by Milana Jacks
The man took a step forward and opened the sliding door near the showerhead. I scooted, squeezed into the right corner, cold tile at my back. Shivers came, my knees threatened to fold, my teeth chattered, a combination of fear-induced adrenaline and a body disconnected from a very tired brain.
He said something and turned up his palm.
“Wha…what do you want? I can’t hear you.” The water pounded the tub. I didn’t dare move to shut it off. Just as well. A large hand attached to a tattooed forearm lowered the spigot. Now I heard the silence. When the water was hitting the tiles, it felt like a companion. Or maybe it was another shield, something to focus on and keep us apart. Silence wasn’t golden. They were wrong. Silence was deadly.
Bare, wet, my feet set on the slippery bathtub floor, I squeezed the half-full coconut shampoo bottle when his hand closed on the handle of the door in front of me. Swiping my wet hair away from my face, I widened my stance, bent slightly at the knees. All right.
He slid open the door.
I squirted shampoo in his face and aimed a kick at his balls. White shampoo goo splattered the wall. He cursed, stepped away, and wiped his eyes. His red eyes.
Oh hell.
“Motherfuck, Vice. You scared the shit out of me!” I threw the bottle at his chest. “What? How…how did you find me?” Heart in my throat, I didn’t know if I should hug him for not being anyone else, or hurt him for being Vice. Caught once more, I thought. But at least I’d live to run away again.
“Your things are packed, which makes all this easier,” he said and picked up a hand towel. He wiped the shampoo off his face and arms. “All I need you to do is come home with me. You’ve five seconds to decide if you want to walk out or get carried out in my arms, naked as the day you were born. You know which one I’d prefer.” Vice winked, his eyes a pale shade of red, which told me he didn’t feel as cool as he sounded. “Five,” he counted.
“I’m not going with you.”
“Two.”
“How did you find me?”
“Time’s up.” He took a step forward.
I kicked out again.
One hand caught my ankle, the other gripped my waist, and he jabbed his shoulder into my middle. I slipped on the tile, but he caught me and threw me over his shoulder. When I reached over, aiming for his eyes, he said, “Don’t make me hurt you. Calm your tits.”
He back-walked out of the bathroom to the bedroom, then dropped me on the carpet inside the walk-in closet. I scooted away, back against the far wall, and looked in the left corner, where I’d stashed another blowgun. No gun. He must’ve taken it along with the unused jumping equipment. “You packed everything,” I said. “When?”
“You’ve been in the shower for almost an hour. I packed, could’ve packed this entire house, and you wouldn’t even know. Finally, I just had to take a piss.”
Oh man, this was bad. I glanced about the closet for a weapon, but the only thing inside the closet, besides the clothes, the boxes, and the shoes, was Vice.
“Take it easy,” he said. His feet were shoulder-width apart, leading foot slightly bent at the knee. A beast ready to pounce. His black-pant-clad legs were long, his nude torso was rock solid, his shoulders were wide, and his shoulder-length blond mane was covered in white shampoo. The metal hangers rustled when he took a pair of jeans, ripped the tag with his teeth, and handed them to me.
I didn’t take the jeans.
Vice’s hard jaw tightened, but he flexed his chest muscles as my gaze roamed over his body. He smiled, showing perfect white canines. “What do you think, not bad for a mate, hm?”
“I wasn’t checking you out,” I lied.
“Mm-hm.”
“I’m not mated,” I said, slow and clear. “Never have been, never will be. You’re delusional.” In my opinion, if we never had sex, we weren’t mated.
He crossed his arms over his chest and widened his stance. “I will mate you soon. And when I mate you, I will put babies inside you so that you’ll think twice before stunt-diving off the fucking rooftops.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Good luck with that.”
Vice crouched to my eye level, determined to drill his point into my head. “I need you to understand my intentions. This is your last run. I’m taking you home for my safety and yours. You’re coming with me, and I won’t hurt you unless I have to.” He pronounced the latter carefully.
“I’m your mate. You can’t hurt me.”
Vice leaned in, his eyes ablaze. “I’m a little edgy after watching you dive, and I will do what’s needed to bring you in. Anything at all. Don’t fucking try me.” He turned up his palm, offering his hand. I smacked it away.
“Come on, Dewlyn, get up and get dressed.” He looked at his watch. “We’re taking off in thirty.”
My mission to help paired women involved a lot of flying, diving, and other dangerous activities, something Vice would never approve of. Staying away from him was crucial to my very existence. He reminded me of things I could never have. If I couldn’t fly, I would die.
Heart rate picking up, I took his offered hand, and when he pulled me flush against his body, I unhooked a wire hanger and slashed across his shoulder.
I shoved him and used the momentum of his fall to push him farther away. He knocked down the left side of the closet, and men’s coats fell on top of him. I ran for the door and yanked the handle. It was locked. “Damn!” I fiddled with it and kicked the door. Oh God, I couldn’t get out!
Palms slapped above my head. A hot body pressed against me, warm breath blew over my neck, and soft lips touched my shoulder. Face against the cold door, I froze in place, trapped. At my ear, Vice said, “My mate is batting her pretty shaved pussy in my face. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how your legs parted when I came closer. I know you feel how I feel about that.” Vice’s cock pressed right above my ass. It was harder than the door against my breasts. “Put some clothes on,” he whispered.
I tried to bite his forearm.
His body pressed on mine harder, and my breath nearly arrested.
“Baby, you know what happens when we fight,” he said. “Go ahead and struggle. Do it.”
I whimpered, heart in my throat, and not from fear but from my body’s response to his warm breath on my ear, to his lips over my shoulder, to the warning bite he placed there, and to the giant manhood that wanted to push inside me.
Instead of pushing inside me, Vice pressed his forearm across the back of my neck.
I heeled his balls. He sidestepped, cursed, and slapped his palm on the back of my thigh.
He lifted, and my legs spread.
He unzipped his pants.
I put my hands up. “I’ll get dressed!”
My jaw in his hand, he turned up my face. His eyes, a pale pink, gleamed hard as he swiped a thumb over my lips, then dipped his head. His lips, inches from mine; our breaths tangled, his smooth and even, mine short and hitched. Blood oozed from the cut on his shoulder, but he didn’t bother wiping it. He tightened his fingers on my jaw as his hand glided from my thigh to my ass.
“I’ll get dressed,” I repeated.
He squeezed my ass and grunted, and his full lips brushed my pinched ones. “We have proven methods to tame some of the wild bitches who refuse matings or just like it a bit on the rough side. It’s a weeklong training, but it works. Don’t worry, I’m gonna be as rough as you want it, so by the end of this week, I’ll have you on your back. Too tired of fighting and fucking, the only thing you’ll be able to do is spread your legs and let me eat your pussy. You’ll say, ‘Please, my Lord Almighty Vice, make my pussy purr.’”
Okay so this time around, something had changed. I could see it in his eyes. When my breath hitched, he chuckled and bent to get the towel I’d dropped on my way out the door. He bundled me in it, then picked me up and walked us outside.
Vice didn’t know I’d stolen anything from the office. He thought I was there for a stunt. Just as well, because I wouldn’t tell him about the shelter
. I doubted anyone would find the stolen key inside the nightstand between the Bible pages. I didn’t know why this beast had one in his home in the first place. Maybe for his mate because no beast minded our scriptures.
Chapter Three
Vice
Dewlyn snored, her mouth slightly open. In the back of the space car, Jamie at the helm, I relaxed back with my mate’s head on my lap. She hadn’t put it there on purpose. Oh no, she’d fallen asleep all uptight and upright and as far away from me as the backseat allowed, but in sleep, the subconscious worked wonders on her mind. Her body rested near mine because, subconsciously, Dewlyn really didn’t hate me.
Or so I told myself.
In either case, she would learn to unhate me, as I had learned to accept my mate was a flight risk and perhaps slightly more insane than the average human female. I brushed Dewlyn’s long red hair, noticing her natural hair growth at the roots. Naturally, her hair was brown, but she dyed it bright red. All the girls from her community colored their hair. When I asked Dewlyn why, she’d said it distinguished them as prettier than girls from other communities. Their father believed prettier women sold better.
Personally, neither Jamie nor I knew where the community’s leaders received the news that any of us beasts were more prone to buying red-haired girls than brown-haired girls. Or blondes, or any combination of hair color, really. The humans didn’t know about mating or that we bought the girl and not just any girl, but still, we’d never voiced our preference for red hair.
I traced the outline of her collarbone to my leather collar around her neck. Goose bumps rose over her skin—two shades darker than mine—as I tugged the choker. She wore it for protection and because she missed me. Or so I told myself. She must miss me, because I missed her. I smiled down at her and whispered, “Fire. You are my fire.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Jamie pitched from the front. I lifted my eyes to see him adjusting his mirror so he’d see my face. Clearly, he was prepared to speak while I hoped I’d have a quiet ride home. It would calm me as I readied for mortal combat in our bedroom. But my brother, the unstoppable, continued. “Yeah, keep petting her. If she were mine, I would have spanked her from here to Tineya and back.”
“Dewlyn isn’t into spanking.”
Jamie shrugged. “Rey wasn’t either, but now she turns up her ass as soon as my pants hit the floor.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I recall you put your mate in a cage.”
Good point. Still, fire needed more fire, not ice, and that was what I was gonna do. I wanted to ignite the fire in her eyes. The same fire that fueled her need for adventure. I wanted all that for myself. If I could do that, I’d put babies inside her, she’d love them as mothers did, and she’d stay with me.
Dewlyn risked her life and mine every time she left me, and I had to know where she was at night, if she was hungry, thirsty, safe… I cleared my throat, not willing to think about her nights away from me.
I wished her parents had never trained her. When I met her, she couldn’t wait to go home with me, but when I picked her up later, she looked lifeless. At the time, I wondered if someone had switched her up with her docile twin. When I brought her home from her community, I took it easy, gave her anything she wanted, until I realized Dewlyn wanted nothing. Weeks later, before dinnertime, I told her about the mating, thinking it would make her trust me, but it did just the opposite. Dewlyn called me a “mofo of epic proportions.” and knocked me out in my sleep and by the time I cleared my head, she’d picked up her damn skater and flown out of the closed window.
After I recovered from my mate shattering glass with her body and seeing the blood left on our white carpet, she was long gone.
“You know what I’m wondering,” Jamie said, pulling me out of my reverie.
“Is that a question?”
“No. I wonder why not parachute from one of the mountains instead of a building.”
“Hm,” I mumbled.
“Tell me.”
“Hiding from me in another city. Likes buildings, likes doing stunts. It’s not unheard of. Some humans stunt-dive.”
Jamie’s eyes locked with mine. “You know that’s not it.”
“Yeah, I know.” Dewlyn appeared at more then one mating party and had tried to make contact with Rey. After the pool incident, when I carried her home, she treated me with silence. Dewlyn didn’t do silence, Dewlyn spoke her mind, so I knew she was hiding something. I didn’t want to think of the possibility Dewlyn had welcomed a human man, not only because I’d break my fasting stretch and have to eat the fucker who ignored my collar around her neck, but also because there were evil humans out there. Dewlyn might be braver than some of the men I knew, but she was too young not to be manipulated by the older and more cunning of her kind.
I knew this firsthand.
The older and more cunning had once pitted Jamie and me against each other.
We were young, stupid, eager, and didn’t know better. Luckily, we had Goner, our late brother, who kept us together. When Goner died, Jamie and I lost our glue.
Chapter Four
Dewlyn
“Mmmm,” I mumbled, and rubbed my face to clear out the sleepy haze. Groaning, I stretched and wished a forklift would open my heavy eyelids. When I managed to peel them apart a little, a blurred image of brown leather was the first thing I saw. It took several minutes after my eyes finally blinked wide open to recognize the scent of a man stuck in my nose. Vice. I jerked up, then back down, banged my forehead on something hard. A hand patted my back, and under my forehead, his chest rumbled with soft laughter.
I groaned, realizing I’d slept stretched on top of Vice on our living room couch, and he’d tied my wrists, then hooked them over his head. I tugged. “Untie me.”
“Good morning, mate. Easy there, you’ll break my neck.”
“I wish.”
“I know. It warms my heart you want to kill me.”
My forehead thumped his hard chest, and I shook my hands to emphasize my point.
“Don’t trust you,” he said. “The rope is permanent during the taming phase.”
“So that’s where we’re headed. Taming.” The beast bitch taming, he meant. The alien beasts brought their own Tineyan culture with them. I didn’t know everything about the beasts, but I knew more than an average human. Often, the beast males treated their human mates as they would a beast bitch, their female. Taming of a female bitch meant keeping her indoors, providing for and protecting her while she got used to her new mate. It also meant Vice would walk around naked, make plenty of body contact in hopes his body heat and maleness would trigger my mating instincts, make me warm and needy so I could give him those much-coveted beast babies.
Except Vice knew taming only worked with beast females, because one, they were animals and went into heat where they had to get it from males or suffer pain, and two, I’d convinced myself I hated Vice with all my heart. But after months of stalking me, I guess he’d grown desperate. Still, I said, “It won’t work.”
“It’ll work.” He cupped my chin and pushed my face up so our eyes locked. When they did, flecks of pale red sparkled in his, and judging by the growing hardness against my belly, Vice was a happy beast. He smiled. “It will work. Nothing else has worked. I’ve courted you, I’ve tried to understand you, I’ve done everything I could think of to make us work, and I failed. So now, I’ll do it my brother’s way.”
“I will never mate with you, Vice. I hate you from the bottom of my heart.”
Vice smiled, seemingly unperturbed. “You will learn to love me.”
“It’s not teachable.”
“It is.”
I sighed and pulled my bound hands over his head, then rested my elbows on his chest. I rubbed my eyes, inconspicuously wiping the drool from the side of my mouth. Pushing away from his chest, I sat back on my heels, and nestled between his legs.
Vice sprawled on the brown leather couch. The only other furniture to sit on was
a new, also brown, leather recliner under the window next to the door on my left. The smell of new leather furniture lingered in our large house, which probably hadn’t been aired out in a while. Random papers and handwritten notes littered every surface. I craned my neck to see the kitchen. The dishes piled in the sink told me Vice had obsessed over finding me since I’d left and had completely neglected the house. I liked this house. I’d named it after my crazy Aunt Jane, the woman who’d advised me to run away after Vice had visited my home and proclaimed me his mate. I didn’t believe that Aunt Jane was crazy anymore, but at the time, I had, so I didn’t listen to anything she’d whispered as I packed my bag, ready for a move into the white house. “Take to the skies and never return,” she’d told me. “That house buries girls like you.”
Dad would never hurt me. I was his tomboy, his one and only troublemaker. Even when he’d grounded me, he seemed proud I rebelled. But I’d misread Dad.
“Good morning, Jane,” I said to the House.
“Good morning, Dewlyn of the Alpha’s Second.”
“Coffee, please.”
The first drop of glorious brown brew dripped into a white cup on the kitchen counter.
“Make that two, Jane,” Vice said. “Are you hungry?” he asked me.
Sunlight drifted around us and onto the small table in front of the couch. I didn’t turn away from him to look out the window, but I wanted to. Out in the driveway, his bike called my name, and I’d need fast transport if I were to get out of here. Probably should leave Beast City when I did get out of here. But where would I go? And what of my shelter?
Helping a mated woman escape her beast mate was punishable by death. I didn’t care about the beast laws, because buying women, then leaving them in the communities for the training should warrant a death penalty too.
At first, I’d found the women by stalking dumpsites. Then I figured out another way. If I could get to the women inside the communities right after they were picked, I could offer them an alternative, a house where they’d be protected. The problem? I didn’t have a system that would tell me who the women were or when they were paired. So I followed Vice when he went into the communities.
