“Fuck, Echo. You’re so fucking tight.”
“I haven’t … haven’t done this …”
He pulled away to look down at me. “You’ve never had sex?” His tone was hushed.
My cheeks were hot. “Fuck you, don’t look at me like that?”
He shook his head. “Oh, baby. I’m going to rock your world.”
“Easy to do when I have nothing to compare it to.”
He pinned my wrists to the bed with a growl. “Mine.” He nipped my neck and then laved it with his tongue before licking and sucking his way down to my breasts, and then his mouth was teasing my nipples with tongue and teeth until my hips were pushing up, desperate for something more.
“Easy.” His voice was gruff. “I need to get you real wet.”
He pulled my pants down, exposing my hot, slick center. The cool air kissed me there, sending shivers across my thighs.
“Finn. Oh, God.”
He lifted my knees, pushed open my thighs, and settled between them. “First time can be painful. So, I’m going to ease into you, okay?” His voice was a rasp.
My body was on fire. I needed him, I needed him inside me. “Just please, just touch me.”
He cupped me, the heel of his palm rubbing against my clit, and then his fingers slid inside me again but deeper this time. He fucked me with his fingers until I was bucking and begging for more, for the hardness trapped in his pants.
“Finn, for fucksake.”
He slid his pants down and palmed his cock, working it, his teeth clenched, a vein jumping in his neck. He was feral and primal, and fuck, I wanted him. He worked his cock in time to the rhythm of his fingers sliding in and out of me.
I grabbed his wrist. “Now, please.”
He withdrew his fingers and yanked me down the bed so my butt was on the edge of the mattress, and then he pushed the head of his cock into my wetness and began to circle my clit with his thumb. I jerked my hips, wanting more, wanting all of him.
“Shit, Echo. Fuck.” He was holding back.
Damn it, I knew the stories, I knew how it worked. First time hurts, but right now my body was a canvas of sensation that was building to something amazing, and I needed more. I needed him to give me more.
I angled my hips upward and pushed into him, and with a guttural groan, he thrust into me. For a moment, my body felt like it was on fire, like someone was tearing me in two with a hot poker. He cut off my cry with his mouth and licked away my tears.
And then he continued to circle my sweet spot, and the pain was replaced by a tightening, eager sensation.
“Finn. Oh, God. Oh, please.”
He began to thrust, slow and controlled at first, drawing moans and groans from me as the pleasure built, but then faster and harder until our bodies were slapping together in a symphony of flesh on flesh, and our cries were rising in pitch and frenzy, until the world was shattering and I lay trapped under a wave of pleasure that pinched and sucked at every inch of my body. His hips jerked as he came, and his fingers bit into my hips.
“Fuck, fuck.” He collapsed on top of me, his breath hot against my neck. “Fucking hell, Echo, you’ve ruined me.” He lay still for long seconds, his breathing as erratic as mine, his weight a pleasant blanket, and then he pushed up to brace himself on his hands. “Did I hurt you?”
“Yes, but then you fucked it all better.”
He let out a bark of laughter. “You’re one of a kind, you know that?”
I looked up into his eyes, into the swirling flecks of green and yellow, at the face I’d loved for so long. “What now?”
“Now I go back and tell them I’m leaving.”
“Just like that?”
Something dark crossed his features. “No. I’m not going to lie. It’s not going to be that easy. But they can’t make me stay if I want to leave. There’s a ceremony and stuff. But it won’t take long.”
His hands trailed across my abdomen, the callouses on his fingers leaving a trail of delicious shivers. “There are a few things I’ll need to sort out. But I’ll meet you here the day after the full moon shift.”
“Two days?”
“Yes. Two days. Then I’ll do what I need to, jump through whatever hoops I have to in order to get into the Protectorate.”
I cupped his face. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it? You and me?”
He leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips. “I love you, Echo, and we will be together. I promise you.”
We lay in each other’s arms for a while longer, contemplating what life would be like for a wolf and a human. It had never been done. We’d be the first.
An hour later, we prepared to part ways at the Chamber H entrance, and a thought occurred to me.
“Finn?”
“Yes?”
“Who did you give the letters to?”
He was silent for a long time. “Emory. I gave them to Emory.”
Chapter 5
The idea of confrontation made me feel sick, but I couldn’t let Emory get away with this. He’d kept Finn’s letters from me, which was as good as lying to me, and it hurt. It hurt because I’d trusted him. Emory was my go-to guy. My mentor, my … god, I thought he’d been a friend, but I’d been wrong.
Friends didn’t lie and keep secrets.
I found him in the training room beating the shit out of the punching bag. His torso was bare and glistening with sweat, which should have been gross but was the complete opposite. The sweat gave his skin a sheen that, under the harsh lights of the training room, showcased every dip and plane of his taut torso. The muscles across his back rippled as he delivered punch after punch, twisting at the waist with each blow. His yoga pants looked like they’d slip down at any second to expose what lay at the apex of his Adonis belt.
My mouth was suddenly dry, but I licked my lips and continued into the room.
His head came up as I entered. He slammed a palm into the bag to stop it swaying and turned to face me.
My gaze slid down his chest from his pecs to his eight-pack and then quickly back up again to lock on his face.
He began to unwrap the bandages from his hands. His hands … I was seeing his hands for the first time. Long and lean and powerful hands.
“It’s a little late to be training,” he said.
“I didn’t come to train. I came to speak to you.”
He finished his right hand and moved on to the left. “Well, you have me, so what did you want to talk about?”
He sounded distant. Cold. Tension built in my chest. “Where are Finn’s letters?”
His movements faltered for a fraction of a second. “I burned them.”
Had he just said … “What?”
He met my gaze levelly. “I burned them.”
Okay, so he really had just said that, and anger should have been my first response, but my logical mind, my problem-solving instinct, was immediately on alert. “Why? Why did you burn them?”
This wasn’t Emory. Emory didn’t do anything without a valid reason. Aside from his strange behavior yesterday, he’d always been solid and predictable.
Emory sighed. “You know why, Echo. You just need me to say it, so I’ll say it. You don’t need to hear false promises. You don’t need someone playing with your heart when he can’t give you his in return. You can’t be with Finn, and it isn’t fair for him to string you along. I was trying to protect you, and I may have overstepped, but after the shit you went through out there, after all the loss, I didn’t want anyone messing with your emotions.” He padded over to the workbench and picked up his towel. “Those letters were lies you didn’t need to read.”
Everything he said made sense, but … “You had no right to do that. You have no right to make decisions for me. Those were my letters, and you should have handed them over. I’m not a child, Emory. I knew the score with Finn from the start. Finn has always been honest with me.”
He pouted and nodded, and when he looked up, something dark and dangerous was staring back
at me. “You do, huh?” He advanced slowly. “So, he told you he fucked three she-wolves as part of his sorting ceremony four weeks ago, did he? Did he tell you that?”
It was as if someone had slammed a sledgehammer into my chest; the breath rushed out of me, and my knees went weak. But Emory was there, his hands shooting out to grab my shoulders. His eyes widened, his mouth parted, and then he shoved me away, turning his back on me with a low, rumbling growl.
“Echo, what did you do?”
Finn … Finn had been with other women? He’d hidden that from me. We’d never committed back then, so I had no right to feel so hurt, but my emotions weren’t tethered to logic, and my insides were twisting into a knot that threatened to bring me to my knees.
“Echo, fucksake.” Emory was pacing the floor, his movements predatory and unpredictable.
My primal brain fired warnings, urging me to slowly back up and leave the room, and even though I didn’t understand what the heck was going on right now, my body reacted, taking a step backward.
Emory’s head whipped round, and his twilight eyes were so dark they were almost black. No, not almost, they were black, and then they bloomed into gold.
Terror gripped the back of my neck and squeezed. “Emory?”
“You let him fuck you?” This voice was deep and gruff and resonant. This voice did not belong to Emory.
“Who are you?”
His lips curled. “You see me.”
I nodded jerkily.
He raked me from head to toe with his golden gaze. “Name’s Gideon, and I’m disappointed in you, Echo. You let the filthy wolf get his cock inside you.” He began to stalk closer, moving in a zigzag pattern, leaving me no room to make a break for it.
“Where’s Emory?”
“He’s here. You hurt his feelings, but he won’t tell you that. He won’t touch you. So scared you’ll break, but you won’t break, will you?” He inhaled. “You’re stronger than that.”
He was so close now, almost on me. This thing, this entity, was inside Emory. But Emory was still here. “I don’t want to speak to you. I want to speak to Emory.”
He moved so fast I was up against the wall in a blink, his body pressed to mine, his face so close I could have licked his chin.
Emory’s body. Emory’s mouth. Emory’s hands on my skin, but not Emory looking back at me. My mind said he wouldn’t hurt me, but my primal instincts screamed at me to fight.
He closed his eyes. “Oh, yes, you liked that. You liked the pain, didn’t you?”
What was he doing? What? My eyes fluttered closed, and I was back on my bed with Finn inside me, pain tearing through me as he took my virginity, but then Finn’s face blurred, and it was Emory on top of me, Emory inside me, thrusting harder and harder, and there was pain, but at the apex of each thrust there were sharp ripples of pleasure. A moan slipped from my lips.
“You like that, don’t you?”
I was there on the bed with Emory inside me, and I was here pressed against the wall with Gideon’s mouth on my cheek, his tongue licking at the seam of my lips. I wanted to push him away, but my hands were sliding up his biceps, skimming over the muscles, over his powerful shoulders, and then sliding up the nape of his neck to bury my fingers into the short hair at the back of his head. As he fucked me on that bed, as he lowered himself over me and raised my leg over his shoulder to go deeper. I turned my head and parted my lips to take his tongue in reality. I sucked on it, drawing it into my mouth in a carnal kiss that had his body tensing. He growled into my mouth and the manipulated flashback cut off, and there was just him and me up against the wall, our mouths fused while I sucked on his tongue and raked at his scalp. I wanted to own him, to claim him, to—
He tore himself free, stumbling back, hands on his head, his eyes dulling back to twilight. “Shit, Echo.” He presented me with his back. “Go. Just go.”
For a moment my legs refused to move, and then I was running past him and out the door.
Micha found me curled up on the sofa in the guardian lounge a half hour later. Emory had a monster inside him. A thing. An entity. A person? Who was it, and how had he kept him a secret for so long? Was that why he was always so controlled, so careful about his personal space? And the gloves … He’d touched me without his gloves and entered my thoughts, my memories. He’d adapted them and manipulated them, and the torment on his face afterward when he’d finally taken the driver’s seat again …
My heart ached for him.
“Echo, you okay?” Micha sat beside me but didn’t touch me. “I just spoke to Emory.”
“Is he okay?”
Micha let out a soft explosion of air. “You’re worried about him after what he just did?”
“But that wasn’t him, though, was it?”
Micha shook his head. “No. You just met Gideon.”
“Who is he? What is he?”
Micha frowned. “I’m not sure. To be honest, I don’t think even Emory knows. Gideon’s just always kind of been there.”
“He was born like that?”
Micha nodded. “Councilwoman Harker is a cambion, which means her father was an incubus and her mother a human. Incubi and succubi have daemons, kinda like darker selves. There are entities that live inside them and require certain types of energy, like sexual energy or life force, to thrive. They crave it. In a pure incubi or succubi, it’s pretty straightforward—you feed your daemon, or you suffer and die. The daemon is an integral part of them. But in a cambion, the rules are blurred. The councilwoman is the only one of her kind, and from what Emory told me years ago, she succeeded in cutting away her daemon. Emory is something even more unique. He’s the offspring of a cambion and an empath. His daemon, or whatever Gideon is, is strong. Whereas the councilwoman was able to control hers by will alone, Emory doesn’t have that control. As a child, Gideon would take over Emory’s body at will. They had to bind him using an enchanted tattoo.”
“So, how is he getting out now?”
Micha shrugged. “I don’t know. But Emory is trying his hardest to keep him in check, and up until recently, you acted as a calming effect on Gideon, but now …”
“I’m making it worse?”
Micha nodded. “I think so. Emory is going to have the tattoo re-inked soon, so until then, just steer clear of him, okay?”
I nodded. “Can you tell him … Can you tell him I’m sorry?”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yes. I’m sorry for the turmoil he’s going through. I don’t want him to think I’m mad at him. What happened wasn’t his fault.”
Micha’s smile was soft with wonder. “You really are something, you know that, Patch?”
“I’m not that forgiving. Emory told me that Finn … That he slept with three Lupin females at something called the sorting.” My throat closed, and my next words came out thick and strangled. “We weren’t officially together, but it feels like he cheated on me.”
Micha put his arm around me and tucked me into his side. “Emory told me about the Finn situation. I can’t say I agree with what he did, but then I’m not Lupinata. There’s a lot of pressure for an alpha’s son, especially one whose father is also a councilman.”
“What?”
Micha frowned. “Finn Carmach, right?”
“Yes.”
“He’s next in line for alpha for the Carmach pack, and his father is on the Protectorate council. The pressure on him to adhere to the laws, to take mates and procreate, would be intense. From what I know, the sorting ceremony is like the engagement phase. The male must rut with the females to seal the engagement.” Micha gave me a squeeze. “He wouldn’t have had much choice but to do his duty.”
“His duty to have sex with three females?” The words were bitter on my tongue. “He should have told me. We weren’t together then; if he’d explained …”
“You would have understood?”
Would I have? Would Finn understand me sucking on Gideon’s tongue? He’d been in my head, but still … I’d
liked it. This was so messed up.
“I don’t know. I’m just … angry and hurt, I guess.” I pressed a fist to my chest. “Like here, there’s this knot.” I blew out a breath. “He told me he loved me today, and that he’s going to leave the pack and go lone so we can be together.”
Micha’s arm around me tensed. “Is that what you want?”
“I love him. He hid the sorting from me, but I know in my heart that if we’d been a couple back then, he wouldn’t have done it. He’d never cheat on me. If you truly love someone, how can you even think of being with someone else?”
Micha smiled. “Well, if you love both people, then it can happen, or, in my mother’s case, if you love four or five, and they all agree to share you …”
I’d forgotten that the queen, like Councilwoman Harker, had several lovers. “I don’t know if I could love more than one person.”
Micha’s gaze tracked my face. “Sometimes we can surprise ourselves.”
A low grumbling sound drifted up between us, and we both looked down at my stomach.
“I guess I’m hungry.”
He stood and held out his hand. “Come on, let’s go whip up something to eat.”
I slipped my palm into his hand, and the weight on my shoulders fell away. Maybe this was his super power, maybe he made people feel good. Or maybe, it only worked on me. In which case, I’d need to keep him.
Chapter 6
It was my first time in guardian clothes—deep emerald that was almost black. The top was long-sleeved with a thicker padded vest that zipped up over the top. There were pockets and a medpack that clipped around the waist. The color brought out green flecks I hadn’t even realized I had in my blue eyes, and I pulled my hair back into a French braid to finish off my new professional look. The pants were made of a fitted material that was also breathable and stretchy enough for the staff maneuvers that were so essential.
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