Savage Bond (The Fallen)

by Anne Marsh

  Was it even possible?

  "So?" She glared at him and he figured he'd better make the explanations fast. They were out of time and she was out of patience. Not that he blamed her. Finding out she wasn't completely human had to be a shock.

  "So, when the archangel Michael tossed our asses out of the Heavens three millennia ago, he tossed in a redemption clause, too. Michael swore that he'd give each one of us a special mate, a female of worth who could redeem her male." Explaining wasn't his best idea, but there was no way to force her to do this thing. She wanted words— he'd give her words.

  "You want me to believe in destiny." Her expression said it all, didn't it? That wasn't the ecstatic smile of a lottery winner that she was wearing. "That someone's been waiting three thousand years for me to come along? Comparatively speaking, Vkhin, I might have been born yesterday, but I'm not that stupid. No one has ever wanted me like that. I'm not some predestined mate for a Fallen angel. None of that is even remotely possible. Your damned wall has probably malfunctioned. That, or you got it wrong and no one—human or paranormal—can cross over it. Which means, we're stuck waiting here for rescue."

  She was special. He'd known that from the first moment he'd felt her watching him. He wasn't handling this right, but that was no surprise. He was a fighter, not a damned poet.

  "We have another choice. I want you," he growled. "We both know that."

  Of course, he wasn't going to bring soul mates up in conversation with her. He wasn't stupid. She was already too wary and he'd made his dislike of the bond damned clear. So, if he changed his tune too fast here, she'd be on to him. And this was too important to fuck up.

  "Bond with me."

  "No." Clearly, she didn't have to think twice and that just proved his point, didn't it. She dropped her pack on the ground and followed it down.

  "I'm not asking," he said. "I'm telling." Of course, the bond wouldn't happen if she didn't agree, but he didn't have time to tap dance around this. The rogues would be catching up all too soon, and he didn't see another way out.

  "Really." She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. "That was perfectly obvious, thank you. You told me you don't do bonds. You said, no way in hell."

  Unfortunately, her memory was working just fine. He crouched down on the ground next to her, slapping his hands down around her. "Look up," he growled. "You see anything friendly flying around up there?"

  Her head tilted back, looking straight up. "Not a thing, Vkhin."

  "Right." He leaned into her, but she didn't budge, so he ended up chest to chest with her. "All that clear blue means you and me? We're royally fucked, baby. There's no chopper up there right now, MVD or the Fallen. We've got nothing—except a pack of rogues who are going to show up here anytime now and then all hell breaks loose. You need to get out of here now and, for that, you need me."

  She looked at him like she wanted him to be different. Like he'd somehow disappointed her. He told himself that didn't matter. He was doing what had to be done to get her out of here.

  "This is all about your deal, isn't it?" She shoved him away and he went. He figured he'd made his point and she'd get with the program quickly enough. Ria Morgan was one of the smartest women he'd ever met, even if she didn't know it.

  "Yeah. This doesn't have to suck, Ria. Trust me," he said, feeling the biggest bastard around. His kind seduced and they both knew it. He didn't have to tell her the forever part of being a soul mate—that was a little secret he could take with him right to the grave.

  "Bond with me, Ria Morgan."

  "This doesn't bother you at all, does it?" She waved a hand at the blades. "Killing. Being on the run. This is just another job for you."

  His eyes watched her, but she knew he was aware of their surroundings, too. Anyone, anything came out of those trees, he was ready.

  "That's what I am," he said calmly. "You knew that, Ria. And I made no bones about it. I've been fighting for millennia. It's who I am. I kill."

  Just the thought made her queasy. How could anyone live like that, day after day? For centuries? Fear had her stomach knotted up right now.

  "It's not who I am," she admitted.

  "Of course not."

  The anger was a welcome change. "I'm scared, Vkhin. Scared all the time. I can Ôt do this, can't live like this. Going up in that chopper, I thought I was being so damned brave. That maybe I'd finally conquered all this fear I had inside me. Earn a little respect. Instead, here I am, stuck inside a prison and we're arguing over who is going to rescue me because I can't do it for myself."

  He muttered a curse. "Who told you that you weren't brave?" he asked finally.

  "Some things don't need telling." She shrugged. "My dad. The trainers at MVD. Lieutenant Reece." When Vkhin raised an eyebrow questioningly, she added, "The woman who had to push my ass out of that chopper because I couldn't jump on my own."

  He stared at her and she got the sense he'd rather be anywhere. Taking on a pack of rogues he understood. This conversation thing? Not so much. "It's okay for you to be scared," he said carefully. "Point is, you got out of that plane. If you couldn't do it for yourself, you made the arrangements to get someone else to take care of business for you. That's just smart."

  "You're never scared."

  "Baby," he growled. "I don't feel emotion like that. Not since the Fall. Feeling scared isn't something I can do."

  "But you don't like this, don't like being forced to bond with me."

  "You're different," he said and she wanted to believe him. She searched his face, looking for something, anything, because all her instincts were screaming that this wasn't a male who didn't feel. He didn't wear those emotions on his sleeve, but they were there, buried deep beneath the surface.

  "Let me help you," he said. "Let me get you out of here. Maybe, MVD gets their act together and they send another chopper after you. Maybe, that new bird gets here before the rogues catch up with us. That happens, they come for you and they make it, I'll bow out and you can go home with them."

  "You don't think that's happening anytime soon."

  "No." Clearly, he wasn't going to bullshit her. "I think that if MVD was capable of hosting a successful rescue mission, that first chopper wouldn't have gone down. Plus, MVD would have been waiting here for you. They'd have been watching for movement at the wall, would have sent in one of those UAVs you pilot for them. They didn't do that. They sent a rescue team and that team went down."

  "What happens?"

  "If we bond?" He stood up and eyeballed their surroundings. "We have sex." Yeah, he definitely wasn't going to sugar-coat this. "I ask you to name your favor. You do that. Then we have ourselves a connection. I can sense your emotions, feed off of them, and whatever favor you ask for gets taken care of. In this case," he hesitated, "I think I'll get my wings back."

  "Since I'm a soul mate?"

  "Yeah. So," his eyes bored into hers, "Question is, will you do it?"

  She shouldn't. Making a bargain with a Fallen angel was about the most unsafe choice she could make. He was a killer. Ruthless and hard and unfathomably older than she was. Worse, he'd just said he pretty much wasn't capable of feeling anything.

  So why was she so certain he was a good man? An honorable soldier. He'd keep his promises because his sense of right and wrong was unbending. Vkhin's world was all black and white—he didn't do grey, even though he lived in a world of shadows. God, that was sexy. And he deserved more, so much more. He hadn't wanted her before. Hell, she had only a passing acquaintance with telling the truth. She'd lie and cheat and steal to get her job done because, at the end of the day, she was going to do her part to keep the human residents of M City safe.

  And to keep Vkhin safe, too, because she didn't want to watch him die and she didn't want to leave him behind here. "Yes."

  "Then we go over there," he said, indicating a tumble-down building tucked close to the wall. Maybe, before the Fallen had taken over here, that building had been a hunting lodge. Maybe, i
t had been part of the princely estates that had dotted the Russian landscape for the last thousand years. Now, the building had decayed, was a mere shadow of what it had been. Russia was a sybaritic empire that had eaten itself up and collapsed when the underdogs had finally risen up and demanded their own day and their own turn at fucking things up royally. All that was left here were ghosts and whispers of power-that-had-been and that was just too fucking perfect.

  She'd fall there.

  Chapter Eight

  Taking her indoors was the gentlemanly thing to do, but Vkhin hadn't been a gentleman. Ever. He'd been bred to be a fighter. A cold-hearted, cold-blooded killer whose only redeeming grace was that he fought for the Heavens. Remaining outside was more defensible. Outside and you didn't end up trapped beneath four walls and a roof when they came for you.

  But, damn it, he was going to do this right.

  Even if he only had a half hour tops.

  He kicked aside what was left of the door and shouldered his way inside. The lodge was full of dust and antiques, the bones of former splendor. And a huge bed. That bed could have held two Russian empresses and half their court and it worked just fine for him. The cover was almost gone from age so he tossed his duster over the top. Would have to do. Didn't matter how much he wanted more for her. This was all he had to offer tonight.

  He just hoped to hell it would be enough.

  "You bond with me," he said, wrapping his hands around those slender fingers exploring his face, "you won't ever forget it. You give me those words, let me in, and you're going to see the marks on your skin every single morning that we're bonded. You ready for that?"

  "You're talking about the bonding marks."

  She'd have seen the tattoo-like markings in MVD's files and on the images her drones had shot. Those marks were black bands around the wrists of both the human and the Fallen angel. Patterns varied, as did the thickness of the markings, but every single Fallen-human pair was marked like that. The greater the favor, the darker the markings. Like a really big paid sticker or a cosmic receipt.

  "Does it hurt?" She toed off her sneakers, reaching for the zipper on the jumpsuit. With her hair tangled around her face, she looked impossibly sexy. The loud rasp of the zipper coming down took his gaze with it. The jumpsuit parted, revealing a pale vee of creamy skin and the lilac tease of her bra. She bent over, pushing the heavy material down her legs and that simple movement had his blood pounding in his ears as he drank in the erotic sight of those long, slim legs and the cheeks of her ass cupped by the thin cotton of her panties.

  Something inside him came alive, reacting fiercely to the thought of her in pain, being hurt.

  "No." His fingers clenched on the gold bracelet in his pocket. He should give it back to her, but he wanted that piece of her. The fragile links had been next to her skin, warmed by her skin. Carried her scent even as they'd been caught and torn and broken in the chopper crash.

  She wasn't going to end up broken like that bracelet. He'd done everything he could to keep her safe, both from the rogues hunting them in the Preserves and from himself. He couldn't be trusted. He knew that, even if she didn't. It was why Zer, the leader of the Fallen, had agreed to let him be the one to come here. To hunt her. Get in, get her pics.

  If he bonded with her and she was, as he suspected, his soul mate, their bonding would restore his wings. The only way out of the Preserves was up and over, so that math was simple. He'd do what it took.

  He'd take her. Hold her. Have her. And, if he couldn't control himself, couldn't control his demon side and the soul thirst, he'd kill her. Just like his last bond mate. It was a chance he had to take, he reminded himself, because she'd die if the rogues got their hands on her.

  But at his hands would be worse.

  She trusted him.

  Barefoot, she moved towards the bed, then hesitated. Reaching down inside one of the pockets on the leg of her jumpsuit, she took out the vidstick.

  "Here," she said. "You take this for now. Keep it safe for me, okay?"

  The plastic case was warm from her skin. His fingers closed over it. He could destroy it. Could leave her here to face the rogues or simply snap her neck, if he was feeling charitable. That knowledge was in her eyes.

  "Okay," he answered and wondered what exactly he was promising her. Because this was becoming more than a simple exchange of favors. He knew that. Hoped like hell she did, too.

  He tucked the vidstick in a side pocket of his pants as her knees hit the side of the bed and she turned. He was close. He inhaled deeply, dragging the scent of her skin deep inside him. She smelled of the smoke from their fire and the outdoors, and beneath that, woman.

  Because that attraction and trust was not going to be enough. Not against a Fallen angel determined to bind her body and soul. He'd tell her what to do, give her commands. He'd do it because he was going to keep her safe and get her home, but she'd still resent his orders. And she wouldn't have a choice. Once they'd bonded, she'd be his.

  This first time was going to have to be quick, too. For her, he wanted to be the lover she needed, but time was a luxury they didn't have.

  "You're all mine now," he said. He'd seen firsthand the sensual games some of his fellow Fallen played. Dom and sub. Erotic games. His Ria was too independent for those kinds of games and they were out of time. Not now. Maybe not ever. She didn't take orders.

  But she would now. He was going to make sure of that.

  He was going to touch her.

  Hell, she was going to touch him. Never mind that this was a really bad idea.

  He was all big, tough warrior as he came towards her, as if she was a battle he needed to win. Heat shot through her as she watched him come. He pulled off his shirt with quick, efficient movements and she fought the urge to move towards him. God, he was beautiful. His body was big and hard, the sharp planes of his stomach where the golden skin disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants drew her eye. He was disciplined. Honed by battles she couldn't begin to imagine. And the thick erection pressing against the front of his pants reassured her. She wasn't alone in this unfamiliar maelstrom of desire. Vkhin was there, with her.

  "Come here," she whispered, stretching her arms up towards him.

  His head turned away from her for a moment, eying the empty fireplace on the other side of the room. "I wish," he began and then stopped. "I can't make a fire for you," he said fiercely. "The smoke would give us away immediately and we need all the time we can buy, but I don't want you to be cold."

  "I'm okay," she said and she was. She was nervous and aroused, but she wouldn't be afraid, she told herself. They were being hunted, but Vkhin would never allow anyone to hurt her. She wanted to take care of herself, even if the danger made her a bundle of nerves, but she appreciated the extra security. Loved how feminine and cherished it made her feel. She'd never felt cherished. As if someone wanted to take care of her not because she needed it but because he wanted to do that for her. A gift.

  "Lay back." His guttural command had her panties dampening. "Do it," he ordered when she hesitated.

  She did as he ordered, the sound of her body shifting on his leather jacket unbearably loud in the stillness of the room. When he got closer, she could smell the smoke and sage scent of the man, clean and hard and undeniable.

  Need blazed through her. This was going to work. Everything was going to be all right. Maybe, they'd get through this and everything would be fine. Maybe, she wouldn't walk away from his bed with a broken heart.

  He came down over her. Not touching her yet, just caging her between the bed he'd made for her and his body. Those broad shoulders blocked out the room.

  "We don't have much time, do we?" she asked because she wanted him naked, but she understood that wasn't going to happen.

  "No," he agreed softly. One powerful forearm came down beside her head. There was a flash of metal as he set a knife to one side where he could palm the blade quickly. "We don't. But I'm going to make this good for you," he promised.<
br />
  He didn't need to make her that vow. She knew this would be good with him. She wanted him, wanted him inside her so she could take him deep and hard and make this part of him hers. Their relationship would be a temporary thing, just long enough to get them over the wall and back to M City, so she pushed that regret out of her head. She'd have him now and that was going to have to be enough.

  "No," she countered, reaching up for him. "I'm going to make this good for you."

  "Make?" His eyes flared and he leaned down into her. "No one makes me do anything, baby. Not for millennia."

  "Too bad," she challenged, because she wasn't going to let him dominate her. Not here, not in their temporary bed. If she did, she sensed she'd lose him. She'd meet him face-to-face, as equals. Whatever he gave, she'd give. "Right now, I'm thinking you're all mine."

  She slid a hand down his chest. His skin jumped beneath her touch, but his eyes never left her face. He just froze, like an animal facing the unknown. "You're going to like this," she whispered. "I promise. Okay?"

  Heat flared between them, as sensations slammed into her, and, oh God, she wasn't cold any more. Her hand wrapped around him through his pants. That hard length pressed into her flesh and she wanted more. Finding his zipper, she got it open and then there was nothing between her palm and him. Just the slick, heated length of him sliding against her skin.

  Anticipation swept through her. He'd fought battles. He'd killed to do the right thing. And now he held himself above her, motionless. Waiting for her touch, her command. So she reached out to him. Just one curious stroke of her finger, sliding down that slick length. Soft and gentle, she explored him, teasing the soft, vulnerable skin. No rhythm. She just touched where she wanted, where he was unfamiliar. Soft and slow. Pleasure filled her, a powerful sense of connection.

  "Let me," she whispered. She wasn't sure what she was asking for. Permission to touch, to take. For him to lower those barriers he kept up against the world. Spreading her fingers, she stroked around him, expanding her horizons. Letting him fill her up.