that he assist us in finding Lucky, but I firmly believe that he’s much too close to the situation. That’s okay, though. There are many ways the world can use Reece. Right now, he can stay here and take care of Sabrina.
Sweet, gentle Sabrina.
I should feel awkward or uncomfortable. After all, this was my first time being with another woman since my family died. Isn’t that strange? It’s been forever. I’ve been waiting ages because it just never felt right. It just never seemed like it would be okay. Then one night just changed everything.
Sabrina showed up in our home and I don’t really know what changed. It’s hard for me to pinpoint what shifted inside of me except that somehow, on a deep, personal level, I seemed to feel like it was okay. She awoke something within me.
She met a need I didn’t know I had.
And sharing her with Reece was unexpected, but it felt like it was supposed to be that way. Neither one of us got jealous or uncomfortable at any point, and Sabrina seemed to love having us worship her body all night.
“Take care of her,” I say.
He glances down at her and nods.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Anything she wants.”
He chuckles. “Anything?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Anything,” I agree.
“You don’t want us to wait for you?” He asks, and although I hesitate for just a moment, I shake my head. Sabrina made it clear that she’s open to the idea of trying this again. Maybe she’s even open to trying a relationship with the three of us. If this is the case, and this is actually going to happen, then I’m not about to start things off with jealousy, secrets, or uncomfortable rules.
“I trust you both,” I say. “If she needs something, Reece, you protect her.”
“I can at least promise to protect her pussy,” he mutters, and I bite back a laugh. I don’t want to wake her. Sabrina looks so sweet curled up on the living room floor. Somehow, with just a single blanket, the three of us managed to fall asleep in front of the fireplace. The fire has long since died, but it doesn’t matter. The night was fantastic. Wonderful.
Everything about it was perfect and now I have to go deal with stupid clan problems.
Typical.
Finally, I shake my head.
“All right,” I say. “I’m going.”
“Hurry back,” Reece says.
“I’ll do my best.”
I can’t make any promises, but I do want to hurry back. For the first time in a long time, I’ve got something to occupy my mind that doesn’t have to do with Lucky or poachers or people who want to destroy my clan.
I leave my house reluctantly and head to my office. Cameron, Lee, and Lawrence are already there, along with Nicole and Marta. It’s not even dawn yet, but they’re all looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Together, we’re going to come up with a plan for taking down the organization that’s been threatening our clan for months. Lucky is a group that hates dragons in particular, but they dislike all shifters. They’ve experimented on our kind and they’ve hurt us. Now they’re going to lose everything.
At least, they are if we can pull this off.
“Where’s Jeremy?” I ask.
“He’ll be here soon,” Lee says. “Just tying up a few loose ends.”
“What kind of loose ends?” I ask.
“The kind that you need a super powerful computer to tie up,” Nicole says.
“Understood.”
“All right,” I rub my eyes and yawn. “What do we have?”
Everyone just stares at me.
“What?” I ask. “Nobody has anything? I thought this meeting was to finalize our plans for terminating their organization.”
“Uh, are we not going to talk about this?” Cameron asks, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Talk about what?”
“The fact that you got laid,” Lee says, chuckling.
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t even shower before you came over,” Marta says. “You obviously just got some. Who was she?”
“Or he,” Lawrence raises an eyebrow.
Great.
So, they can smell both Sabrina and Reece on me.
Normally, I’d lie. I’d say it’s none of their business and they can fuck off for asking me, but there’s a slight problem with that: these are my friends. More than that, they’re dragons, and Fablestone is a pretty small place, all things considered. If I try to withhold this from my group, they’re just going to dig and dig until they find the answers they want anyway.
So, I might as well tell them now.
“I did not hook up with a man,” I say pointedly. “However, Reece and I did share a woman last night, and we’re going to be dating, so please be polite when you see us out and about.”
“Dating?” Cameron looks shocked.
“Hey, congrats,” Lee says.
“Who’s the lucky girl?” Nicole asks, curious. She and Reece have a...tumultuous history. She worked for Lucky, albeit briefly, but she’s not exactly his favorite person. In fact, he tried attacking her once, which is why he lives with me now.
“Sabrina.”
Nicole doesn’t react poorly to finding out that the guy who tried to kill her is now dating his therapist. In fact, she seems almost humbled by this revelation. She’s changed quite a bit since she came to Fablestone, and instead of being angered or frustrated, she smiles.
“Good for him,” she says. “And good for you.”
“Now that all these well-wishes are out of the way, let’s get to work,” Jeremy says, coming into the office. He pushes past us to the large table in the center of the space, and he slaps a bunch of papers down.
“What do we have?” Lawrence asks.
“Plans for the building.”
“The main Providential building?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy says.
“I thought we agreed it would be best to try to discredit their organization,” Nicole says. “Rather than go in and blow everything up.”
It’s true.
We had talked about that.
We’d talked about a lot of different things.
The truth is that Lucky, sometimes called Providential, has been a thorn in my side for a couple of years now, and I’m more
than ready to see them destroyed. They’ve made life hell for my clan and they’ve threatened everything we’ve stood for.
It’s time for them to die.
And it’s time right now.
“Clan Thunderstorm has agreed to collaborate on a destruction mission with us,” I say.
“It might make people dislike the dragons,” Marta says. “They might think we’ve randomly targeted a pharmaceutical company. As we all know, that’s a front for what they’re really doing.”
This group does it all.
They capture dragons.
They experiment on us.
They give us medication that hurts us.
They’ve tried to do things like administer “healing” medication, but the truth is that they want our blood. Dragon blood has a lot of healing properties in it, and the black market price of a dragon is through the damn roof.
“That’s why we’re going to release a video at the same time that shows just exactly what this company has been doing to shifters of all kinds,” she says.
“How did we get the footage?”
“I went and met with the director of Providential yesterday,” Marta says. “Thanks to Nicole’s insider knowledge, she’s been low-key communicating with them via a burner phone one of their agents left behind.”
“Bernie.”
“Yep,” Nicole agrees. “When Bernie was...killed...unfortunately...we managed to salvage a burner phone. We didn’t know if it had any tracking devices on it or whether it was bugged, so I used it to text Providential/Lucky as her. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve managed to gather a lot of information from it. We were able to use that info to get Marta a meeting with Erin Allison, who is the woman behind it all.”
In other words, the most evil woman in the universe.
“I haven’t seen you since the meeting,” I say to Marta. “Can you fill us in?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she says. “But why don’t you watch my video first?”
“Um, okay.”
She opens a laptop and presses a couple of keys. Suddenly, a short film begins to play. Watching it makes me feel sick, but that’s probably a good thing since it means that this is going to work. Using this as a way to drum up human support for the dragon shifters of the world just might work.
It was during Marta’s meeting that she got most of the footage. She was able to stealthily acquire a lot of information from just one short visit. That, coupled with the things we already knew about the company, means that her video is both straight-to-the-point and totally damning.
I’m still not completely sold on absolutely obliterating the Lucky and Providential offices entirely, but we’re going to do it at night, so that nobody will get hurt.
We’re going to destroy their building, so they’ll have no choice but to stay away from our little group of shifters.
And we’re going to have Clan Thunderstorm by our side.
Thunderstorm has been an incredibly valuable asset in this. They’ve fought by our side before and we’ve fought by theirs. Together, we’ve been sharing information and learning about Lucky for years. They’ve been just as affected by all of this as we have and now that it’s finally all about to come to a head, I’m feeling both nervous and relieved.
I’m nervous because attacks like this never go according to plan. We finally know where the base of operations is for Lucky. We finally know they’re hidden behind the pharmaceutical company Providential. For a long time, we didn’t know where they were located or where their base was. Now we know, but now we also have so much more to lose.
I think about Sabrina and Reece cuddled up back home. I think about happy I am to have them both in my life. I think about everything I risk losing if this all goes wrong.
I think about them, and I close my eyes for just a moment.
“Are you okay?” Cameron asks, placing his hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“Look,” he says. “You can stay behind if you need to.”
“I don’t.”
“Nobody will judge you,” Lawrence says. “Just let us know if you need to sit this one out, man. We’ve got plenty of people.”
“But you only have one leader,” I say. Now that we have the floor plans for the building, we know which areas are weak and where we can attack first. We know what steps we need to take to burn it all to the ground. We know all of this.
And we can do it.
It’s time for this evil company to stop hiding behind the guise of being strong, behind the guise of being good for shifters.
Their reign of terror is over now.
It’s finished.
I look at my team and I nod.
“We fly at dusk.”
Chapter Seven
Sabrina
I wake up alone in the middle of the floor.
“Where the fuck am I?” I mutter, looking around. “What the fuck did I drink?”
Seriously. I’m in some sort of rich-person home because there are beautiful, thick carpets covering the floor, there’s some sort of weird wooden bench thing with a velvet top, and the paintings that line the walls probably cost more than I make in a year.
“Not as much as you think,” Reece says. I look over and see him standing in the doorway, and he is very, very naked.
Deliciously naked.
Super naked.
And suddenly, it all comes back to me.
The drinks.
The flirting.
The making out in the hallway.
The kissing...
Everywhere.
And Wilson.
“Hi,” I whisper, looking up at Reece.
“Hi,” he says, coming into the room. He gets down on the floor next to me, takes my hands, and kisses me softly. “How are you feeling today?”
“Good,” I whisper, and it’s the truth.
I feel sore, but deliciously pampered and wonderful.
“Me too,” he says.
“Where’s Wilson?” I ask, looking around. This is his place, too, after all. I kind of thought he’d be here. Hopefully he’s not off nursing any wounds. It’s normal to feel anxious or frustrated when you have a sexual experience after a prolonged period of abstinence.
“Stop.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re thinking about,” Reece kisses me again. “He went into the office. He’ll be back soon.”
“Why the office?”
“Lucky.”
“Oh.”
Reece doesn’t look sad or tense about this, which is good. I don’t want to talk about his trauma when we aren’t in the office together, but I reach for him and cup his cheek.
“How are you doing with all of this?” I ask him.
“What? Having a beautiful naked doctor in my home?” He raises an eyebrow. “I think I’m doing okay with that.”
“No, silly,” I laugh. “With the planned attack on Lucky.”
The fact that our clan is planning to attack the pharmaceutical company that has destroyed so much of our world and community isn’t really a secret. It’s kind of common knowledge in the world of shifters. Luckily, our clan is fairly isolated, and shifters are really good at keeping secrets.
Just not from each other.
“I’m ready,” he says.
“It’s been a long time coming.”
“Forever.”
“Are you going to go with them?” I ask gently.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Doc,” he says. “You know better than anyone else why I won’t go with them.”
“It’s a good idea to stay behind, Reece.”
“I still feel worthless.”
“I know.”
I reach out and hug him, pulling him close to myself. I know that he hates feeling worthless. That’s probably the one emotion that has bothered Reece more than anything else. Most of the time, he handles himself just fine. He can deal with living as a tiger in a world of dragons. He can
deal with not going back to his old life before the clan. He can deal with all of that.
But feeling useless?
That kills him.
I know it would kill me, too.
“I’m not going either,” I say.
“That doesn’t make me feel better, sugar.”
“I know, but we can spend time together while everyone else is gone, right? Keep our mind off of things.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“And how do you suggest we keep our minds off of things?” He raises an eyebrow and tips an invisible hat. “Good doctor.”
I push back from Reece and look at him: really look at him. Despite looking a little sleepy, he looks better than he has in weeks: maybe months. In fact, I think it’s safe to say this is the happiest and most content I’ve ever seen him.
Reece and I have cried together.
I’ve held him while he poured his heart out.
He’s opened up to me about things he’s never been able to talk about before, and he trusts me with those secrets. He trusts me with so much. Now it’s my turn to trust him, too. I need to trust him to help me not feel scared knowing that Wilson is going to lead the shifters into battle.
I need to trust him to guide me.
I need him to protect me because if I think about this too much, I really will feel scared, and I don’t think I can afford to feel that way.
Not tonight.
“I’m worried.”
“About what, sweetie?”
“Wilson.”
“Wilson is an expert fighter, Sabrina. Besides, they aren’t going to engage in any hand-to-hand combat.”
“I know,” I murmur, but I don’t know. I don’t know the details of their plans, nor have I asked. All I know is that someone I care about very much is going to go into a very dangerous situation, and I don’t feel like there’s very much I can do to stop it.
Correction: there is nothing I can do to stop it.
“I’m sorry you’re scared,” he brushes his hands down my shoulders and runs them back up again. The gesture is sweet, delicate.