“Gamό,” she cursed in Greek. Something a Vrykolakas she’d once worked with taught her.
“Awake?” A hushed female voice to her right spoke, treading softly enough for Cimby to have missed the movement. “Surprising. It’s been only thirteen hours. Usually Vryk poisoning knocks a Were of your species out for at least twenty. Impressive.”
“Who are you?” Cymbeline asked, her voice croaking and mouth dry as sandpaper.
“Don’t be afraid.” She heard a tray of metal settle on a hard surface, then more scuffling around whatever room she was in. There was a fireplace smoldering directly in front of her, she could smell the wood burning and hear it crackling, providing a pleasant ambiance to go with the instrument’s melodic tones.
“I am not afraid. I am pissed off and have to use the facilities,” she grumbled, closing her eyes, not wanting to remain in whatever reality she had landed herself in. Thirteen hours…she had been gone from her cottage for nearly five days. That was too long. She promised Irisi she would be back in a week.
The woman laughed, husky and deep, almost as scratchy sounding as Cymbeline’s, like she wasn’t used to laughing. After a few more moments of scuffling sounds, a gentle hand slipped under Cymbeline’s back and lifted her to a sitting position. The instrument’s music wavered for a moment as she struggled to remain upright, worry rising that she didn’t have full use of her limbs yet.
“Why can’t I move?”
“The symptoms of the Vryk blood wears off slowly, but it will wear off,” the woman said. “You’ll have full use of your faculties soon enough.” The music started up again, almost as if the musician had been waiting for that answer.
“How do you feel, Ms. Wolf-who-attacked-our-guards-and-would-be-wise-to-not-do-that-again?”
The woman sat on the bed in Cymbeline’s line of sight now. She shook her head to dislodge the short, frizzy red curls flying about her ears. She was skinny, too skinny, almost as if she was wasting away. There were dark patches under her green eyes and her skin had a sallow look to it. She wore a black T-shirt, lab coat and old jeans that she probably hadn’t looked drowned in at some point in her life. A knee rested on the edge of the bed where she sat, revealing bare feet. On any other day she would have appreciated the woman’s eccentricities, but not today.
“Like I cannot move and am being held captive against my will.” Cymbeline grunted, trying not to stare at the woman. That waifish look and red hair reminded her of Irisi.
“Well, at least your cognitive reasoning skills are intact,” the woman said with a wobbly smile as she placed a breakfast tray full of delicious smells over Cymbeline’s lap.
“Brilliant,” Cymbeline said sarcastically as she tried to raise her hands off the comforter to take the food, but her strength had not returned completely. She could barely even wiggle her fingers.
“Ah.” The woman saw her struggle. “I know it’s frustrating but your motor functions will return quickly now that you’re awake. Here, drink this.” She grabbed a glass of water. The woman gently placed the straw to Cymbeline’s lips and waited for her to swallow. She could sense the magic-infused water and drank with fervor, feeling instant relief.
“This will give you use of your arms and hands at least.”
“Thanks,” Cymbeline said grudgingly, grabbing a cut-up piece of steak from the breakfast tray and tossing it into her mouth. It was bloody and barely cooked, just the way she liked. The sooner she loaded up on calories and replenished her energy, the sooner she could skip out.
“The food will help you heal as well,” the woman said, nodding in satisfaction as she watched Cymbeline eat.
“I know,” Cymbeline said, annoyed with the two people watching her eat and what she now realized were magic-infused cuffs on her wrists. She was not leaving anytime soon, apparently.
“So how long have you been the Incendiary?” The redhead asked curiously, pushing back her frizzy hair with a trembling hand. The lab coat insinuated that this woman was a medical practitioner of some kind, even though it looked like she needed a doctor of her own.
“Can’t tell you.”
The woman flicked her eyes across the bed and back to Cymbeline. “Okay…where are you from?”
“Can’t tell you,” she said again through a mouthful of food.
The woman shrugged, leaning her hip on the bed and crossing her arms over her small chest. “Is there anything you can tell me about yourself?”
“Are you the Captain?”
“No.”
“The Lieutenant?”
She rolled her eyes and gestured to her lab coat before answering, “Clearly not.”
“You the Alphar?”
The skinny doctor placed her hands on her hips, frustrated by the runaround. “You know I’m not.”
“Then thank you for the food but there is not a damn thing I can tell you about myself. If you would like to remove these cuffs, then perhaps we can arrange an exchange of information. Do you have any other questions I am going to refuse to answer? I can do it all day.” Cymbeline bit a chunk out of a warm flaky biscuit, staring the healer down, not caring that she seemed to be ill and in need of healing herself. Cymbeline was not required to tell anyone who wasn’t her trainers or the Alphar anything about herself, and it was not the healer’s right to ask. The bastard playing the mandolin however had every right, if he deemed it worthy of his time to lift his head and look her in the eye.
“Lottie,” a deep voice to her left said quietly. The voice was almost as melodic as the tunes he had been playing during her waking. The frazzled woman, Lottie, stood and nodded to the figure out of Cymbeline’s line of sight.
He came into view, walking slowly around the edge of the bed. Even in captivity she found her breath catching at the marvel he was. Her darkest fantasies brought to life in an elegant yet dominant package. He now wore fitted jeans and a long-sleeved, navy-blue T-shirt. Needless to say it was perfectly sculpted to his rather large, muscular body. Cymbeline’s eyes made a blatant trail down his torso, noting the jeans that sculpted his form in all the right places and then surprisingly, finding his feet as bare as Lottie’s had been. She could not help the small quirk of her lips at the oddity.
“What?” he asked, arching an eyebrow, and stealing a slice of bacon off her breakfast tray. He sat down where Lottie had been leaning at the edge of the bed.
“No shoes,” she pointed out, forgoing the use of utensils as there seemed to be something off with her coordination, and shoving a slice of French toast in her mouth.
He shrugged. “I’m in my home, why shouldn’t I be comfortable?” They sat in silence, taking the time to observe one another. She could only imagine how dirty she looked after four days of hiding in trees and then running frantically through the woods around The Mansion. He flexed his hand with the speed of a snapping snake and grabbed another piece of bacon before she could blink. He had no tells. No tensing of muscles or shifting of weight that warned of movement. A perfect predator. “No table manners,” he murmured, gesturing to the sticky food in her hands.
“You forget things like table manners when you have had a week from hell. I have been Vryk drugged and taken captive by an arrogant Alphar who thinks I am his mate. And that was just in the past day,” she said around a full mouth. “I think I am excused from proper etiquette, your majesty.” She leaned over to reach the straw bobbing in a glass of orange juice, making sure to blow some bubbles and slurp as obnoxiously as possible. She could feel her Wolf enjoying the game despite her attraction to him, so she did it louder.
“Just this once, I’ll accept that as an excuse.” He continued to munch on the crispy bacon. Her crispy bacon. She had been eyeing that bacon and no matter how good looking he was, nobody stole her bacon without consequence. There was a small piece remaining in his hand and with a flick of her sore arm she snatched it back and tossed it into her mouth. They s
at for a moment, each chewing in silence. The Alphar watched Cymbeline’s mouth as she chewed the bacon, his gaze unwavering.
“Why did you bring me back?” she asked him, unnerved by his attentiveness.
His mouth quirked in a smile, and Lords help her, but she hated herself for wanting to feel that quirk against her own lips. The man’s physical presence was so potent, she felt like a teenage girl with her first crush magnetized by a million. If only her trainers could see her now.
Feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable, Cymbeline decided to shore up her walls by picking on what appeared to be his pet peeves. He seemed to have a thing about proper etiquette so she picked up a pancake with her hand to eat. He took it from her with a stoic, dominant glare and placed it back on the tray. She began to complain when his large hands came down over her own, helping her pick up the fork and knife and slicing the pancakes into pieces.
Cymbeline tried desperately to ignore the tingles in her hands as he held them within his. It was infuriating that just a touch of his skin against hers could send her flesh ablaze with sensation, when all she wanted to feel was numb and dark against his sensual onslaught. It was what she needed to be in order to escape, to do her job efficiently, which she had every intention of doing. He may have been her superior as her Alphar, but he was also her captor and she refused to be another Stockholm syndrome statistic.
“You know why,” he said, finally answering her question. He took the fork and speared one of the pancake slices with an acrimonious fervor, as if her question had angered him in some way.
“I don’t, honestly. I can tell you and your people think I am crazy since I have claimed myself to be the Incendiary,” she stated in a wearisome tone, not wanting him to think he was affecting her in any way.
“Who knew you were Incendiary when you were chosen during Riddan’s rule?” he asked, changing his course of questioning on a dime. “Who knew besides Riddan?”
“My trainers. I was raised to become the Incendiary. Other than that, no one. He informed his right-hand man and one other of my existence, as it is with all Incendiaries. I figured his right-hand man was the Captain and the other would either be his Lieutenant or his mate.”
“Riddan didn’t have a mate, thank goodness.” He held the pancake up to her mouth and she had no choice but to take a bite. She was starving and if this was the only means to acquire food, she would bite the bullet and let him feed her.
“Why do you say that?” she asked after swallowing and trying with all her might not to blush at the way he watched her chew. “The ‘thank goodness’, I mean.”
“He was insane in his final years. I wouldn’t have wished that madness upon any man or woman destined to be his mate.” He quirked his head, offering another pancake slice. “How long have you been the Incendiary?”
“You should know,” she said, not bothering to close her mouth as she chewed.
“Well clearly, Riddan did not trust me with this information when I was Captain. Tell me your history.”
“Is that an order?”
He stared at her for a moment, something shifting in his eyes, their easy conversation turning into something else. “If it needs to be.”
Orders she could handle, the prospect of spending the rest of her long existence with one person made her panic. She fell back on her training, a place of comfort, and obeyed her Alphar. “I was born in California My first trainers took me from my mother to train to become the Incendiary. When I turned twenty-five I was put through the final trials of the process and after my success, was Turned.”
“You are not a born Were?” he asked, halting another pancake slice’s ascent to her mouth.
“No,” she said before leaning forward and snapping the pancake slice out of his hand with her teeth. He smirked at the action but didn’t comment. “I performed a spiritual rite led by a daemon to determine what animal would suit my nature as the Incendiary, and that was the species chosen for me.”
“You didn’t get to pick your animal?” he asked angrily, seemingly a bit put off by this.
“No.”
“Were your trainers Were or human?”
“Weres.”
He offered another pancake slice and she took the bite, staring at the frown lines marring his roughly hewn face. She didn’t understand the feeling welling inside her heart, confusing and tugging her from the path she’d known her whole life. He was upset for her. Why did that make her chest contract?
“Go on,” he said as she swallowed.
“I trained for another year as a Were to become acclimated to my new strength and speed. After that I reported to the Alphar to take my oaths.”
“Tell me how you received your missions,” he continued, spearing some fruit on the fork to offer her this time. It was odd, being fed in such an intimate way yet reciting generic facts about her life for him, like reading out of some file.
“I am sent an information packet to a P.O. Box located near my current residence. It informs me who my target is and what crimes they committed to have me sent after them. The rest is up to me. Upon completion of a mission I send a picture of the finished product—”
“The what?” he asked, lowering the fruit he’d been about to offer her.
“The body,” she clarified. “I send a picture of the body to a return address, which is also a P.O. Box. The money gets wired to my account upon completion.”
“You get paid to do this?”
“Yes, Incendiaries need to eat as well.”
“Have you ever not accomplished a mission?”
She sighed, annoyed that her perfect record had been broken but acknowledging the validity of the reason for it. “Only once.”
“What happened?”
“It was the mission that brought me here. I couldn’t in good conscious carry it out.”
“Wait, you’ve been carrying out missions while I’ve been Alphar?”
“Yes. A steady line of missions, which was another reason I came. The targets have been…different than the previous targets of just a few years ago. They are softer, lacking the killer instinct I usually see in the criminals. And there have been absolutely no rogues, which is my main purpose. I was put off by the change but did not think it anything to worry about. Until Marcus.”
“Who?” He crossed his arms, making his muscles bulge even farther. She swallowed before continuing.
“The last target I was assigned before coming here. He was plainly innocent, even though I had been instructed to execute on sight. He was also an idiot but that did not warrant my assassinating him. Marcus was the one that told me the Alphar, Riddan, had been killed and replaced.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I live on the fringes of society. No, I did not know,” she said, annoyed at his surprised tone. She didn’t like to watch TV and any magazine or news article about Were culture was usually written by humans who had some sort of fetish and sensationalized the culture to the extreme. She picked up a remaining piece of pancake with her hand just to be contrary. Her control over her emotions was frighteningly fragile around this man, which only provided yet another reason to get as far the hell away from him as soon as possible.
“The fringes?” he asked, tightening his lips to keep from smiling. She did not care what he thought of her life.
“Yes,” she said indignantly. “In a cabin as a matter of fact.”
“You live in a cabin?” He didn’t even try to hold back his smile as he mocked her, the bastard.
“A cabin in the mountains. It’s a very nice cabin.”
“Do you greet the animals in the morning and sing a jaunty tune while sweeping your quaint front porch?”
Her eyes narrowed. “How are your balls, Alphar? Needing another kick?”
“Would you like to check on them yourself?” he asked, with an unbearably handsome and mischievous g
rin. Cocky bastard.
“I’ll pass, Alphar.”
He leaned towards her, his hand resting near her hip. She could have sworn she felt the heat from his hand through the comforter. She wanted to feel him skin to skin. “Kerrick.”
“What?” she asked, unwilling to back down from his stare.
“Call me Kerrick. Will you tell me your name, please?”
“I’m sure if you looked through Riddan’s files you would find it,” she said, focusing on the nearly empty food tray, trying to remember all the rules her trainers had drilled into her about emotions and how completely irrelevant they were in her line of work.
“I’d like you to tell me.” He placed his hand under her chin, angling her face until her eyes were on his. Oh, his eyes were endless pools of darkness and power, pulling her in like a tractor beam.
“Cymbeline Kendall,” she whispered, unable to speak up, caught in his sensual trap.
“Lovely.” His thumb caught her bottom lip and tugged for half a second. She wanted to moan and wrap her arms around his thick neck, let him cradle her body as she writhed against him, taking his mouth in a kiss that could be nothing but a claiming. He was hers.
What was she doing?
Cymbeline shook herself out of it, removed his hand from her face, and returned to their prior conversation, determined to just ignore every thought passing through her brain that involved them getting naked and making better use of the bed. “How did you not know about me? And if you did not know about me, then who has been sending me assignments for the past few years?”
“That is something we’re going to find out,” he said, sitting back. She was in no way fooled he had given up on his pursuit, but was thankful to have her personal space back for the time being.
To Mate an Assassin: The Lost Alphars Series, Book 1 Page 6
