Blood Drenched Conquest (Ryze Book 3)

by N. Isabelle Blanco

  Something I think Kaden is aware of. Straight, wet hair falling into his eyes, he wraps his hands around her hips and sets in with a vengeance, all but pounding that mortal into the side of the house.

  Like his rage has overflowed and his only salvation is what the female has between her thighs.

  The human—Kirsten—tugs him to her mouth frantically, using his mouth as both an enhancer and a muffle for those animalistic sounds leaving her.

  See, at this point, as shameful as her lack of control is, a part of me can’t blame her. I’ve stalked him for almost a month. Have seen him going about his daily life, both the big events and the small.

  I’ve . . . seen him sleeping.

  Have also seen him showering.

  Guess what those two events have in common?

  Nudity. Never-ending nudity. That male doesn’t believe in covering himself up when he’s on his own, deep in his self-imposed privacy.

  I know what that human is getting right now.

  Know how perfectly formed it is.

  In no way typical for his species.

  That’s Ismini’s Fort’em, whore.

  A brother who is as stunning as his sister. Ismini is everything sweet and sensual. Her brother? Darkness and raw sex. Even though he’s human, I’d have to be dead not to notice. The wrongness inside him has leaked out into his aura.

  His writhing white-and-silver aura with its dark stains scattered through it.

  “Oh God, fuck, yes,” Kirsten moans, kissing him harder.

  He lets her, eyes closed, not a single sound leaving him. Not a twitch in the facial area, either. Just robotic-engagement, his body working hard below the waist while the rest of him remains perfectly controlled.

  One more thrust, and the human is seizing around him like she’s been hit with a thousand megawatts right between the legs.

  That cold pit in my chest grows deeper, more oppressive, as if I’m being drilled completely through.

  My fingers jerk, tiny, microscopic bolts of energy sparking to life.

  Above their heads, the wall light flickers.

  Up and down the street, other lights begin to do the same.

  Kaden’s head rises and his gray eyes narrow as he analyzes that bulb.

  All while continuing to give that human everything her greedy twat desires.

  You’re sounding extra petty and pathetic. Stop it. My dislike for humans is well-known among my friends etcetera, but even I have to admit I might be taking it a little too far in my mental judgement of the human.

  Who yanks Kaden back to her, kissing him with everything she has, lost in him. Clearly desperate to get him to feel an ounce of what’s consuming her.

  He goes right back to the licking, and sucking, and biting, beautiful lips glistening from their kisses, but his expression doesn’t change. His breath barely speeds up. Not a single sound leaves that man.

  Out of nowhere, I feel my lips curling into a smirk.

  Wet footsteps echo down the block. A couple of humans huddled under an umbrella are heading this way. A few more feet, and there’s no doubt they’ll get an eyeful of those two going at it in the rain.

  Sure, Kaden’s trench coat does a great job of hiding the interconnected body parts, but their positioning is unmistakable.

  I should let them get caught. Would serve his ass right.

  Instead—and for some reason I cannot even begin to fathom—I will the three-feet-wide Gnetica surrounding me to extend on either side of me.

  I’ll still be hidden from Kaden and Kirsten, but the shield will also hide their presence from the humans walking by behind me.

  Kaden hears the footsteps and his body jerks to a stop, much to the displeasure of the wanna-be nymph locked around him. Head turning eerily towards the sound, he watches the two humans walking by with narrowed, calculating eyes.

  By the gods, that male is more beautiful than most of the immortals I’ve ever come across.

  Humans just aren’t made like that. Not naturally.

  I see his brow twitch as he realizes how blind the humans are to his and Kirsten’s presence. He doesn’t say anything, but the way he tracks those two homo sapiens is both familiar and disconcerting.

  He can’t see me here. Doesn’t know the Gnetica is responsible for saving his ass from a lot of well-deserved embarrassment. But he knows damn well it’s not normal how those humans just passed by, mere feet away, and didn’t even blink at his indecent exposure routine with Kirsten.

  His eyes move across slowly, still following the humans—

  They jerk to a stop, freezing on my spot.

  Looking right at me, in fact.

  I jump back, instinct firing off beneath my skin. As always, all that does is set off a chain reaction in the world around me as the primal light within me starts amplifying other lights on the street.

  They all flicker at once, the tungsten wires within struggling under the surge—

  Slamming my eyes closed, I will my heartbeat to slow-the-fuck down and my adrenaline levels to drop. When I open them back up, the lights have all returned to normal.

  And Kaden Harrovnian isn’t paying them any mind. His lover is, light brown eyes staring out into the rainy night, confused and glassy from that orgasm, but his eyes are still fixated on the same spot.

  On me.

  His dick is lost in another female, skin-to-skin with the deepest parts of her, but his attention completely abandons her, focused with a laser-like precision on where I am.

  Behind the Gnetica.

  He can’t see me. His pupils have expanded as he struggles to stare into the night, but there’s no flash of recognition in there.

  Not that he knows me or what I look like, but he isn’t seeing anyone here. He’s seeing what I want him to see—the street behind me, devoid of my presence.

  So why is he staring at me like that? Like he knows I’m here?

  Kirsten forgets all about everything except the flesh still gripped by her body. Shifting on him, she licks up his neck, whining, “Baby,” in a needy tone.

  Baby. One of the dumbest human endearments ever thought of.

  My abs tense, chest going concave, and it takes me a while to realize that the low rumbling I’m starting to hear is bubbling up from the pit of me. . .

  Kaden pulls away from Kirsten. In the night lights, I see his insanely-swollen erection, how it’s glistening with her arousal—he flips her over, bending her against the side of the house, and is back inside her faster than I can blink.

  Clearly determined to come, in spite of his body’s lack of facial and verbal responses to the sex, he sets to pounding Kirsten hard enough to yank screams out of the girl.

  Delighted, horny screams.

  I hiss under my breath, fists clenching. Does this fucking moron want to be caught?

  His eyes come back in my direction, doing that super-focus thing again—and remain here, staring through my own, as he chases that orgasm.

  Lids peeling back, I try to breathe through this overwhelming, confusing reaction, unable to pull my eyes away, even as he continues fucking another female in front of me.

  A female everyone in his command gossips about because she’s utterly in love with him.

  A love he supposedly doesn’t reciprocate.

  He flattens his hands against the side of the house, fucking her faster, and there it is, a twitch going through his expression, some sort of reaction.

  A parting of lips . . .

  His back arches and he clenches his jaw, a groan finally breaking free as his comes deep into his lover.

  His eyes on mine the entire time.

  Chapter 14

  Dyletri and Ismini’s Ziaphrite

  - East Wing, Inner Court, Enzyria

  IANTHEN

  “W e seriously need to talk.”

  Great. He caught up with me.

  “What do you want, Cy?” Surrounded by dozens of immortal beings, I have no choice but to face him and play it cool. Dressed in a slick pair
of black dress pants and a perfect-fitting button down in the same shade, my best friend looks more like his brother Keiros than his usual self.

  Especially with that serious glower on his face. I feel the air shift as a Gnetica settles around us. “I told you, we need to talk.”

  “The most infamous relationship ending words of all time,” I playfully warn him, finishing off my latest round of Laussane. Inside, I’m an impatient, hot mess, but my instincts tell me it’s best he doesn’t realize that.

  Where did Sol go off to?

  Crius is chilling over by the waterfall on the left side of the room, glaring into the crowd, so I know she didn’t chase after him.

  “Dude, listen to me.” Cy hits me with those golden-orbs, shiny with concern and other bullshit I rather not deal with. “It’s time we come to terms with reality.”

  I know where he’s going with this. How could I not? And now isn’t the time. I was in the middle of my search when he interrupted me.

  What search?

  The search for Soleria. A tipsy, possibly already drunk, dressed-to-fucking-annihilate Soleria.

  A search I’m being forced to undertake as a regular immortal because I can’t sift through all these energy signatures fast enough to locate her.

  “Bro, can it wait? I was in the middle of—”

  Cyake’s hand shoots out to block my path before I can take a step. “Ianthen. I think she’s the one.”

  Those words have the desired effect.

  If his goal was to annoy, infuriate, and ruin me.

  Closing my eyes, I battle back the impulsive, aggressive demands of my Hyren instincts—the same instincts that are slowly turning on me. Usually, they’re my staunchest ally, the one voice I can count on above all others to never steer me wrong.

  Well, usually I’m not going on a full month of no sex, either.

  I remember this. Remember this pull inside me, the never-ending restlessness that torques my nervous-system into nothing but a pretzel of mis-matched signals. My inner wolf is rapidly losing its small grasp on common sense, becoming pure, frantic emotion.

  I can’t find shit.

  Which means I can’t locate Soleria on the dimension and I have no fucking clue where she ended up in that indecent, gorgeous dress she decided to wear tonight.

  One look at her and I swear I heard my insanity snap in half.

  “Ian, did you hear me, bro?”

  “I heard you. And apparently, you didn’t hear me when I told you Nylicia confirmed she isn’t the one.” The conversation happened a week ago, sure, but still. We already went through this.

  “What did Nylicia say, exactly? Word for word?”

  Gritting my teeth, I reiterate my conversation with the Watcher. “And she said it twice. Straight up. Soleria will not be the reason I die.” Moving my arm out of his grasp, I step away from him. “Which, based on the nature of the prophecy, rules her out from being the one entirely. Now, if you’ll excuse—”

  “You’re exhibiting symptoms.”

  Deathly stillness settles over me.

  Which is what happens when a male is frozen by shock. “No . . . I’m not.”

  Cyake appears an inch from my face, filling my vision with nothing but gold-and-black. Those eyes are so far up my grill that I see every nuance as he purposely widens them to illustrate his disbelief. “Has she tasted your skin yet?”

  I jerk back away from him and the slideshow of inappropriate, violently pornographic images that question slams my mind with.

  “No?” Eyes following me, body tense like he very much plans on blocking my way if I try to leave, Cy hammers on, “Dude, you need to let her taste your skin. Nothing more blatant than that.”

  He’s talking about the multitude of well-catalogued symptoms that plague all bonded beings of our species.

  Step one?

  “Her scent already felled you. I was there that night. I saw it,” my best friend insists, his godlike-asperger’s kicking in and robbing him of his ability to read social cues.

  What else could explain the fact that he’s still talking despite the incoming-death written over my face? Baring my teeth at him, I let him get a good flash of the canines genetics gifted me with. “She did not fell me.”

  Those eyebrows of his go any higher, and I’m going to personally make sure they come off his face. “Oh really? So what was all that knee-to-ground action that took place that night? You went down hard, bro. Didn’t even realize it. Of course, I, like the great best friend I am, made sure to fix that mini-crater you left behind before we came back here, because gods forbid leaving something like that for the human’s to find. You know some forensic scientists are good like that nowadays, right? Just saying. The last thing we need is one of them realizing that impact was caused by a knee, but if that wasn’t about her scent, you tell me what it was about. I’m waiting.”

  And he places his hands on his hips while at it.

  The dream. That’s what it was about. The fact I was fresh off it, shaken up, and not only did Soleria turn out to be real, her scent truly is made for sex. “I’ve seen many a male lose his shit over the way that female smells. Any living, breathing being would.” Hell, last week, when Stephen kept at it with all the lovey-huggy, I caught him dragging it deep into his lungs and holding it there.

  Which prompted the whole tap-tap on the shoulder and the time for you to go, asswipe that followed.

  Cyake wisely refrains from commenting on that part. “And you know, I want to believe that. I do. Even tried. And that night, when we went to Sphynx, I really believed it, because come on. You were going to get laid. Bonded males don’t fuck other beings once they find the one they belong to. Except, we both know what happened that night—”

  “Wilks gave me intel and I capitalized. End of.”

  “Have you not picked up on your behaviour lately? Stellar. If one’s goal is to become a shining example of instability. You want that female so bad it’s mutating you, bro.”

  Now it’s my turn to invade every inch of his personal space. “Of course I’m horny for her! Have you seen how hot that female is?”

  That mouth of his opens to offer a response.

  I get further up his grill, my teeth inches from his nose. “Don’t you dare answer that.”

  Wide-eyed, he shoves his finger in my face, the pad of the digit pressing to the tip of my nose. “You see?” he cries out. “That. Right. There. That’s shit’s what has me worried. You were going to kill Cri a few minutes ago just because she said she came at the sight of him. Which was a joke, by the way! Stop growling like that!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I snap, although deep down I know damn well what he’s referring to.

  I mean, who could forget that carnal little gasp Soleria gave at the God of the Underworld’s entrance, or the fact that, when she said she’d come at the sight of him, there had been a slight change in her scent—

  More growling.

  Coming from me.

  “You’ve become straight-up psycho-possessive of the female! And you haven’t even slept with her yet!”

  Fuck. Fuck.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Fuck some more, gods damn it!

  “Number one hallmark of a bonded Hyren male? Possessiveness. Even in a male that’s never exhibited it before! And you, buddy, you . . .” he trails off, but he doesn’t need to finish the thought.

  We both know what he’s going on about.

  Fourteen millennia walking the planet and not once have I ever felt a flare of jealousy or possessiveness.

  Kind of makes sense why I’m having such a hard time dealing with it now that it’s finally reared its head.

  “You forget,” I mumble, turning my back to let him know I’m so done with this conversation. “I’m also not exhibiting every other symptom.”

  “Are you not? Urge to claim: check.”

  “That’s called an urge to fuck, you dumbass.”

  “Urge to keep other males from your f
emale: check. A need to look after and guard your mate?” He pauses to throw me a let’s get real now look. “Building aggression the longer you deny yourself your female? Check, check, and CHECK, motherfucker.”

  “It’s been over a month. All those symptoms you’re talking about? They hit within the first hour, all in synchronized formation. If all you can go with for sure is a taste-test—”

  “You’re also a god, bro! Not just a Hyren. For all we know, that means the symptoms are going to hit you differently. There’s only six of us in existence, and none of us have bonded before. My father never did when he walked this plane. Neither did yours. What the fuck is the guarantee that your bonding symptoms would follow the regular guideline? . . . There you go again, wanting to rip my face off! Bro, you’re special, I’ll give you that, but this level of aggression ain’t like you.”

  “What’s making me aggressive right now is your annoying ass—”

  “And you refuse to let her taste your skin which is our number one, foolproof-guarantee!”

  Because our bodies are built like that. Once bonded, it becomes all about the other being. Providing for them. Taking care of them. Pleasing them.

  To the extent that our body’s chemical composition alters, changing the taste of our skin to one specifically designed to please our mates.

  Even when the being is someone we barely know, our bodies instinctively align themselves with what’ll drive our mates the craziest.

  If I belong to Sol, my taste will be unlike anything she’s ever encountered before and she won’t be able to hide it.

  I imagine those lips all over me, her tongue licking up whatever part of me she likes . . . imagine her losing control like most beings that end up with Hyrens do at their first taste . . .

  “Dear gods, it’s coming off you in waves. Waves, bitch. I’m not even into you like that, and I’m getting a contact-high.” To illustrate his point, he whirls away from me, blocking me from seeing whatever reaction he has going on in the front.

  I open my mouth to remind him that his melodramatic bullshit isn’t always appreciated—

  That silver sparkle enters the corner of my vision.