by May Sage
He couldn’t come up with another explanation.
As the day drew on, somewhere between the Coliseum and the Pantheon, he felt her grow stiff. It wasn’t just that he saw her shoulders tense and smelled a difference in her; he felt it to his bones. His mate’s worry transferred to him.
He wanted to ask, but he knew he couldn’t.
Are they here? Are they watching?
Ava had said the second she’d return to Italy, the eagles of Dale would know it, and would go after her. Something about their ward warning of the master’s return. It had probably been set in place so her folks could get ready to greet their Alphas after they came back from a trip. Who knew?
What mattered was that now her enemies were going to come after her.
Which would have been all well and good, if she wasn’t expecting him to let them take her.
* * *
They won’t want to spill blood in Rome. Firstly, it makes more sense to abduct me and deal with me on their own turf than to potentially have to fight whatever ally I bring with me. Secondly, if I’m close to home, they won’t be able to resist bringing me back to Dale, and parading me in front of everyone as their captive. They were quite dramatic with my parents and siblings,” she’d grimaced with distaste.
How that was supposed to convince him to let them take her, he didn’t know.
“Right. So, we let a merry band of psychopathic traitors take you where they can hurt you. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this isn’t the very definition of insanity. Then what?”
She smirked.
“Then, we crush them all.”
* * *
He’d only caved after listening to every single detail, and had her answer all his theories, all of his questions. The damn woman had eliminated every logical concern he’d voiced. Still, it didn’t mean that he liked what he had to do.
“Just heading to the toilet, beautiful,” he said, kissing her forehead one last time.
He looked into her violet eyes and held her gaze one beat too long for it to seem casual, but he couldn’t say the words at the tip of his tongue. Stay safe. Come back to me.
So, instead, he simply told her, “I love you.”
Her jaw dropped, and he simply winked before turning his back and heading away from her. He’d never done a harder thing in his entire existence.
Chapter 20
Home
Ava resisted, kicking and screaming when they came at her. Recalling just what they’d done to her brother and sister when they’d gotten their hands on them, it was hard to allow them to take her. Very, very hard. The best she could do was hope that they’d planned to wait for them to get to Dale before starting her humiliation and torture.
One of the men managed to get his hand around her mouth and nose. An unpleasant stench filled her nostrils and she almost immediately started to lose focus, slowly blacking out.
How predictable they were. Still, she was pretty glad she’d been right, given that the alternative had been them just breaking her neck and getting it over with.
But she knew Roberto, Max, Antonio, Neri, and she most definitely knew Angela. Others had joined them, but as the old Enforcers, they were the main force behind the treason. They wouldn’t have been able to resist making a show of it, demonstrating that she wasn’t better than them.
Two of them were Richard’s age, the others, older, and she’d known them all her life. She couldn’t recall ever saying one unkind thing to them, or acting like a superior brat, for that matter. That wasn’t her personality.
Aria had been a little on the arrogant side, perhaps. Rupert, too, although his vanity was mainly about his abilities; he’d loved to spar with the Enforcers, knowing he’d win.
Still, none of that mattered. Her time away from Dale had taught her that what she’d considered normal for so long, what her family had, really wasn’t natural.
Most other kinds of shifters had ruling packs, prides, and flocks, like wolves and felines, but those groups left the rest of their peers to do what they wanted on an ongoing basis; they only interfered when there was a true need for it. The Flavians hadn’t overseen the rest of the flocks; they’d ruled. And their monarchy had been despotic. Fair, just, caring, she’d liked to think, but still absolute.
It had only been a matter of time before someone rebelled, and, honestly, Ava even saw it as a necessary thing. As she’d said to the other Alphas, it was the twenty-first century, and even vampires had realized that no one liked to be ruled.
They hadn’t only desired to overthrow them, though. They wanted to eradicate them, not realizing that it would really mean their own doom. They’d done what they’d seen as necessary.
Well, not just that. They’d enjoyed killing her family and they’d taken pleasure in hurting her siblings.
Ava didn’t have a choice.
* * *
The drug they’d used only knocked her out for an hour, but she had the sense to control her breathing, and pretend to sleep, because while her consciousness came back quickly, she didn’t immediately regain control of her body.
If they’d paid attention, the shifters driving her would have felt the difference, but they were too giddy and victorious to care.
Although her eyes were blindfolded, and closed underneath, she felt it the second she passed the immaterial barrier keeping the rest of the world away from Dale. Some of her weariness disappeared, and, in her heart, despite everything that had happened here, she knew she was home.
“Did Max get everyone to the forum?” she heard Neri ask.
“No, just us. He said he wanted to make sure the bitch was broken before he showed her to the flock. You never know, they might try to free her or something. Why they all seem to care so much about her, I’ll never know.”
“She wasn’t the worst of them,” Roberto admitted reluctantly. “I would have preferred getting my talons on her brother.”
She managed to keep her gasp quiet. So Richard was alive. She hadn’t let herself think about it too much; if she didn’t know, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was gone.
She smelled a familiar fragrance, indicating they’d reached the far edge of the city, where the Bianchi family made the best wines and cheese; they were close. Tentatively, she attempted to move a finger, and smirked when it worked.
Then, she waited.
If she wasn’t mistaken, she had three abductors. They parked the van and walked out towards the back to grab her, chatting casually along the way.
“What do you think Max will do to her, then?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but he’s going to make a point - if we make it dirty and let the word spread, no doubt her brother will rush here to defend her honor. Then, we can get them all.”
Great plan, actually. Just not as good as hers.
“What if…” Neri cleared his throat. “I know they showed us proof that they weren’t even around when they said they were, that they aren’t related to the Flavia, but what if they were wrong? You know. Killing them both… that could mean our own end.”
“Don’t you worry about that. Max doesn’t plan on risking it. Richard, we’ll kill, but we’re keeping the bitch alive, just in…”
He’d opened the door, the idiot. Her eagle burst out of her skin so fast the chains binding her hands and feet were torn to shreds, along with her clothes. Although the animal would have loved to stay and scratch their eyes out, she just bulldozed her way through the three shifters. Her absolute priority was in line with Ava’s.
They needed Coveney here.
And, alright, a few other allies wouldn’t hurt, but if they didn’t succeed, they’d never see him again. Which wasn’t an option.
She heard a high-pitched call, too close to ignore, but, against her instincts to turn and fight whoever was coming at her, she flew straight towards the very place where they’d wanted her.
She was lucky they had been fed some nonsense that made them disregard everything her family had said. Otherwi
se, they might never have brought her to Dale. Otherwise, they definitely wouldn’t have planned to take her to the forum, a long open roofed hall with high columns at each side, each of which was adorned with statues. Unlike the rest of what may have been done back in the day, it wasn’t effigies of gods; they were symbols of nature - trees, leaves, fire, air, earth. Some showed stars, too.
Never slowing to soften her landing, she crashed onto the floor, and begged her eagle to let her shift back immediately. The bird relented instantly, giving her back her limbs, and more importantly, her vocal cords.
There, right in the middle of the place where their initial protection spell had been cast, she said one simple word.
“Aperire.”
Good thing she was proficient in Latin, too.
As they were bid by their rightful owner, every ward clouding Dale from the eyes of the world opened.
Chapter 21
Helpless Damsel
So, that was an insight into what insanity might be like. Coveney stared into the void, the empty road ahead, where the rest of them had been waiting.
The eagles had been reluctant to let them – Coveney, Ace, Rye and Knox – tag along on their little rescue mission, but his Alphas hadn’t budged. Ava was part of their prides, and they had no intention of being kept out of the action. They’d relented. Good thing, too: nothing could have kept Coveney away from Ava.
The eagles that had visited Dale in the past swore it was there. All he saw was a bunch of strangers, along with his Alphas and Knox, all waiting on the side of the road. Jas had stayed at their hotel with Zack.
The only thing that kept him from entirely losing his mind was that, somehow, he felt her.
“How does this thing work? According to Google Maps, there’s nothing here.”
“It wouldn’t be much of a magical ward if it showed up on Maps,” Knox remarked.
Still, he didn’t know it was possible to so completely cloak anything, let alone an entire city.
“Witches were a little more ‘hard rock’ back in the day,” the wolf explained. “Virgin sacrifice, firstborns, orgies. All that stuff makes for stronger magic than what they do now.”
“So when,” he wasn’t saying if, “she pulls the wards down, it’s going to appear on Maps. Can she put them back up?”
Knox shook his head. “No living coven I know of can manage that. We’re going to watch regulars freak out that there’s a whole city out there that they didn’t know a thing about. And talk about real estate value.”
An eagle chuckled. “Yeah, let them try to take it from us.”
“If I heard it right, the Flavian kept records old enough to make any historian hard. There’s no way…”
Knox stopped talking because all of a sudden, Dale was there, right in front of his eyes.
If no one had told him the place was called Dale, Coveney might have gone with the Garden of Eden, or maybe Olympus. Picturesque didn’t begin to cover it. There was a valley covered with fields, some green, some golden, smelling of freshly cut hay. He saw sunflowers, poppies, grapes; a few horses ran freely at the bottom of a large hill. Rows of cypress trees led to a white city; each flat-roofed, elegant house seemed fit for a king. Right at the peak, there was a palace. They were too far away, so Coveney didn’t see its fountains, its obsidian and gold halls, its statues by the world’s most acclaimed artists over the ages. Still, he said, “Well, fuck me,” right before he shifted, and started running towards his mate.
* * *
The eagles made it first, obviously. He knew they would. What he hadn’t expected was that none of them would have had any work left by this point.
It wasn’t like the rebels had all of a sudden decided to lay down their arms and surrender, either. By the looks of it, they’d at least attempted to fight their way out of it.
When he made it, Ava was standing naked in the middle of the forum, holding a stranger hard in her little arms. He was in an equal state of undress and bloodiness. It pissed Coveney off for all of two seconds, before he saw the tall, muscular shifter’s violet eyes.
Richard. That was her brother.
He forced himself to stay back, to let her have her moment.
There were various body parts at their feet, bird and human.
“You do know some of your avian friends came from China for this, right?” Knox mused out loud.
He didn’t seem to mind being thoroughly ignored.
The siblings finally turned to them, both grinning from ear to ear. The moment they did, Coveney let his animal pounce and rub himself all over her legs to make sure she was really there, really in one piece.
“Richard, this is my mate, Coveney.”
He narrowed his eyes, zeroing in on the white tiger.
“A cat.”
Coveney roared in response. Would it kill them all to say ‘tiger’ instead?
“Oh, no, don’t you start being a pain, brother. Maybe if you’d looked at other breeds of shifters, you might have found your own mate.”
Richard snorted.
“See this?” he pointed to the bodies. “Mess up and you’ll wish I’d just dismembered you.”
“Threaten him and you’ll just wish I didn’t have incriminating pictures of you,” his mate defended him as he shifted back.
His tiger had needed reassurance, but so did he. Pulling her towards him, burying his head in her hair and inhaling all her sweetness, he finally breathed easily.
“What happened?”
“Everything went as planned.”
She was lying. He could tell.
“Ava…”
“She was reckless,” Richard filled in. “Hurt herself on her way down and found herself surrounded by enemies, with a bad arm. Which was lucky for them, or it wouldn’t have been a challenge. She’d managed to blind that one,” he waved towards a corpse, “and bite that one’s finger off when I made it. Gave her a second to shift. Then, well,” he winced, then shrugged. “They started it.”
Fuck. He wanted to ask how whatever they’d done had resulted in so many bits and pieces of people, but thought better of it.
Rye couldn’t help himself, though. “How the heck did you get a dozen full-grown eagles? I mean, they did take your flock.”
Ava averted her eyes. Again, her brother had no issue spelling things out. “We lost, last time, because none of us thought to fight. Our parents were too shocked, our siblings were too freaked out. I flew out immediately to try to find Ava…”
“And I’d run,” the woman filled in, darkly. “We lost because I was too cowardly to stay and fight.”
It was more than that, though. In a few days, he’d seen a shift in her. He didn’t know her as well as he wanted to – not yet – but he’d peeked at her insecurities, her belief that she wasn’t worth as much as the rest of her siblings, when he’d first met her. Perhaps thanks to Knox, or to the Alpha eagles who’d chosen to follow her, that was gone now. And what was left was a powerful, determined, dominant leader.
Coveney smirked. Yeah. He was going to be the bottom for the rest of his days.
The Alphas she’d called to her aid were watching, visibly uneasy at what they’d witnessed.
“Sorry, I did genuinely think I needed help,” she told them.
Her brother ruffled her hair, calling her an idiot.
“Still, you came, and I’ll keep my word.” She glanced towards Richard. “This place should belong to all of us. The whole history of the world, from the shifter point of view, is recorded in our library - I don’t think anyone else has a full account like that.”
“I beg to differ,” Knox piped in.
Her brother nodded slowly. “Whatever you say. This place gives me the creeps anyway.”
The Alphas didn’t seem reassured. Finally, one spoke.
“This isn’t normal. I’ve heard your family trained well, but it should have taken an entire flock to tear them apart like that. You… there’s a reason why you guys were the head of our kind.”
/> There was. Not one that she was willing to say out loud, though. She held the Alpha’s gaze without saying a word, until he looked away.
“Dale can become a public place if you want,” he said. “But the Ryder flock will still honor its pledge to your house.”
Ava was taken aback, but instead of seeming all awkward, like Coveney thought she might, she inclined her head at the same time as her brother, accepting it gracefully.
Each Alpha swore the same oath that day, as Ace and Rye carefully watched from a distance. Coveney stayed at Ava’s side, feeling like a queen’s consort. There were worse things. Especially since, while she may have the upper hand in practically every other aspect, there was still one place where he was on top.
* * *
Please!” she yelled, shamelessly begging at the top of her voice.
He wasn’t having any of it, keeping her knees wide open and suckling on her folds, making her tremble and try her best to move. With her hands tied to the head of their bed, and her legs pinned in place, she had her work cut out for her.
“Please what, beautiful?”
He smirked as she glared at him. Shrugging, he just carried on teasing her pussy, stopping each time the pace of her breathing got faster, each time she started to reach the edge.
“You’re going to have to spell it out. It’s not like I can guess what you want me to do, can I now?”
The woman cursed him in a bunch of languages he didn’t recognize; he was pretty sure he got the gist of it, though. It was killing her. She was just too polite and well-bred to talk dirty, which made it imperative that he had to hear her do it.
Plus, she totally deserved it for making him worry for hours.
Eventually, she caved, screaming, “Please let me fucking come!” and who was he to deny his mate?
