Wolf's Choice

by Carina Wilder

  “I love you, wife,” he murmured against my lips.

  “I love you, too, husband,” I replied. Pulling free and slipping down to plant my feet in the soft cushion at the lake’s bottom, I guided him back to shore. I stared into his eyes, turning around to lower myself until I was on my back, parting my legs for him. The ebbing lake water caressed me, slipping over my sensitive nerves, teasing my clit like a warm, velvet tongue. I watched as Tristan eased down to take over the job, thrusting his hands under me to lift my hips as his mouth took me possessively.

  “I love how much you thrive on my pleasure,” I told him, fingers raking through his hair. “I love how generous you are to my body.”

  “If we survive this madness, I’ll make it my life’s mission to see to it that you to come all the time, lover,” he replied, kissing my thigh before sliding the tip of his tongue over my swollen clit. “I’ll live for it, I promise you.”

  He pressed his fingers into my folds, splitting me open, and jammed his tongue inside me. Then he stroked my bud with his fingertips, watching as I cupped my breasts in my hands, my fingers teasing their tips over my nipples, sending fiercely erotic tremors through my body.

  “Fuck, I can’t quite believe I was ever willing to give this up,” he said, sliding over me to tease his silken cock head into my opening.

  “Neither can I. I’m still mad at you,” I growled. “You put me through hell today.”

  “Then I’ll have to do whatever I can to make it up to you.” He rammed hard, his dick driving deep inside me, my pussy clenching tight around his impossibly swollen length.

  “Not enough,” I moaned. “I need more.” He pulled out again and repeated the feral thrust.

  “Again.”

  He began to drive himself into me hard and fast, his eyes glowing bright, his inner wolf riled up, ready to do battle with the entire world. I raked my fingernails over his back, feeling the jagged lines of his cruel scars with my fingertips—reminders of what we were fighting for. Silently, I begged him to go harder. To destroy me. To let me feel every inch of him, over and over again until I couldn’t take any more. If I was going to die with him, let it be here, like this, under the moon, the water caressing our bodies.

  “Ariana…I’m going to come so hard for you, lover…” A hot burst of semen burned its way through my core, my insides searing with his exquisite seed. I pulled him close, my arms tight around his back, hands cupping his head to my neck as a sob escaped my throat. I held him there as long as I could, feeling his weight on top of me, letting the damp earth consume me from below.

  “You haven’t come yet, lover,” he murmured after a time. “I want you to, for me.” He pulled up and looked down into my eyes, his beautiful, muscular arms holding his torso over me.

  “So make me come,” I said. “I’ll do anything for you, as long as you promise me you’ll stay alive.”

  “I promise.”

  With a sexy smile he reached down and massaged me with his expert thumb, destroying me all over again. He was still inside me, and I could feel his beautiful dick swelling again, even as his touch—that erotic, delicious touch—swiftly carried me right to the edge. Feeling my body tighten under him, Tristan bent down and took my left nipple between his teeth, driving me to distraction as he teased me with his tongue.

  “Suck on them,” I begged. “I need to feel your lips tight around my nipples. I need to know you’re as hungry for me as I am for you.”

  He did as I commanded, drawing my nipple tight into his mouth, then moving to my right breast, drawing a sigh of relief from my tense body.

  “Come for me, sweet thing,” he said, pressing his thumb into me as lashed his tongue over my flesh, urging my body towards pure ecstasy.

  I rolled my hips under him, relishing the sensation of his fingers working me, his cock delving into my depths, and let the orgasm overtake me slowly…my mind spinning with thoughts of everything that had happened. Our past, our present.

  Our future…and tomorrow’s war.

  Chapter 24

  At three in the morning I found myself wide awake with Tristan breathing steadily on the mattress next to me. The sound of his gentle inhales was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard in my life. Not so long ago I’d been convinced I’d never hear it again, that I’d never look into those beautiful eyes or hear his voice as long as I lived.

  Just thinking about it was enough to set a lump into my throat, and the last thing I wanted was for him to hear me weeping. So I slid off the mattress, draped a spare wool blanket around my shoulders, and headed outside.

  Through the trees in the distance, I could see the orange glow of a flickering fire. It didn’t strike me as menacing, though; more than anything, it reminded me of the campfires my family had sat around when I was a child. For a moment at least, the world seemed calm and peaceful. I felt as though I could live here forever, tucked away in a shanty shack hidden from the world…if it meant I could live my life with Tristan.

  Drawn to the light like an eager moth, I advanced until I could see that a solitary man was sitting by the fire, shoulders rounded. He was large, his eyes fixed on the crackling source of heat rising from the ground before him.

  Krane.

  I moved towards him, knowing all too well that he was aware of my presence. I braced myself, prepared to endure his mind games—though something told me he wouldn’t attempt anything with me tonight. Yesterday’s events had taken the wind out of his sails, and I could only assume that he was miserable right now. He’d betrayed the Seven, which meant they’d never trust him again. At the very best, his relationship with Tristan was as fragile as a cracked eggshell. Krane was now a broken man, a shifter without a place in his own world.

  I almost—almost—felt sorry for him.

  “How is he?” he asked without lifting his eyes.

  I seated myself on a fallen tree trunk on the opposite side of the fire and looked over the dancing flames into his eyes, tugging the blanket around myself to make sure I was entirely covered. Best not to show any skin; it would only give the seductive dragon sexual ammunition to use against me. I wasn’t about to forget how he’d stared at my breasts at the Midsummer Ball, how he’d tried so hard to convince me that I wanted him.

  “He’s all right,” I said, pulling my thoughts away from his raw sensuality, “though he admits that the shifters are now at war. Then again, I suspect we would have ended up here no matter what. If Tristan had died, his people would have had to retaliate. What the Seven have done isn’t something that should be allowed to stand.” As I spoke, I realized how strange those words sounded coming out of my mouth. How the hell had I gone from working in a theater company in New York to strategizing about battles between shifter factions?

  Krane let out a sour chuckle. “You’re wrong. If Tristan had died, that would have been the end of it. My brother leads the largest army of Valkyries in existence, but they wouldn’t attack without a commander. They’re loyal to him and no one else. A new Alpha would have to be in place in the north.”

  “Well, there are the other factions in Manhattan. I’ve met their leaders, and they’re also loyal to him.”

  “The ravens, the big cats, the bears,” Krane said. “All very impressive.” His eyes were shining bright now, hints of gold flickering through his irises as though his dragon was stirring inside him. “None of whom would be stupid enough to come down here and try to take on seven dragons.”

  “But together,” I said, “and with help…”

  Krane sealed his mouth and stared at me. “You’re an optimist, aren’t you, Ariana?” he said. “You think the world will turn out for the best, no matter what.” The words were bitter, accusing, and his voice was laced with something ugly. Something that told me the man hadn’t known a day of happiness in a long, long time.

  I shook my head. “You’re wrong. I’m a pessimist through and through,” I told him. “If you knew the number of times since I met Tristan that I’ve thought we were over. Or the
number of times I cursed fate before I met him for the way my life was going…”

  “But you think somehow you’ll get through the next few days alive,” Krane said. “Right now, your mind is telling you that by some miracle you’ll emerge on the other side of this conflict with Tristan by your side. Despite the odds being stacked completely against you, you’re convinced you’ll eventually go off on your little honeymoon like none of this ever happened.”

  I pulled my eyes away, wincing into the darkness around me. “I have to believe that,” I said, “or what do I have left?”

  He let out another cynical laugh. For some reason I rose to my feet and walked around the fire to sit down next to him. “Krane,” I said softly, my eyes fixed on his profile now.

  “Hmm.”

  “Tell me what happened all those years ago, when things went wrong between you and your brother. What made you like this?”

  He hadn’t expected the question, and I watched him grind his jaw as though he was fighting back some deep emotion. For once he didn’t look at me, didn’t undress me with his eyes. He just stared at the fire, gathering his thoughts. I sensed that he was searching for the young man who’d lived inside him long ago, in the years before he and Tristan had been changed.

  That young man had been a loyal brother once. A good friend, even.

  “We were working together, for Demarche,” he said. “We were happy.”

  “I know,” I replied. “You two had well-paying jobs on his plantation.”

  Krane nodded. “Then I found out about Tristan and Elodie,” he said. “I knew they planned to get married, but I hated the idea of it. I didn’t like her. Didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. I tried to convince him to stay away from her, but he was a horny idiot. He wouldn’t listen to my warnings.”

  “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  He shook his head. “No. Had I known that, I would have told Tristan to get his ass to another continent as fast as possible.”

  “So instead you just told him to break up with her.”

  “I did. I let him know on more than one occasion that I sensed something awful in her.” He turned my way, narrowing his bright eyes at me. “That was before she was changed, of course,” he said. “I sensed the freaking devil in her before there was even a dragon in her blood.”

  “What was it about her that you hated so much?” I asked. I could have written a book about all the reasons I despised her, of course, but I was curious to know what she was like back in the days when the three of them had first met.

  “She was ambitious. She latched onto Tristan because she could see his desire to succeed. She knew that one day he’d be wealthy, and she wanted to ride his coattails to that life. I don’t think she ever loved him. He was just a pawn in the game she liked to play.” He let out another strange laugh and said, “If you really want to know the truth, I’m not even sure the baby was Tristan’s.”

  “What?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat in my chest. “Are you serious?”

  He nodded. “Elodie slept with everything that moved,” he said. “Except for me. I had no time for her.”

  “Did Tristan know about this?”

  “No. He was blinded by his affection for her and by his work ethic. When he wasn’t with her, he was working on building something for Demarche. He had tunnel vision. Focused on one thing at a time.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and crossing his forearms. “He loved that fucking job.”

  “I remember that,” I said, “from his journal.”

  “Yes, his journal,” said Krane, picking up a stick from the ground and tossing it into the fire. “I wish I’d burned that fucking thing when I’d had the chance.”

  “Were you the one who tore out so many of its pages?” I asked, remembering the missing excerpts. Entire months had been ripped away by someone who’d wanted to conceal the whole truth of Tristan’s descent into chaos.

  He nodded. “I tore out the parts that I thought might one day hurt him the most. The parts about what he was feeling for Elodie, even about me. I suppose the truth was that I just didn’t want his fantasies about her to exist. Long ago he accused me of jealousy.” With that, he leaned back and pulled his eyes up to the moon. “But it wasn’t that. I wanted to look out for him. I wanted him to be happy more than anything in the world.”

  “So what happened in the end? I mean, I know what happened to Tristan, but what about you?”

  “Like I said, I warned him about Elodie. When he didn’t listen—when it looked like he’d throw his life away on that bitch—I went to Demarche and informed him that his employee was behaving unprofessionally. I guess I figured that at the very worst, he’d fire Tristan. Oh, I’d heard the rumors—that Demarche was the devil himself, that he did awful things to people who wronged him. But by then I’d grown to see that he liked my brother. He’d been kind to him over time, so I thought the best thing was to be honest with him. I figured I could always find Tristan another job, one where he wasn’t infatuated with the boss’s daughter.”

  I swallowed, my chest tightening. I hated hearing about Tristan’s affections for someone else, but I’d literally asked for details, so I couldn’t exactly complain. I had to remind myself that it had all happened lifetimes ago. That he was a new man now, and Elodie—she’d proven herself a beast.

  “But of course things didn’t go as I’d hoped,” Krane added.

  “He found out about the pregnancy,” I said. “He wanted to do more than just fire Tristan. He wanted him to suffer the tortures of the damned.”

  The dragon shifter nodded. I watched his jaw clench and unclench a few times before he said, “I hated that man for what he did to my brother.” He looked at me then, his eyes pulsing with golden light, hotter and brighter, even, than the fire. “I wanted to murder him. Because of what he and the Marquis did, my brother had become an animal. Tortured, abused, his mind stolen from him. I was there that night, you know. I watched it happen.”

  I pressed a hand to my mouth, holding back the cry of pain that wanted to escape my lips. The thought of it was horrible—of witnessing what Tristan had endured and being helpless to save him. “You saw it,” I breathed.

  “I did. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The bite of that whip into his flesh. The screams my brother let out into the night. It destroyed me, Ariana. I knew it was all my fault. And I knew I couldn’t help him.”

  I reached out, wanting to touch him, to let him know he wasn’t alone. But I pulled my hand back, tucking it into my lap. Touching Krane still felt too dangerous. Too intimate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be,” he growled in a jagged tone that sent a tremor through me. “I deserved to suffer for what I’d done. But it was the fact that I couldn’t save him that really got to me. Tristan was a good man, and he didn’t deserve that.”

  “You couldn’t have done anything. You would have had to fight them all off,” I said. “You were just one man.”

  “I was. But maybe I should have at least tried. Maybe I should have sacrificed something of myself, like Tristan was ready to do today.” He pulled his eyes away again, like he didn’t want to inflict his piercing gaze on me anymore. “Tristan rejected me after the Marquis changed him. He didn’t want to see my face or talk to me—maybe he knew it was my fault Demarche found out about him and Elodie; I really don’t know. All I knew was that I’d lost my brother. I’d lost everything. So I left New Orleans and traveled alone for a time, trying to figure out how I could win him back. I met some strange people—powerful ones, who reminded me of those I’d left behind. I began to ask around, until I found someone who could help me get revenge.”

  I stared into the fire, images flooding my mind as though I knew exactly what Krane was thinking. “You found a dragon shifter,” I said. “You found someone who was willing to change you, so you could be more like your brother.”

  He nodded. “I did. A man who lived in the north. He was a recl
use, and I traveled for days to get to him. When I finally found him, I begged him to change me, and he did—for a price.”

  “What was the price?” I asked, but as the words escaped my lips I realized that I already knew the answer.

  “To serve the Seven, as he’d done all his life,” Krane said. “To be their loyal helper until the end of my days. At that time, Elodie wasn’t their leader, of course. It was a man called Fujiko, a powerful shifter who lived in Japan. He was strong as anything, and often cruel. They said he was seduced by a beautiful woman who convinced him to set the Seven’s curse on Tristan Wolfe.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Krane winced. “He was killed a few years later,” he said, “by a more powerful, more ambitious dragon shifter who wanted to take his place. A shifter who had been changed by his own hand.” He looked into my eyes. “A woman with fiery red hair and eyes like emeralds.”

  “Elodie…was the one who’d seduced him?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you come back to Louisiana after you were changed?” I asked.

  “I did. I sought out Demarche at his property. When I found him, I killed him slowly. Word got to Elodie, who was in Europe at that time. Naturally, she despised me for it. She wanted me to suffer, so she looked for ways to become more powerful than I was. She got her revenge by seeing to it that she’d become the leader I had to serve for the rest of my life. She would make me watch over my brother like a fucking spy.”

  “You never told Tristan any of this?” I asked, stunned by the series of revelations. “It never occurred to you to tell him Elodie was alive, or that…that you’d sacrificed so much of yourself to try and avenge him?”

  Krane’s eyes met mine again. He reached out for me, but his hand stopped in midair. He pulled it back, curling his fingers into a hard fist. “The change turned me into a monster,” he said. “I’m sure Tristan has told you that it’s not a pleasant thing for the human mind to be consumed by a constant state of bloodlust. It’s a poison in our veins, a fire burning its way permanently through our souls. Some humans who are changed don’t live through the ordeal; others go insane. As for me, I became a creature of pure malice.” He let out a laugh that chilled me to the bone. He was still looking into my eyes, but now he narrowed them, and suddenly the air around us altered until I could feel the familiar, daunting aroma of his enticing sensuality wrap itself around my mind, drawing me in. “You may think I’m still raw malevolence,” he said softly, moving closer even as I found myself frozen in place by his stunning allure, “but in comparison to what I used to be, I’m downright tame.”