by Nell Stark
“Oh, Val,” I murmured between the kisses I placed along her jawline. “Val, you feel so good.”
When I pinched her between my fingertips, her strength gave out and she called my name, collapsing back onto the mattress. I followed her down, marveling at the power I held over her in this sensual moment, and brushed my breasts across her glistening mouth. The loving swirl of her tongue inspired a groan from deep in my throat. She always made me feel so desirable. So cherished. But in that moment, I didn’t want tender romance. I wanted to feel the potent depth of her need for me—a need beyond pleasure, beyond even love. I needed her teeth in my skin.
Giving in to gravity, I slid down until my mouth was next to her ear. “I want you slow, Valentine. I want you to take your time with me. But not right now.” Her body went taut and I punctuated my words with a sucking kiss to her sensitive earlobe. “Right now, I need you not to hold back. Right now, I need to feel you come with your teeth in my neck.” She shivered, and I hid a triumphant smile against her skin. “Take me. Please.”
The weakness, the hesitancy, the doubt—all of it disappeared in one powerful surge of her muscles. And as I stared into her handsome face, her cheeks flushed with desire and her eyes dark in passion, the world righted itself. This was where I belonged.
“Off,” Val growled, making quick work of the buttons on my jeans. She kicked away her shorts and then there were no barriers between us. She cupped my cheek as she slid one thigh against me, and I knew the moment she felt how very wet I was by the thirst that twisted her lips.
Her hand against my face began to move, sliding down over my shoulder and along the outer curve of my breast—Valentine mapping me, anchoring me with her possessive touch. As her fingers slid between my legs, I closed my eyes in pleasure.
“No,” she said harshly, stilling her hand. “Keep them open.”
“Val…” her name left my lips on a groan as I obeyed. When my eyes locked with hers, she stroked me, a whisper-light touch. I cried out, my entire body clenching, the pleasure made all the more powerful by the intensity of her hungry gaze.
“You’re mine,” she said, lowering her head as she continued to tease me. Overwhelmed with sensation, my back arched. And then she was kissing me—a fierce, bruising, possessive kiss. She stole my breath before trailing her lips down, down from the corner of my mouth, over my jaw, down along my neck where the staccato of my racing pulse was strongest.
“So beautiful,” she said, tracing the lines of my veins with her lips. “Alexa. I need you.”
The sharp flash of pain as her teeth broke my skin merged with the inexpressible pleasure of her fingers pushing deep into my body. She claimed me fully, and I screamed. I pulled her closer as every muscle contracted, tangling my fingers in her hair and twining my legs with hers. Her hips surged, and through the blazing tide of my release, I rejoiced that she had found hers.
Val drank and drank, coaxing every last shudder from me until I lay quiescent. When she stilled her hand and withdrew from my neck, I shivered at the loss. She stayed where she was, pressing me into the mattress, tenderly licking the tiny wounds closed as she eased her fingers from my body.
Peace suffused me and I drifted, dimly aware of Val turning down the covers and sliding me between the sheets. She wrapped herself around me and I turned into her embrace.
“So good,” I slurred, burrowing my face into her neck and breathing in the fragrance of her familiar, beloved scent. “Don’t you see? No more pushing me away. Promise.”
She stroked my hair. “I can’t live without you,” she said, and though she meant the words to be reassuring, the note of sorrow in her voice made my heart ache.
“Val—”
She shook her head and deepened her touch, massaging my scalp. “Sleep now, baby.”
“But what about everything that’s happening?” I said, struggling to muster my thoughts. Helen might have told both Val and me to lie low, but I knew Val wouldn’t be content to cool her heels while the maelstrom raged around us. And neither was I. “First Brenner, and now this disease. What are we going to do?”
I expected her to stop then, to turn her focus from me to what our plan of action should be. But the soothing rhythm of her fingers never faltered. “We’ll figure it out later,” she said. “Rest. You need it. We both do.”
Sighing, I let myself relax into her touch. We were together again. Everything would be all right. I knew it. I’d prove it to her, day after day, until every one of her doubts disappeared. Surrendering to my own exhaustion, I let the cadence of her words pull me under.
“I love you, Alexa. Sleep.”
Chapter Seventeen
The conference room adjacent to Karma’s office was barely large enough to fit us all, but it had been the only viable option. Trying to be circumspect, I moved my chair to the right to put just a few more inches between myself and Sebastian. My panther, sensing his connection to the powerful alpha who had terrorized us across the ocean, was on high alert. She radiated distrust and suspicion, and had it been up to her, we would have been on the other side of the building by now. Her unease was compounded by my own; Sebastian still regarded Val with the kind of propriety look that wasn’t appropriate on anyone but me. Had he not been our ally, I would have been tempted to teach him a lesson.
Karma patted my knee in reassurance as I edged closer. We had just spent an hour in her office, catching up over coffee. For a good day and a half, I hadn’t had the urge to leave Val’s bed. Wrapped around each other, we had slept long and hard, waking only to eat and make love. But the stronger I began to feel, the more stir-crazy I became. It had been a relief to leave the narrow confines of our room, though Val had vehemently protested.
Only when I forced her to admit that Karma had yet to show any sign at all of being ill had she relented. I didn’t like making her upset, and I never wanted to hurt her. But if I’d remained sequestered for much longer, the panther’s claustrophobia might have won out over my own ego.
I had several reasons for wanting to talk to Karma in private. I’d missed her over the summer and wanted to share stories of my time at Telassar. But more importantly, I wanted her take on what had happened that night, almost a week ago now, when Valentine had lost control. Once I’d satisfied her curiosity about what it had been like to confront Balthasar Brenner, I asked her to tell me about Val.
“I went to your apartment,” Karma had said. “Malcolm had just received news about Telassar from Nadia—you must have met her? She called in once she reached safe haven in Djerba.” When I nodded, she went on. “I knocked on your door, and then again when Val didn’t answer. She finally opened it. I think she had been sleeping.”
I smiled at the thought of sleepy Valentine: her features soft and vulnerable, the slow blink of her blue eyes as she tried to make sense of the waking world. But that was my Valentine, the one who woke in my arms after a restful night of sleep. I could only imagine how frantic Val had looked when she’d opened the door for Karma.
“I went inside. I told her about the siege, and Brenner. That you and Constantine were missing.” Karma had reached out for my hand. “I think I made a mistake then. She was upset, so I put my arm around her. As we kept talking, she grew more and more tense. I attributed that to her being worried about you.”
The panther’s hackles had risen as jealousy flared beneath my skin, hot and sharp. I didn’t blame Karma—she had only been trying to comfort Val—but it had been a struggle not to react. “What happened after that?”
“She was telling me about a dream she’d had. About Brenner. I was asking questions. And then…” She had trailed off, and I’d wondered if she was reliving the memory. “Sometimes I think that we—that vampires and Weres—have more in common than we realize.”
“How so?”
“Valentine fought against the impulse to drink from me. She lost.” Karma had shrugged. “How many times have I fought my jackal and lost?”
“You won that night,” I’d said, a
llowing the gratitude that I felt to saturate my voice.
Karma had shuddered. “It was a close thing.”
“You knocked her out and brought her here?”
“Directly to Clavier, yes.”
Another lance of anger had shot up my spine and set my panther snarling. “He gave her blood.”
“What?” She’d sounded shocked. Most shifters believed that my relationship with Valentine was perverted—a kind of slavery. But Karma knew the idea had been mine from the beginning. She saw how much we loved each other, and she respected it. “I went in to see her as soon as Clavier would let me. She wasn’t hooked up to anything then.”
I still wanted to rip him limb from limb for violating Valentine—for believing he had the right to ignore her wishes when it came to the nature of her very existence.
“Val made him take it out when she woke up.”
“Alexa, I am so sor—”
“No,” I had said gently, squeezing her hand. “You are not allowed to apologize. You did everything you could to help her, and in a way, you even saved her life.” I had shaken her fingers lightly to get her to meet my gaze. “Thank you.”
“Is everything going to be all right?” she’d asked after a moment of hesitation.
I had wanted to say yes—a confident, unequivocal yes. But I couldn’t. “I hope so.”
“We have a problem,” said Val, startling me out of my memory. As she paced the length of the small room, my gaze lingered with appreciation on the defined muscles of her upper arms, the gentle swell of her breasts beneath her tight gray T-shirt, the pale band of skin between its hem and her low-slung jeans. Even in the midst of so much chaos, she stirred my body and my heart.
“Just one?” Sebastian’s words were heavy with irony.
Val shot him an irritated glance. They had grown close in my absence, and I didn’t like it. While I wasn’t about to begrudge Val a friendship, I would never be convinced that Sebastian didn’t have some kind of design on her.
“We know there’s a pathogen out there. We know that it’s killed. We know that the Consortium is covering up its existence.” She stopped behind my chair and her fingers brushed my neck—to reassure either herself or me, I couldn’t tell. At her gentle touch, I closed my eyes. The panther purred.
“Let’s take a step back,” Karma said into the silence. “Helen and Malcolm have been distracted by the ADA’s inquiries into Consortium business practices for most of the past month. Without any warning, Brenner razes Sybaris and seizes Telassar in the space of a week. And now, Weres are dying mysteriously.”
I frowned at the logical conclusion. “A three-pronged attack, and not a coincidence?”
“Where my father is concerned,” said Sebastian, “it’s always best to assume the worst.”
“Both Helen and Malcolm are completely preoccupied by his movements,” said Karma. “Malcolm has encouraged me to investigate the disease, but his primary concern seems to be that Brenner will attempt a takeover here.”
“Here?” I was incredulous. “He can’t risk that kind of exposure.”
“What if this disease is a forerunner?” Sebastian said. “If it creates a large enough vacuum, he can waltz right in to power, virtually unopposed. By Malcolm, anyway.”
“Why only target Weres, then?” I asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. I got the distinct impression, after listening to him rant and rave, that he wants vampires out of the picture. Categorically.”
“At this point, I don’t care what he wants.” Val looked grim. “What I care about is that there’s some kind of pathogen out there and we still know virtually nothing about it.” She scrubbed a hand through her hair. “I don’t think it’s airborne, but I can’t be sure, and I’ve been worse than useless since Helen put me under house arrest. If I could get to my lab, I’d have at least a little more information. I put in a call to my friend who is running tests on Shade’s blood, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
“It’s definitely spreading,” Sebastian said. “Especially among the hardcore user crowd.”
“Two of Malcolm’s lieutenants fell ill last week,” Karma added. “But they don’t fit that profile.”
“The rumors are spreading even faster than whatever this thing is,” Sebastian said. “Luna has been emptier by the night.”
“Rumors?” I asked.
“My people have heard it compared to HIV on several occasions.” He bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. “So much for stopping a panic.”
My pulse spiked and the panther instinctively shoved at the boundaries of my psyche. I turned in my chair and met Val’s troubled gaze. “Is there any truth to that analogy?”
“Yes and no.” She began to pace again. “It’s probably transmitted in the same ways as HIV. And I suspect that, like HIV, the pathogen itself isn’t fatal. But unlike HIV, this doesn’t seem to be an immune disorder. My best guess at this point is that what killed Gwendolyn, for example, was…well, the tiger.”
Karma leaned forward, clearly alarmed. “Her other half killed her?”
“She couldn’t make the change,” said Sebastian. “But she couldn’t stop it, either.”
Karma reacted by speaking several words in a language I didn’t recognize. They didn’t sound good. I reached for Val’s hand and squeezed tightly.
“That must have been a terrible way to die.”
“The next full moon is a few weeks away.” Karma’s voice wavered. “What will happen to the ones who are infected? Will they also die?”
Silence greeted her question. I imagined what it would be like—feeling the full glory of the moon as it rose above the horizon and pulled at my blood, wanting nothing more than to surrender to the wild beauty of the hunt…only to be blocked, over and over, from obeying its insistent call.
Torture. It would be torture.
“I don’t know,” Val said angrily. “God damn it, I don’t know.”
We were interrupted by a knock at the door, and as Karma got up to answer it, I drew Val’s hand to my lips. Pressing a gentle kiss in each space between her knuckles, I willed her to focus on me, alive and well. On us, back together again. As frightening as this illness was, especially on top of everything else, I felt confident that I would be safe. I didn’t inject drugs, and I certainly wasn’t sleeping with anyone except Valentine.
“Sebastian Brenner.” A familiar voice reverberated off the close walls, and I looked up to the sight of Darren and another member of Helen’s guard, the vampire who had accompanied them both to the Missionary’s loft, so many months ago. The one who, I suspected, had set fire to the place afterward. He was looking at Sebastian, who lounged in his chair, feet propped insouciantly on the table.
“This can’t be good,” Val muttered, moving even closer to me.
“We are under orders to detain you.” The vampire wore a gun clipped to the waist of his dark jeans, and I wondered whether its chambers were filled with bullets or tranquilizer darts.
“To detain me?” More quickly than my eyes could follow, Sebastian was on his feet, his knees bent as though poised to flee. Or fight. Across the room, Karma tensed. “On whose orders, exactly?”
“Mine.” Helen stepped into view behind her crony and rested a hand on his shoulder. He moved aside just enough for her to enter the room, but his gaze never left Sebastian.
“Unsurprising.” Sebastian cocked his head, and I could almost hear the debate that raged between him and his wolf. To strike out? To escape? To yield?
“On what grounds?” Karma asked, outrage seeping into her voice.
Helen didn’t so much as spare her a glance. “Suspected sedition.”
Sebastian’s devil-may-care smile hid a snarl. “You’re an idiot. And this is an act of desperation. In my case, the apple landed quite far from the tree.”
I didn’t particularly like him, but in that moment, my respect for him increased tenfold. It was refreshing to hear someone stand up to Helen. And I had no doubt that evidence of any involve
ment in his father’s activities didn’t exist. Helen was running scared. So was Malcolm, if he had signed off on what essentially qualified as internment.
“Are you going to come quietly?” said the vampire, palm poised above his gun. “Or not?”
Sebastian widened his eyes dramatically. “My, my, you do seem eager to put that weapon to use. I’d better not give you an excuse.” When he reached the doors, Darren cuffed his hands behind his back. I wondered whether he felt torn in his loyalties.
Sebastian glanced over one shoulder, the fake smile still plastered to his lips. “Feel free to come visit me at camp,” he said sarcastically before turning back to his captors. “All right, gentlemen. Arbeit macht frei, eh?”
They marched him down the hall, but as the echoes of their passage faded, Helen remained behind. Her gaze traveled over my body like a forced caress, and I struggled not to shudder. Finally, she turned the spotlight of her attention away from me and onto Val.
“You’re looking better, Valentine,” she said, her tone mocking.
Val ignored the bait. “Where will you hold him?”
“You are blowing this out of proportion, as usual.” Helen smoothed the front of her gray blazer. “We just want to ask him a few questions.”
Her patronizing tone made my panther lash her tail. Karma was struggling, too—I could tell from the white-knuckled grip that she had on the back of the nearest chair. But if she was able to sense our unrest, Helen was totally unfazed by it. She glanced at her watch, then back at Val.
“Be safe.”
And then she was gone.
As soon as the door closed, Karma collapsed into her chair. “I need to talk to Malcolm,” she said. “Now.” But her shoulders trembled, and she made no move to get up.
“Do you think Helen’s acting alone?” I asked. “Or would he sign off on detaining Sebastian?”
Karma looked up, poised to answer…and froze.
“What?” I said, frowning. “What is it?” When she didn’t move, I turned to Val, only to watch the blood drain from her face. She even wavered on her feet, as though she might faint.
