Thearon’s phone flipped up and down; smooth glass, then textured metal, then smooth glass again. Thearon was betting himself whether he would lose his cool and shatter this one against the wall. By this point, his assistants must have a secret closet full of iPhones ready to go. Thearon was zoning out, watching the nameless New Orleans residents walk up and down the sleepy street. It really was pointless, watching the footage of this particular restaurant. Thearon knew it well, it was a favorite of his and Parker’s – best gumbo in the city, he thought – but it was a hole in the wall and located on a residential street to boot. He knew Parker had chosen it for that very reason. It was a safe place to take the Queen.
So when Thearon noticed the first pair of Werebeasts walk by the entrance to the restaurant, he didn’t think much of it. They were just another couple out for a walk on a beautiful night. When the second pair of Werebeasts walked by, Thearon stopped playing with his phone. They weren’t the royal Werebeasts he and Lavinia had spied on at the Tea Party, but still his instincts were triggered.
When the third pairing walked by, Thearon’s gut started sending out a red alarm. Immediately, he started mobilizing: texting Parker and then texting Lavinia. For her text, he simply started writing after an apology text he had started earlier. In his mind, there wasn’t even time to erase what he’d written before.
***
Sitting in a dark corner booth of the small seafood restaurant, Lavinia was feeling tipsy. It was a combination of good wine, flirtatious conversation and a very sexy view. Parker simply glowed in the candlelight of the restaurant. His clear blue eyes were set in a face with strong lines and tanned skin. He’d rolled his sleeves up and Lavinia couldn’t help but ogle his forearm muscles as he talked with his hands and lifted the glass of wine to his full lips. For the world, she wanted to see him use that mouth and those hands on her body. Lavinia had experienced Thearon alone and it had defied expectations. Surely, a man as emotionally connected as Parker would blow the Omega out of the water.
“How was the gumbo?” Parker asked, splitting the last of the wine between their glasses.
“Well, I believe it was the best in the city.” Lavinia proclaimed with a sparkle in her eye, “Obviously, I’m the best judge of such things as this is my first experience at a restaurant outside of the Were community.”
“I always forget that you grew up sequestered from everything. When we talk about stuff, you always know what’s going on. I forget the experience wasn’t first hand.”
Lavinia took a healthy sip of wine and thought about her unusual life, “I wouldn’t say it wasn’t first hand. I watched and read and did everything myself, it’s just that my options were cultivated by someone else. Mainly, the preferences of the Tribe and what you and Thearon were interested in. First and foremost, the Queen is groomed for her Kings.”
Parker raised an eyebrow in mock outrage, “Kings? What Kings? Do I have more men to share you with?”
Lavinia laughed, “Fine, my Alpha and Omega.”
“That’s better. Don’t create more men for me to deal with.”
Lavinia brushed her hair back, the wine making her bold, “Does it bother you to share me with Thearon?”
Parker sat back and thought about the question, “No, in all honesty, not with Thearon. I’ve trained my entire life to be a certain person as well. That person just happens to be the other half of Thearon. We share everything – we always have. It feels natural to be half of what pleasures you.”
“Well, I’m learning I like to be pleasured,” Lavinia’s cheeks were flushed; whether with wine or lust she wasn’t sure, perhaps some combination of the two.
“I don’t like that I haven’t had the pleasure of pleasing you since our wedding ceremony. That’s far too long.”
Lavinia watched as Parker licked his lips. She could practically see him deciding which of her bits he’d like to eat first. Lavinia swallowed hard, “The night is young, my Alpha.”
Parker gave Lavinia a heart-stopping grin and started to lean across the table to give her a kiss when his phone pinged with a text. Sheepishly, he sat down and retrieved the phone. Lavinia understood, just because he was on a date with her didn’t mean he could stop being Alpha for a night. He was always on call for the Tribe.
Brows furrowed, Parker swiped at his phone and ripped off a swift text. Looking back up at Lavinia, he apologized, “Sorry, I’m not allowed to go off the grid. Where were we?”
“I think we were headed for a meeting of the minds,” Lavinia said leaning over the table toward Parker for a kiss as her own phone gave off an urgent beep. With a dry laugh, she too sat down to take the text. Glancing down, she saw that it was Thearon. The first line of text was the start of yet another apology and she wasn’t in the mood to take it this evening. Things were going far too smooth with Parker to bring in her complications with Thearon. Hitting ignore, Lavinia sat up and asked Parker, “Want to get out of here? You did promise me dancing…”
Parker grinned and moved out of the booth with an ease surprising for a man his size. Offering his arm, Lavinia gathered her purse and threaded her arm through his. It felt wonderful to be tucked next to him. The bulk of his bicep, and the strong shoulder, made her feel indescribably safe. They passed the two plain clothed guards on their way out. As the guards were still settling their bill, Parker motioned they would head to the car to wait.
They were only three steps out of the building – two away from the open door to the armored vehicle – when it happened. A shot rang out and things went blurry. The sounds were intense: the loud report of the gun, a grunt and a shout from Parker and the fury of footsteps running toward and away from her. The feel of Parker knocking her to the ground, her body being covered not once but twice: Parker and then what must have been a guard. The bite of pain was a sharp feeling that confused Lavinia about where it was coming from. Parker’s hit? The uneven bricks of the sidewalk? It wasn’t until she was floating on a cloud of unconsciousness that Lavinia wondered if the cause of the pain could have possibly been a bullet...
CHAPTER SIX
Thearon paced back and forth in front of the window, playing games with himself. If he didn’t look for ten minutes. Then, when he did, something will have changed. If he waited to look until after Parker exploded again and Thearon calmed him down again, things would be different. If he counted the beeps of the machine until he reached one hundred, when he looked, things would be different.
Unable to help himself, Thearon looked through the thick paned glass. It was threaded through with the crosshatching of wires, which Thearon thought was a little excessive as the woman it encased looked as calm as sleeping beauty. If not for the multitude of wires and tubes attached to her thin and bruised body, he could convince himself she was simply asleep instead of fighting for her life.
The sound of Parker’s irritation drew his gaze. It was time again for the second game in his repertoire: Being the other half of Parker’s conscience.
“This was my entire fault. I nodded to our security guards. Seriously, Thearon, I nodded at them like some jackass who didn’t need security guards in the first place. Like I was going to be enough to protect us. Logic demands that the very need for an armed guard negates the ability to protect oneself from a threat. Ugh, I’m supposed to be the smart one.”
Thearon quirked a weary eyebrow and watched as Parker ran a frustrated hand through his hair, tousling the golden locks in a way that simply screamed angst. You know what I mean. I’m supposed to be the one who’s good at outings like that. I’m the one destined to navigate the social waters. It was supposed to be a quiet night; a safe place…”
In Parker’s frustration, his bear started to come out, claws forming at the tips of his fingers as his muscles started to quiver and realign. Thearon sighed. They’d been going through the events leading up to the shooting again and again; at this point the words he spoke to Parker were coming out on autopilot.
“You couldn’t have known. You followed pr
ocedure and one of the two guards should have gone with you to the car. That being said, the risk was low and you only had about ten feet to cover before you were in an armored car. Preliminary ballistics shows that even with the guard, they had a sharpshooter aiming for Lavinia and the guard would have done little to prevent the attack. The shove you gave her was probably what saved her life. You have to be thankful for that.”
Thearon looked toward Parker to gauge if the bear had gone away; that would be his signal to look into the room once again—to see if her beautiful chocolate colored eyes were finally open. The doctor had said…
“Thankful,” Parker spat. “Thankful for what? That our wife is now lingering in critical condition rather than dead on arrival?”
Thearon flinched at Parker’s words. He didn’t want to think about Lavinia doing anything other than opening her eyes of her own volition.
“She’s going to be fine. She’s going to live. She’s strong.”
“How would you know that? We’ve been married for what, a week now? For most of that time, the two of you were in various forms of fights. Hell, I saw less of her because of you. I wouldn’t even have been out on that damn date, if you hadn’t upset her. I had to chase her down like a fox in a hole.”
Thearon whipped his attention away from his wife’s hospital room door to address his husband. “How dare you blame this on me? It’s not my fault that Lavinia was shot tonight or that the two of you were at that restaurant.”
“Well you’ve spent the last few hours telling me it isn’t my fault either.”
Thearon tried desperately to control his breath. “It’s not.”
“Well it has to be someone’s fault. If you weren’t the reason we were on that date, and by the way, you were, then as head of security, aren’t you the reason the second guard didn’t follow us out to the car?”
A red haze crept into Thearon’s vision and his hands began to clench and unclench in an attempt to stave off their transformation into his bear form. The last thing they needed in a hospital was a mated bear on the loose. From a security standpoint, it was the worst possible scenario.
Choosing his words carefully Thearon responded, “Parker, as I’ve told you before, both you and the guard were aware that the royal couple should be escorted to and from any building with an armed guard. I’m choosing to look at the situation from a detached perspective, where I can see that the risk assessment of the situation should have been low. I can also see from preliminary reports that the addition of one or both guards would have had little effect on the proximity of the gunman and our assessment of that gunman’s probable ability. I’m choosing to move forward into the future, rather than focus on the what-ifs. Logically dwelling on things we cannot fix does no good.”
Parker took that statement like a bull who had just seen a red cape flash in front of its eyes. Stalking toward his husband, Parker forced Thearon back against the wall. Fuming he spat, “Well, fuck you too, man. You are a heartless bastard if you don’t feel the need to blame something or crush someone against the wall.” Taking a hand and pinning Thearon against the , Parker acted out his statement with Thearon’s windpipe.
Feeling the air slowly cut off to his body, Thearon reveled in the violence of the action; letting it give him a reason to physically retaliate. Gripping Parker’s wrist in both of his still semi-human hands Thearon twisted the skin in two different directions. An Indian burn, they would have called it as little cubs, but as an adult with partially morphed bear muscles the action almost ripped the skin from Parker’s forearm.
With a grunt, Parker let go of Thearon’s throat and attempted to knee him in the balls. Blocking the strike with one suit-clad leg, Thearon shoved his shoulder into Parker’s chest with a grunt and watched as the almost seven foot Werebear slammed into the cinderblock wall opposite Lavinia’s room with a satisfying crunch. Dust fell on the golden boy as tiny spiderweb cracks appeared around the outline of his body.
Parker stepped forward, ready to rush at Thearon like a linebacker, when Lavinia’s doctor came rushing around the corner and threw himself between the men. As Parker suddenly put the brakes on his next charge, he almost fell over, for loss of balance.
Panting, with both hands held up, the doctor addressed the men. “Hey now! The cinderblock wall is one thing, but if you tackle Thearon against the wall to your wife’s room that plaster is going to fold like a cheap suit. It was not built to withstand half a ton of Werebear being thrown at it.”
Both Parker and Thearon stood up a little straighter, chastised. Thearon turned to address the worried doctor, “Sir, I don’t know how you’ve chosen to judge our weight, but I assure you, half a ton is a low estimate.”
The doctor closed his eyes and nodded to himself. Thearon secretly wondered if he was praying for control. As a Werelion, the doctor wasn’t exactly a small man himself, and if he so chose could have added to a fair fight, not that hospital administration would have liked that story to make the rounds.
“I need to know that the two of you can control yourselves while you’re here. You’ll be asked to leave if you continue to disrupt not only your wife’s care, but the care of others in the intensive care wing. The nurses are nervous to walk past you to care for the other patients.”
Both Thearon and Parker slowly looked around. True to the doctor’s word, there were a few women on either end of the hallway waiting with carts and clipboards to pass through the battle zone. Suddenly, Thearon felt exhausted as the fight leaked from his system.
“I apologize. We never meant to interrupt the function of the hospital. Our emotions got the better of us.” As Parker spoke, he gave Thearon a look that said he was sorry. Thearon chose to accept the unspoken apology. They would need to lean on each other if what the doctor said next wasn’t good.
The doctor nodded at Parker, “I understand. You’re far from the first and won’t be the last to experience a loss of control while waiting for news about a family member.”
“Our Queen, doctor,” Thearon modified.
“Yes, I’m sorry, your Queen. What I was on my way to tell you when I heard the sound of a wall giving way, was that you can see your wife now. She’s finally awake.”
As one, both Parker and Thearon turned toward the hospital room. Sure enough, amid the tumult of their fight, the beeps had started a new rhythm and Lavinia’s beautiful eyes were fluttering open.
*
Octavius looked around the cramped room with irritation. True, he was in the penthouse of one of the oldest hotels in the French Quarter. It was appointed for royalty, but it was also noisy and disgusting. thanks to the twenty-four hour party that was Mardi Gras. They weren’t supposed to be here still. Octavius hadn’t come to New Orleans to throw cheap beads at women for a flash of their breasts, though some of the members of his team were choosing to look at that aspect of the situation as “the bright side.” Octavius thought it meant that there needed to be a larger culling of the species before they were through.
The point of this mission was to incapacitate the ruling structure of the LeKing Tribe. To prove that their belief in a polygamous marriage was not fate, but an immoral structure that pandered to their beastly natures. Right now, the bride should be dead and the fate of the LeKing Tribe collapsing in upon itself. The whore was the lynchpin of the entire royal unit—without her, their current structure failed to work.
They would be forced to accept that each of their leaders needed a single wife because gods knew no other woman would want to take the position on short notice. Their damn Queen needed to be trained for almost fifteen years of her life to deal with the emotional and societal ramifications of having two husbands. That alone proved how disgusting their marriage was.
Octavius looked around the sitting room of the penthouse, watching the other Weres catch up on their royal business. None of them were essential to their tribes, not even Octavius. They were a group of second and third sons. In the past century, they would have been relegated to church or
tribal military positions. However, in the information age and an age of medical advancement, they weren’t needed as alternate leaders of their tribe, or for other figurehead positions.
It’s true what they say though, in every event there is a silver lining. Finally, in this day and age, the second and third sons were perfectly aligned to take down the cancers that plagued the Werebeast society. Those individual Werebeasts and Tribes were holding their elite species in the shadows of the world.
How humans, with all of their weakness and disgusting traits, were able to hold sway over the world was beyond Octavius. Werebeasts in general were healthier, stronger, and smarter than the humans as a whole, and for Werebeasts to live cowering behind the human society—to live on the fringes of the world—was simply not right.
It was true their first mission on New Year’s had been a failure. They had sent emissaries to do the work of royals and the common Weres had botched the entire thing. They wanted to kill the future king of a Werehorse tribe who was handicapped. The boy couldn’t walk without assistance, and furthering his blood in the royal arena was yet another cancer that would slowly eat at the strength of Werebeasts as a whole.
When the mission had become national news in both the human and Were community, it was already too late to turn back. Plans were already in place for their second strike, the LeKing Tribe’s polygamous royal union, and it was too late to turn back.
Octavius knew that the kings of their tribes were not happy with the result of the shooting. Some of the others on the team were hopeful that the bride would simply die in her coma, but Octavius could feel in his gut that she was going to live, and be harder to kill because of it. Now, they were behind schedule and stuck in this ghastly ornate hotel; the scent of beer, bourbon, and sex wafting up through the open windows. They needed a new plan of attack and they needed it fast.
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