by A. C. Arthur
“Below the ear!” she heard Eli yell. “Get it below the ear!”
Nivea was already moving, not sure if Ezra had heard Eli or not. She came around the left side of the beast, the other guards shuttling away the guests that were too shocked to run out of the ballroom. As the beast continued to roar, slamming its huge fists into the floor causing the entire room to shake, Ezra continued punching it in the face, his thighs covering the beast’s neck. But she glimpsed something, a crack just beneath its ear.
“Get the hell back!” she heard Eli yelling. Knowing he was talking to her and clearly prepared to ignore it, Nivea’s clawed hand was in the air swinging downward, just missing Ezra’s cheek by an inch or so, before landing right along the line of the crack in the beast’s neck.
Its mouth opened, tongue lolling to the side as it made a half-roar sound and green ooze shot up into the air. Ezra and Eli both yelled as the ooze splattered on them. Nivea backed up but still managed to get splashed.
“What the fuck is that?” Nick asked, pushing past the two guards that had helped to form a circle around where the beast, Nivea, Ezra, and Eli now stood.
“I’m guessing what serves as the blood of a hybrid,” Ezra said, coming to his feet and removing the tuxedo jacket he’d been wearing.
Eli had already pulled his jacket off, the seams of both arms ripped after all his movements. He had it balled up and was currently using it to wipe his face, just before he looked over to her with what she’d already deemed his death glare. He was angry with her because she hadn’t listened to what he’d told her to do. She knew that just as she knew she’d hear an earful at some point tonight. Funny how he was never suffering from lack of words when it came to chewing her out about something. But after they’d made love—radio silence. Typical arrogant shifter behavior? No, typical Eli Preston behavior.
“Two more down in the bathroom,” Brayden announced, entering the room with his brothers flanking him.
Rome cursed. The First Female was right beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder, her light complexion in stark contrast to the black of his tuxedo jacket. She wore a shimmering silver gown that earlier this evening had caught every twinkle in her hazel-colored eyes. Now, those eyes looked worried.
Ary Delgado also stood beside her mate, her gaze transfixed on the hybrid while Nick scowled.
Caprise Delgado—a woman and shifter that Nivea admired for her strength, beauty, and tenacity—had already walked up to the hybrid, kicking the now disintegrating carcass, frowning when that part of its leg melted into ashes.
“They aren’t worth the tainted DNA they’re using to make them,” she stated.
“How many were outside?” Rome asked sternly.
“One,” Eli replied. “One big-ass motherfucker with only one objective—to kill.”
“What makes you say that?” X asked him.
“Its eyes,” Eli told him, tossing the jacket onto the closest table. “There’s no comprehension there, no movement or focus. They’re blank, like a robot. A programmed robot that was coming for us but able to take out anything in its path.”
“They’ve been tagged,” Aidan said to Rome. “Each one of them had this little pin just beneath the right ear.”
“So, the crack beneath the left ear—the one that makes them look a little like Frankenstein—is their Achilles’ heel and the pin at the right ear is their GPS?” Nick asked, his eyebrows drawn so close it looked as if he had one wicked unibrow.
Aidan nodded. “Right. We’re going to take these and work our magic. Meet you back at Havenway,” he said concisely, but still waited for Rome to respond.
Rome looked to the younger shifter that he’d brought into the fold. “Good. I want a full report within the hour.”
Aidan’s reply was a tight nod to Rome, and another one to his brothers as he turned and headed for the doors. Caleb and Brayden followed him out.
“Get Priya on the phone. I want a conference with her and all of the other FLs the moment we arrive at Havenway. Jax, take someone to get the vehicles and bring them around to the service entrance. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Jax mimicked Aidan’s previous nod, turn, and walk-out motion as Eli immediately moved to Rome’s side. With Kalina’s guard gone, he would assume protection detail for both the Assembly Leader and First Female. Without being asked, Nivea went to stand at Kalina’s side, noting the First Female’s nod of acceptance as she moved past her.
“X, I want you to stay behind to make sure all of this is cleaned up. Nobody gets in this ballroom until it’s done. And check those bathrooms before you leave,” Rome directed. “Caprise will ride with Nick.”
Nivea almost thought Caprise would say something in response, but in the months since she’d come to Havenway and mated with X, the female shifter had begun to take the hierarchy seriously. Nivea had worked hard to train herself for the same allegiance, but taking Eli’s orders was becoming harder and harder the more personal their relationship became.
“Their DNA is still unstable. They’ll turn to ash to be swept up,” Ezra told Rome.
The Assembly Leader looked down at the floor where the beast that was terrorizing them just minutes before was now nothing more than a steaming pile of gray ash. “Make sure we take care of it. I don’t want any human sweeping it up and trying to figure out what it was. It’s apparent that Crowe somehow got his hands on a shifter through our carelessness. I’m not used to making the same mistake twice.”
With that, X moved to whisper something to one of the other guards. They in turn left the room, no doubt to find a broom and trash bag to sweep up the ash, Nivea thought.
“The trucks are here,” Eli said to Rome.
“Fifteen minutes after we’re at Havenway I want all of you in the debriefing room,” Rome told Nick and X.
Eli and Ezra would attend as the Lead Guards. Nivea would not be in attendance, which meant she’d have to wait to find out what their next step would be. As she walked behind Rome and Kalina—Eli moving quickly in front of them—she thought there would be definitive next steps in finding out where Crowe was so they could stop him. Apparently what happened in Arizona had not slowed the man down one bit.
* * *
“What the hell did you think you were doing? I told you to stay back!” Eli yelled the moment he’d found Nivea and pulled her out into the hallway at Havenway.
The conference call was over, and to say the shifters that had been in the room were running high on tension was a vast understatement. He was angry and irritated beyond belief that because of her he’d been distracted in the meeting. When he should have been listening intently to every word that was being said, every facet of the new game plan being laid out, he was instead thinking of what that beast could have done to her.
As it stood now, the image of her being twisted around the beast’s back, her arm about to totally dislocate from her body, had him simmering with rage. He’d wanted to rip that bastard apart with his bare hands and only because he might have injured her in the process did he hold tight to the heated rage that bubbled inside of him. He couldn’t take it if something happened to Nivea. That, for Eli, would be the last straw, the third strike where females in his life were concerned and he had no idea what he’d do after that.
“I was doing my job,” was her calm reply.
She’d been sitting in the cafeteria, her hands holding a cup of coffee, her gaze forward. He’d wondered what she was thinking so intently about but had been more attuned to the scent he’d picked up the moment he entered the room. It was the first time he’d scented her in he didn’t know how long, the first time his body reacted before he’d actually seen her. Did that mean his senses were back on point? Was whatever had been going on with him over now? He couldn’t tell, but was certainly hoping for that.
“I told you to stay back. I am your superior!” he yelled at her.
“You’re an asshole,” she snapped back. “I did what I was trained to do and I helped take that
bastard down. So why don’t you just say what’s really on your mind, Eli? Tell me why you’re really so angry with me, so intent on pushing me away.”
He loved to watch her lips move, to see the sparks of emotion in her eyes when she was angry or aroused. He did not like what she was insinuating.
“It was dangerous out there tonight. You don’t know anything about those hybrids. Nobody does,” he countered.
“You knew where to strike to take it down. How is that?” she asked, her back still pressed against the wall. “This was your first time seeing one, right? How did you know what to do?”
Eli took a step back. He wanted to look away, to regroup, but he couldn’t. Her hair was curly at the ends, hanging loose down her back. She’d changed from that sexy-as-hell dress to sweats and a loose-fitting T-shirt and yet he still wanted to wrap her legs around his waist and pound into her warm, wet pussy until his mind cleared, until his body and his cat felt finally free.
At his sides his fists clenched, jaw ticking with the pressure of gritting his teeth. “Instinct,” he told her. “I’ve been training longer than you. It was just instinct.” Only Eli wasn’t so certain that was it entirely. He’d seen the spot beneath the beast’s left ear and then he’d seen the beast falling, crumpling to the ground and he knew. In the next moment he acted. It was as simple and perplexing as that.
Nivea shook her head, the left corner of her mouth lifting slightly. “Another thing you suck at is lying, Eli. You knew something about that hybrid. And now, I do too.”
“What?” He stepped closer to her again because staying away was just futile. “What do you know?”
She looked around then, her head moving from side to side, her gaze searching for someone. Finally she came up on tiptoe, pressing her lips to his ear and whispered, “It shared your scent. I thought it was you but it wasn’t. Why is that, Eli?”
He jerked away as if her words had somehow scorched him.
“Why did that killer smell like you and how did you know how to kill it?” she asked again.
Eli kept moving back, trying desperately to get away this time. Not from her, he thought, as his legs continued to move. From everything.
“You know, don’t you? You can tell me, Eli. You can trust me.”
“No!” he yelled. He couldn’t trust her. She was just like the other females that had come and gone from his life. They were soft and smelled like heaven. Highly sexual and desirable and he wanted them. No, correct that, he needed them. For the moments it took for him to get off and to move on, he thought finally. Because now, after all he’d been through, Eli would never allow anything more.
With his mind in check once more, Eli took a steadying step toward her. Then another and another, until her breasts rubbed against his lower chest. He waited until she looked up at him, as he knew she would. There was never any backing down from her, never any turning away because things got tough. For a second he wondered if that would be true in any case.
Then he blinked and realized he didn’t give a damn. None of that mattered.
“What I want to trust you to do is be a better guard,” he said sternly. “To take the orders given to you and to protect the ones you’re assigned to. Do you think you can do that, Cannon?”
She swallowed, her lips thinning only slightly before she replied, “I can do that, Preston.”
Chapter 9
“He asked about you,” Amina said simply, her voice sounding strained as she spoke over the phone.
The fingers that had been drumming over her steering wheel while Nivea sat outside the barbershop on the corner stilled.
“Why?” she asked after a few seconds of silence.
“I wondered that myself,” her sister told her. “It’s been years since he’s even acknowledged you existed. Then out of the blue he asks, ‘Have you heard from Nivea?’”
“And what did you say?”
“What was I supposed to say? He is my father. And yours too. Whatever falling out you had with them all those years ago was probably silly and should not have kept you all from speaking or seeing each other for all this time.”
This wasn’t the first time Amina had shared her views on what she thought was Nivea’s chosen exile from the Cannon family. It was normally Nivea’s practice to simply ignore her sister, changing the topic and moving on. Today, Eli’s questions from a week ago resonated in her mind. Why was Richard Cannon giving money to the Comastaz Labs?
“It just is, Amina. We’ve been over this before.”
“Right. And before I always let it go because you seemed happy and so did they. But he wanted to know when the last time I saw and talked to you was. He wanted to know where you were, what you were doing and I thought, maybe?”
A car sped past and Nivea looked up and out the side window. She tried to keep her breathing steady and remain alert. The press had been all over what happened at the charity ball. Even with Priya’s statements on behalf of Reynolds & Delgado, LLC, that there was a disagreement arising from hotel guests that were not on the invite list and things quickly escalated, the whispers of “cat people” were circulating once more.
“Maybe what?” she asked her sister, trying to keep her personal life from overlapping with her work, and not 100 percent certain that was going to remain a possibility for much longer.
“Maybe you would like to come home,” she said slowly. “Just for dinner, I mean,” she quickly added.
“No!” Nivea replied just as fast. Going back to New York—not home because that place would never be Nivea’s home again—was not an option.
“But—” Amina started.
Nivea was shaking her head even though she knew her sister couldn’t see her. “But nothing. I’m never going back there. Ever,” she added adamantly. “Look, Amina, I have to go. I’ll call you later.”
Nivea immediately took the phone from her ear and ended the call, her fingers shaking as she held it in her hand. Lowering her head until her brow rested on the steering wheel, Nivea closed her eyes and continued to focus on her breathing.
In slowly, out even slower. In and out until her heart rate steadied and her temples ceased throbbing. That’s what the shrink had taught her. Whenever the memories came on hard and swift, to breathe her way through them and to remember, no matter what, that it wasn’t her fault. It was Richard’s.
Still, the weakness each memory provoked was all hers and Nivea hated it, each and every time.
“Dammit!” she whispered vehemently. “Just goddammit!”
Shaking her head slowly as if the motion could actually clear all the dark and degrading memories that lived inside her, she rose up until her spine was straight. Her cat, also rising to its full length, filled her human body until she felt every ounce of its courage and strength pouring through her veins like some sort of intravenous injection.
With pursed lips she thought about Eli’s questions once more. Was Richard Cannon somehow involved with the creation of the hybrids? And if so, how was she going to handle that? She was sure that Rome and the others thought she might not remain loyal to them, even though—to their credit—none of them treated her any differently than they had before.
Leaving the ballroom a few nights ago she’d been able to assist in guarding Rome and Kalina as they’d left. She’d ridden in the truck with them and had seen Kalina back to her private rooms.
“Thank you very much for taking the initiative,” Kalina had said to Nivea before ducking into her room.
Nivea had felt prouder than she had in a very long time because this was what she wanted to do with her life. To protect those that she was loyal to, to uphold the laws of their kind, and to work with the other guards doing the same. She was not a traitor, or a murderer—or anything else that made up the complex composition of Richard Cannon. No matter that his blood ran hot through her veins. She was nothing like him. But she did know him better than probably anyone else on this earth. He’d made it that way the moment he’d pulled his nine-year-old daughter in
to his adult world with that first inappropriate touch to her bare shoulder and visiting her nightly for the next seven years.
Hence the reason she could never go back.
Unless she really had no other choice.
Nivea prayed she would have another choice, her gaze moving to the door of the barbershop as she stopped fighting the indecision over whether or not to go inside. Eli owned the barbershop and three others just like it throughout the city. He employed men that he’d met over the years, ones that had fallen in some way and needed a helping hand. She’d admired that about Eli, the compassion he had for people. The fact that it seemed to be all people besides her only stung a little. Well, a lot, but she wasn’t about to start with that complaint at the moment.
Instead, she slipped her cell phone into her jacket pocket alongside the keys she’d previously taken out of the ignition. She climbed out of her car and seconds later was opening the door to the barbershop, all while trying not to think about Eli’s reaction to her being there.
They weren’t out on assignment today because Dorian Wilson had seemingly disappeared. After the incident at the cabin they hadn’t seen him at his house and X’s friend at the Bureau had confirmed he hadn’t shown up for work. He wasn’t dead, Eli had seemed certain of that fact when she’d suggested that maybe he’d been shot at the cabin but managed to drive away, thus dying someplace else. But he didn’t seem to be in D.C. either. And after the incident at the charity ball, Rome wanted all shifters focused on training to deal with the hybrids, since it seemed apparent that Crowe wasn’t stopping his development of the species.
Eli had left Havenway hours ago and she’d been—like a stalker—following him around the city. Why? She’d asked herself that question several times today and had only been able to come up with one answer—he was her mate.
Nivea was as sure of this as she was of her name. Especially after their little tryst, no matter how long ago that seemed to be. The shrink said she’d one day be able to love and trust and care for someone the way she was supposed to have been loved and cared for, and she believed it wholeheartedly. Just as she was certain that Eli was the one, if he could ever get past that chip the size of a boulder on his shoulder.
