Hunted Princess: A Paranormal Dark Romance (Feline Royals Book 3)

by Alexa B. James

  “No,” I admitted. “I’m not sure what I am.”

  Jetsun swallowed, his eyes dropping to my body and quickly jerking back up. “Me, neither.”

  “So, anyway,” I said, clearing my throat. “What can I do to get it from you? Obviously mating things are out of the question.”

  Jetsun’s cheeks darkened a tiny bit. “I took a vow of celibacy.”

  “And you’re my brother.”

  “You keep saying that,” he said slowly, shifting and tugging at the knees of his pants. “But I’m neither cheetah nor ocelot.”

  At his movement, my eyes dropped to his crotch, where his erection was even more obvious than before. I pressed my eyes closed, trying to force away the fluttering pulse in my throat at the sight of his cock outlined against the cotton fabric.

  “I met your dad,” I said, opening my eyes and keeping them steady on his face. I could just pretend we weren’t here separated by a wall of glass that hadn’t even trembled when I pounded on it. That my secretions weren’t soaking my pants as we spoke, putting off so much scent that I’d made a monk hard for an hour straight. I’d just pretend his cock didn’t look mouthwateringly temping right there not two feet away from me, that he wasn’t my brother, and—

  No. I wouldn’t pretend he wasn’t my brother. That would be a torture I couldn’t bear. Our relationship was the only thing that could get me through this.

  “How did you meet my father?” Jetsun asked slowly. “He’s been dead for almost twenty years.”

  “I went to the spirit world,” I said. “He told me to find you and get the amulet.”

  “You went to the spirit world,” Jetsun said flatly, as if he didn’t believe me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Twice, in fact.”

  “Then how are you here? You don’t smell like a ghost.”

  Ghosts had a smell? I tried to remember what Kwame smelled like. Like hay drying in the sun, baked earth, and a warm kitten. Was that the scent of a ghost? Or the scent of a lion?

  “The first time I visited the spirit world, I was alive,” I said, shaking my head to clear it. “I was taken there by a lion shifter. My mate, actually. My True Mate.”

  Good. Remind him I’m taken. Remind myself I’m taken.

  Jetsun nodded and made a noncommittal sound.

  “Actually, I was able to bring him back,” I said. “I guess I have some kind of strength, even if it doesn’t look like it to you.”

  Jetsun’s brows drew together briefly. “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just probably don’t seem strong when I’m like this.”

  “You brought a lion shifter back from the dead,” he said.

  It was my turn to nod. “Yeah. I know that’s weird. He’s probably the only lion shifter who can actually be a lion and a man in the human world. But he’s still a ghost. I don’t really understand it. I’m actually a human. Or, I was a human until recently.”

  I knew I was rambling, but Jetsun was being too quiet, studying me too intently, like a scientist in the middle of a dissection. I remembered all those creepy instruments and decided I better get to the part about being his sister before he decided to do a lobotomy on me. He might want to study my weird mutt brain that had allowed me to do these crazy things. Because maybe all snow leopards were half-god, but I wasn’t. I was only quarter. Yet another anomaly.

  “But then I got killed,” I said. “And I went to the spirit world for longer. I went to my mom, and she told me that she’d had an affair with your dad, and… Here I am.”

  Jetsun shook his head. “Sorry. I’m lost. If your mother is an ocelot, and your father really is my father, how are you a cheetah?”

  “Oh,” I said with a forced laugh. “Because of the magic of the cheetah amulet, I was able to be brought back to life when my other mate put his cheetah inside me to heal me,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m also cursed, so he died.”

  Jetsun just stared at me, and I realized how outrageous my story sounded, but I didn’t know how to tell it without sounding like I was spinning the world’s tallest tale. I’d just unleashed my whole life on a stranger, but I couldn’t help the feeling of frustration and helplessness that welled inside me. I’d lived with that feeling all my life—the feeling of being alone and inadequate. I’d kept busy to keep it at bay, playing hard when I was a kid and partying hard as a teenager. I wasn’t a shifter, so I’d never been fully a member of my own family. But I was a princess, which set me apart from the other humans. I had spent my whole life trying to prove to both shifters and humans that I was enough, that I could belong. Now I knew the truth.

  I didn’t belong.

  I wasn’t human. I wasn’t a shifter, either, not by birthright.

  And now this god was staring at me like I was an alien with three heads, and I couldn’t blame him.

  Jetsun licked his lips like he might speak, and my core throbbed with desire at the flash of his pink tongue between his lips. God, I wanted that tongue. I wanted to suck his plump lower lip between my teeth and bite it. To taste his blood on his tongue. To feel it rasp against mine, his teeth clashing with mine as his tongue plunged into my mouth…

  “You have met your True Mate?” Jetsun asked, interrupting my wildly inappropriate thoughts.

  “Yes,” I said. For some reason, I didn’t want him to know I had more than one. I didn’t want him to judge me, to think I was a whore like my sister did. I couldn’t help the marks on my arm, but I could control what I did. I’d fucked all five of them before I had their marks. I wasn’t ashamed of my mates, or even having five mates. But to tell a monk that I regularly fucked five guys seemed disgraceful, nonetheless.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Do monks have True Mates?”

  “No,” Jetsun said. “No one with a True Mate would become a monk.”

  “How would you find out?” I asked. “To get the mark, don’t you have to… Mate?”

  Jetsun shook his head. “To become a monk, you have to consult a psychic. A wise woman who can see if you have a True Mate somewhere in the world. If you have one, they don’t let you do this. It would be too cruel.”

  “You can’t ever leave the monastery?”

  “We could,” he said. “But we’ve chosen to dedicate our lives to this practice. Why would we choose otherwise?”

  I thought of Gabor, who had dedicated his life to a different kind of master. I didn’t understand either of them. Who would choose a life of lovelessness when there was so much love in the world?

  “How did you become a monk?” I asked instead, steering away from the personal. It was hard enough sitting here staring at his erection that never seemed to end. I didn’t need to hear about his vow to never use it. Not when I knew how good it would feel to touch it, to slide my fingers down its hot length, to wrap my lips around it and—

  “When my father died, I wasn’t yet of age,” Jetsun said, his words jarring me out of my daze of lust. “The monks took me in. When I turned eighteen, they gave me the choice to leave or stay and become a monk. So, I stayed.”

  “You never wanted to—”

  Fuck me

  “—experience the world?” I asked. “Fall in love? Have a family? Play with a bunch of little snow leopard cubs?”

  The corner of his mouth quirked up in a genuine smile that sent tingles straight to my swollen pussy lips. Did this man have any idea how positively godlike he looked? How could he waste away sexlessly in a monastery?

  “That never interested me,” Jetsun said. “I was relieved when I learned I had no True Mate in this world. I never saw the point in love. It seems rather… Silly. Don’t you think?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “It seems to me like love is the point of everything.”

  Jetsun held up a hand. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I know you have a True Mate, and that love is deeper than anyone without one can comprehend. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had one. But I don’t.”

  “I never
knew True Mates existed until recently,” I said. “I grew up as a human. And I still think that boring old human love is the best reason there is for anything.”

  He shrugged. “I guess I just don’t see the purpose. It’s complicated, people get hurt, and what good ever came from it?”

  “How about the continuation of the species?”

  He gave that crooked smile that made my heart flip and other parts of my body do other inappropriate things. Fuck. Why did he have to be my brother? And why didn’t my body care?

  “No other species requires love to carry on,” he said. “I respect your lifestyle. It’s just not for me.”

  I started to argue, then realized how silly that was. Why was I trying to convince this man that love was worth anything, even if it broke your heart, even if it got you killed? He couldn’t know that without feeling it. For some reason, a wave of anguish twisted inside me at the thought. He was alone. He’d never know what love was. It seemed a tragedy of heartbreaking weight.

  “Tell me about your family,” I said, pressing my palms flat on my knees and trying to ignore the pull from between them. If I could just have Kwame here with me, even one time, to ease the chasm of longing inside me…

  “I have no family,” Jetsun said, shaking his head. “It was just my parents and me, and now it’s just me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said with a shrug. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  “My mother was never well. My father…” He met my eyes and then looked away. “I don’t want to color your opinion of him, if you might know him for yourself.”

  My whole body felt inflamed. I understood the word as I never had before. My body was in flame. No, it was a flame. My skin was hot and flushed, misted with sweat. My pulse was racing, and the hunger inside me was tearing at me like an animal.

  “Tell me,” I groaned. “Make me think about something else.”

  Jetsun’s eyes widened, and his tongue darted out to wet his lips before speaking. I closed my eyes, trying not to burst into flame, to let it consume my body and all the oxygen inside this torture cell and extinguish at last, relieving me of the unbearable panic clawing like Kenosi’s cheetah, shredding me from within.

  “Okay,” Jetsun said quickly. “Okay. Until the suppressant works…

  “Yes,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. “Talk to me.”

  “My father—our father—wasn’t an evil man, Itzel. I don’t want you to think that. He wasn’t abusive or violent, he wasn’t an addict or a criminal. He just wasn’t perfect. I’m not trying to turn you against him before you know him for yourself.”

  I nodded vigorously, my eyes still squeezed shut. “More.”

  I heard Jetsun shifting his position, but I couldn’t look at him. Not until this wave of heat was gone.

  “Our father had a bit of a savior complex. I don’t think he consciously wanted Mai to be ill. He certainly wasn’t responsible. He didn’t make her that way or sabotage her attempts to be well. But he was at his best when she was at her worst. He liked taking care of her, of us. He liked that she needed him and that he didn’t need us. I think it made him feel powerful, knowing that he could walk away from us and be fine, but we couldn’t do the same.”

  It sounded fucked up, but when I thought of my own imperfect parents, I couldn’t say it sounded much worse than my childhood, or probably anyone else’s.

  “Were you close?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not with Babu. There was always a distance between us. I don’t think he meant to let us know, but through the years it became obvious that he’d sacrificed his happiness for us, and that he resented us for it. He’d married Mai because she needed him. And she couldn’t care for a child alone, so I became another person who needed him.”

  “I thought he liked that.”

  “I think he did,” Jetsun said. “But he also resented it. We’d taken his freedom. He was a member of the International Council of Feline Nations, and he’d always traveled to the conferences before Mai came along. She couldn’t handle travel, so he stopped doing that when I was young. As I got older, he’d go to them if Mai was in a good place. But if she wasn’t, he stayed to take care of us, and he never failed to let us know he was giving that up for us.”

  “Sounds pretty shitty.”

  “I’ve made peace with both of them,” he said. “I’m just telling you how it was.”

  “Did he love your mother?” I asked, forcing myself to look at him and give him my full attention.

  “I don’t know if Babu loved her, exactly,” Jetsun said after a minute of thought. “He loved providing for her. He loved that she needed him. He loved relieving her of the burden of her son for a few hours when she was sick of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, resting a hand against the glass.

  This is what I had wanted when I came here. I’d wanted to hear my brother’s stories, to bond with him, to know how he’d grown up. Turned out, it was no better than my childhood. If my biological dad was some kind of saint who was the exact opposite of King Ocelot, I might have felt terrible that I’d missed out. It turned out, he was just a man, as flawed and fallible as the rest of us. I liked that Jetsun hadn’t lied, hadn’t painted him to be the savior of his mother, though it sounded like he could have.

  I wasn’t exactly happy about growing up as the daughter of a murderous tyrant, but it didn’t sound like I’d missed some idyllic childhood, either. King Ocelot hadn’t been all bad. I believed he loved my mother in whatever capacity he could. He’d always doted on her possessively, jealously. I remembered plenty of happiness and love in our family, but it was between my mother and her children. Our father had always seemed resentful of the attention Mom showed us, the time she spent with us, and even our presence. He’d always treated us like an annoyance, and then like a commodity.

  What I’d seen hadn’t been healthy. But maybe that was why I wanted love so badly. I hadn’t seen enough of it between my parents, so I wanted to make up for that. Or maybe I hadn’t gotten enough of it from my father, so I was making up for it by glutting myself with it now. Why else would I need five men to fulfill my longing for love?

  Twenty-Seven

  “It’s not working,” I said, pressing myself to the glass, staring out at Jetsun as he sat cross-legged on a mat in the middle of the floor, apparently meditating. Still hard. God, his cock never quit.

  “You can take another one,” he said. “But don’t take more. I don’t know what it would do. It might hurt you.”

  I hoped it did. I hoped he had to come in and take me out to a doctor, and the doctor could give me what I really needed—dick. There was the truth. I needed to be fucked. Bad.

  Now, the thought of some savage snow leopard stealing me off the mountain and trapping me in his lair for a week to be his sex slave sounded like my most delicious fantasy. Anything would be better than this. I swallowed two pills, then hesitated. I was going insane. I had said love was the best feeling in the world, but now I needed something else, something more primal, more simple, than love.

  I swallowed another handful of pills, already knowing they wouldn’t work. There was something wrong with this heat—or with me. And since I was terrified that it was really me, I had to believe it was the first option. I’d taken too much of the oil inside the tiger amulet. Maybe I was supposed to take only a single drop instead of rubbing the balm all over my throat. That had to be it.

  I went back the wall, my heart crushing inside me with the need inside me.

  “Do you need me?” Jetsun asked, rising and approaching the glass again. “What do you need? I’ll help you any way I can.”

  I wanted to scream. Yes, I fucking needed him. I needed him to bend me over and fuck me like Tadeu had. That experience had scarred me, but right now, I would have given anything to have Tadeu in this cell with me, fucking me so hard I couldn’t breathe, ripping my hair out and ripping me in half as he pounde
d his impossible cock into me.

  “Talk to me,” I whispered, pressing my hand to the glass. A fog surrounded my fevered fingers on the cool surface. I wished I could reach through, wrap my arms around Jetsun, who obviously hadn’t found as much peace with his parents as he thought he had. I wanted to hold him, to tell him that even if we could never fuck, I still loved him. I loved him for breaking my heart this way, for being so good, for going through this with me and being stronger than I could ever be.

  He nodded, swallowing so hard I could see his Adam’s apple bob. “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “It’s alright,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “You are,” I whispered. So perfect it made me want to cry.

  “No.”

  I pressed my forehead to the glass. “He met my mother at one of those conferences. Did you know that? His last one.”

  “Had they met before?”

  He was asking if that’s why his dad always went to those conferences. If he’d been a cheater. I couldn’t answer the question, but I knew when he’d met my mother.

  “No,” I whispered, dampness coating my lashes suddenly. Jetsun stilled, but I couldn’t look at his face as he put the pieces together, as he realized that his father had strayed from his mom, that my existence was proof of their adultery.

  “My mother loved him,” Jetsun said. “As much as she could. She needed him.”

  “I know,” I said, a tear slipping from my lashes and down my cheek.

  “When he didn’t come home, when they told us there had been an accident, she couldn’t handle the grief. The weight of life was too much for her. It broke her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Not looking at his face meant I was looking at his body, where his cock was still as hard as my pussy was wet.

  And he was my brother, telling me about my father, and about his mother’s death. How could our bodies still ache for each other under these circumstances? It was wrong, and yet, I couldn’t stop the pulse of lust that shot through me when I saw that his arousal remained.