by A. Vers
Ruin’s head turns and I back up into the doorway as his rage filled profile grows visible. “Lilah is my people, Markus. She is mine, do you understand? Mine.” His hands slam against his chest and every male in the hall takes a step backward. Everyone but the King.
“If you cannot follow directives, Captain, then I will be forced to replace you.”
Ruin’s lips part on a snarl and I dive through the door frame.
“Hey guys.” My heart trips in my chest, but I throw on a stupid human smile as I bow halfheartedly to the King. “So we got a lead, huh?”
Markus’ eyes glitter, but it’s the weight of Ruin’s gaze on the side of my face that leaves me flushed and disconcerted.
“We do, Ms. Marks.”
I nod. “That’s good. Real good. Vlad needs to be stopped, no matter what.” I try to wind my fingers with Ruin’s to calm him.
He pulls away from me, his expression cooler than it was at Carnage that first night. “Even at the sake of you? Of your life?”
I look between them, pulse racing and knowing they can hear it. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
Ruin glowers. “Draven is Vlad, Lilah. The sick fuck from Carnage is the one who killed half our people last month alone.” The world seems to drop from beneath my feet, and I can’t focus. Everything seems hazy, distorted. Ruin’s head shakes. “And he’s after you now. He will never stop, do you understand? Vlad will never stop coming until he has you. And I can’t let him do that. I can’t let him take you from me too.”
He turns on his heel and storms off down the hall. Tanner bows to their king and takes off after him.
I don’t follow. I can’t. As much as I want to reassure Ruin, his isn’t the only world upside down and right side wrong right now. I stand in the hall, confusion warring with the truth of it all.
The waitress at Underground, the break in at Carnage ... It was all Draven. I shrugged him off. Figured he was locked up with Vic. That my guardian was the only one pulling strings behind the scene.
And look at how fucking wrong I was.
“Lilah?”
My head whips over to Markus.
“I know this a lot to take in. A lot to deal with ...” His topaz eyes seem to glow softly, “but I would ask one favor from you.”
“Sir?”
“I would ask that you tell him to go.”
I blink. “What?”
He sighs. “Ruin will not leave— will not lead the men with you in need of his guarding. Tis not the nature of our kind. Of of our males.” He steps closer, reaching for my hands. “The only way for us to capture Vlad once and for all, is with Ruin’s help.”
“Markus.” Caine’s voice is hard, angry. “You can’t ask her to do this. Maybe you don’t see it but–”
“I see it better than even you, Master Auden,” Markus snaps. “And though it pains me to do this, more than you or Ruin can understand, Vlad must be stopped. At all cost.”
Caine’s jaw flexes and rage simmers in the depths of his eyes. “Then I’ll stay behind.” The words are soft, but they seem to whip through the corridor as even Horan gazes at the demon in surprise. “I will protect the coven house and Lilah. If something happens, I’ll get her out.”
Markus appraises him before his gold eyes track to me with more than a little resentment. “It seems, Ms. Marks, that you bring havoc wherever you go.” My face flames and my head drops, averting my eyes. “Fine, Caine. You will remain at the coven house and I will go with the team.”
“We need every hand we can get,” he grumbles and walks off. “Alert your Captain of the change. We leave at midnight.”
Gage and Horan look at Caine. “That was either the smartest thing you have ever done, or the dumbest,” Gage tells him.
Horan nods. “What were you thinking?”
Caine stares at me, dark hair low over his eyes. “The Captain and I have an understanding,” he says plainly. “And that is all you need to know.”
40
Ruin
WHEN LILAH AND CAINE fill the door behind Tanner’s gesturing arms, I know what they are going to say before they say it.
My eyes lock in Lilah’s. “No,” I say, and T shuts up long enough to turn around too.
Her arms fly in frustration. “You’re being unreasonable.”
I just look at her.
She glances from Tanner to Caine and back with a glitter in her eyes. “Guys, is there any way you can give me a minute with him?”
Caine smiles, salutes me, bows to Lilah, and walks out. I’m not stupid enough to think T doesn’t see it. But the motherfucker is smart enough not to say anything as he walks from the room.
Lilah waits until their steps have truly faded before closing the door and locking it.
I peer at her. She just takes a step and her hands fist in the hem of her shirt. When she tugs it up and off, leaving her full breasts straining her black bra, I stand up straighter. “What are you doing?”
Her lips curve and there is a fierce resolution in her eyes that wasn’t there before. But it’s harder than the innocence I cherish so much. Jaded.
“You won’t argue with me if I’m naked.”
I snort, arms folding over my chest. “That’s what you think.” But my eyes remain locked on the blushed skin of her chest and face.
Her agile arms go around her back and the bra pillows against her. She slides it down over her hands, presenting me with rosy nipples that I want to suck into my mouth. “I bet you won’t.”
My length swells in my jeans, tenting the fabric. “Then you don’t know just how stubborn I can be.”
She unclips the button on her shorts and pushes them over the thick swell of her legs. Her scent hits me in the face. Heated, aroused, angry.
“You need to go, Ruin. The team needs you.”
I grab my sex and rub through my jeans. She licks her lips. “No. What I need to do is take you against the wall until you forget this little plan of yours.”
Her smile grows sad but no less determined. She slips her fingers under the band of her panties. I growl. “You want me?” I nod; my eyes casting her skin and the dim room in gold light. Her back arches as she rubs her apex beneath the silk. “Then help your team and come back to me.”
“Lilah–”
She stops teasing her body and her hands push into my chest, forcing me back against the wall. My spine jars into the stone. “No buts, Ruin. Your team needs you. The coven ... Hell, Lock Lake needs you. You need to do this. You need to stop Draven because I can’t. Because I couldn’t stop Vic.”
Her sapphire eyes flash with more of that resolve. “I need you to do this. I need you to be the monster I can’t.” Her expression falls, and my arms want to wind around her on an instinct I don’t understand. But it’s the same one that hasn’t stopped battering at me since the first night I met her. “I need you to be a hero.”
I push back against her hold, angry now. “I’m no hero. I’m too selfish for that shit. If I’m not here, I can’t protect you, Lilah. Just like I couldn’t protect my wife.” It bursts from me before I can stop it.
Shit.
She lifts her head to look at me and starts to back away, her expression aching. Hollow. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, baby girl.” I try to pull her to me. She struggles. My thumb brushes her cheek, but she swats it away. “Don’t be angry.”
“You’re married! Of course, I’m angry.”
“Have you seen anyone with me, beautiful?”
She stops fighting. “Well, no.”
“And you won’t. No one but you. Not now. That was long ago.”
Her lips tremble with a touch of hope that I am sure I am not supposed to see. “So you were married?”
“To a point,” I hedge, pulling her back to me. This time, though, she remains a foot away, she doesn’t fight me on it. “It was long before my transition ended. Almost a hundred years now. I knew if I was to ever marry anyone, it would have been Arrow.”
> “Arrow?” Her little brows furrow, scrunching her nose.
“I didn’t grow up here, baby girl. Not in Lock Lake, anyway. The war had just broke out between supernaturals and humans, and the Rom colony I grew up in, well, my father was their Chieftain. Arrow was his general’s oldest daughter.”
Lilah blinks. “And you loved her?”
I nod. “It seemed like the thing to do. She was to be mine, anyway. The union would ally our families, strengthen our people. And Arrow was...beautiful. Willful, but kind. It didn’t hurt that I was nineteen and going through my transition. My sex drive was insatiable and I ate damn near my weight every day. Drank it too. But we didn’t know that was what it was. Had no idea that my mother had had a one-night stand with a traveling vamp before meeting my father.”
The old bonfire circle fills my mind, hazy with almost a hundred years between then and now. But I can still picture the rocks, the firewood, and the flames casting over the caravan.
“The night of our wedding, the thirst hit for the first time. Arrow was laid out on our marital bed, her body as ready for me as I was for hers. We had courted for so long, small touches and long looks over a span of months. She ached for me, I could smell her. And suddenly it was too much. Too hard to control every need coursing through my body. My fangs punched through my lip.”
My hand scrubs over my face, trying to block it out. “Her screams were heard, they had to be. But it was our first time. Her first time. They left us alone on the edge of that tree line, her scrambling to get away as my eyes lit up the inside of our wagon like dawn.”
“I could smell her fear, her blood ...” Arrow pleading, her dark eyes huge, her hair in my fists as I wrenched her neck in one long line ... “She begged, screamed for me not to. But I couldn’t stop.”
I close my eyes to try and silence the flood, but now that it is open, there is no stopping it.
“Arrow’s blood was everywhere, on my mouth, neck, hands. Her slim throat was in ruin. A word I would later claim as my name. Because I ruined the most innocent thing I touched. I drank and I drank from her, draining her to death. And when I finally snapped the hell out of it, I did the only thing I could. I ran.”
“Sunlight bothered me for weeks after. And I was so sure it was my punishment from God that I considered ending it then and there.” I exhale. “I found my way to Louisiana and stumbled into the war on the side of the humans. I was running from that night and all the ones after. Praying that if I slayed the monster I was so sure I had become, maybe the one inside me would die too.”
“Markus was a general for the supernaturals, and he found me on the front line. He saw the hunger in me and knew exactly what it was. He trained me to control it, and then later taught me to fight. When he founded Eternity, I was the first one to sign on.”
My eyes rise to trail over her upturned face.
“I’m not a hero, baby girl. But I am a monster. And not the good kind. I’m one of the ones that would let the world burn to keep you safe. To do what I couldn’t do all those years ago. I have to be able to protect you.”
She pushes away. “You have, Ruin. For days now you have. I’m free because of you. Or almost.” Her little hands alight over her hips and she glowers at me. “The only thing that is really stopping that is knowing Draven is out there doing God only knows what. I can’t stop him on my own, and the only person I know who can is you.”
I rock back in surprise.
“You don’t think you’re a hero, but Ruin, you are. You’re mine.” Her voice cracks.
I take a step closer, meaning to rip her panties off, to kiss her until she stops talking about heroes and Draven and starts screaming my name. I mean to claim her so hard that she knows what I am in every way possible.
But my hands don’t grab, they caress. Her skin is like silk under my fingertips. My eyes don’t devour her, they memorize, taking in every sweet curve, every full line. When my lips finally meet hers, I can’t feast upon that plump bottom delicacy, I go slow and savor her flavor, her sounds.
There is no rush to taking her. Not this time. When she gently tugs at my clothes, I discard them slowly, my hands never wanting to leave her for long.
As I lay her back over the thick blue mats against the wall and her arms wind around my neck, fingers flowing into my hair, I glide into her body and nibble gently at the column of her throat. She ripples around me. My thirst has her heartbeat drumming in my ears and my fangs press deep into my lip.
I pull back to glance down at her. The mix of emotion brims from my eyes in a wash of gold light.
Her smile is soft, all woman and that innocence that all the hell in her life couldn’t quite destroy. She strokes my face as my rhythm falters. “I know, love,” she says softly and arches her neck back to give me access to her thundering vein. “But I trust you. Take what you need.”
The world brightens, washing away the dark and the years of loneliness.
I bite my wrist without thought and offer it to her. Her lips close over the meat of my arm, speeding my breathing and the slow glide of my hips. I rear back to lock my fangs and my body deep inside hers.
Her screams of pleasure fill my ears, replacing ones better left in a life I no longer have to live. One I can put behind me at long last as my body pistons into hers. We peak together, her core clenching around me until I jet deep inside, claiming her again and again in every way I know how. My body sags around hers and I cradle her to me.
She’s mine forever, if she will have me. And I will do whatever I have to to make sure no one can take her away.
No one.
41
Lilah
“I’LL GO,” RUIN TELLS Markus. His beautiful body is once again clothed in the warrior leather I met him in, but there isn’t as much tightness around his eyes now.
Something warm unfurls inside my chest as I watch him, and I’m not dumb enough to call it love. But could it be in time?
Definitely.
Finding out he was married, to a point, changes nothing. Except my respect for him. To go through that at such a young age ... My lips tremble. It only makes me believe in all this more. In us.
He glances at me, his dark eyes hot, but open. “Caine will remain with Lilah and Raina.” He turns back to the king. “They go nowhere without him.”
Markus scrubs his jaw. “You presume to give me orders? To give your queen orders?”
Ruin meets his gaze head on. “On this ... I would humbly request you agree.” Though the words are amicable, the tone he uses is not.
The King smirks. “Then I suppose you leave me no choice.” Raina smiles at me from her place next to him, and I give her a thumbs up.
Markus pivots to face the rest of the team. “Don’t think this gives the rest of you liberties. This is a one-time thing.”
Tanner and Gage crack smiles, while Caine’s grin can only be mischievous. Sinister. Horan appears bored with the whole thing, but even his gold eyes are lighter. And no wonder.
As Ruin’s team, they owe him a certain allegiance. But Markus is their king. Having the two men in such a bad place had to be difficult. Hell, the definition of a rock and a hard place.
As the rest of the team disperses to get ready, Ruin pulls me aside.
With the weapons bristling over his frame, he is fierce. Deadly. “Stay with Caine, do you understand?”
I nod. “I know, Ruin. He is the fastest way out if someone got in.”
He smirks and kisses me on the side of my head. The motion leaves me flushed, and my gaze meets a hellfire filled one across the room. “Good girl,” Ruin says, but I barely hear him.
There is more than a little intensity to Caine’s gaze. A trace of resentment too. He catches me watching him and turns away to walk to the door.
But I don’t miss his glance back or the bare ache in his gaze.
The door closes behind him and Ruin strokes my face. I startle. “Do I need to be worried?” he teases.
I look up, frowning. “That’s
a stupid question.”
His black eyes glitter. “Just checking.”
“Caine is an Asmodean, right?”
He nods. “Came to us about five years ago, near dead. Horan hated him immediately, tried to follow him with crosses and holy water, even tried to con him into a church to repent his Sin.”
My eyes widen. “Are you serious?”
Ruin snorts. “Can you picture the arrogant son of a bitch doing that? Horan ignored him for months. The first time they came nose to nose in training, the bickering started then and it’s never stopped.” I punch him in the arm and he laughs.
His whole face lights up with the motion, and it makes him appear younger, more accessible and not. I stare at him as the corners of his eyes crinkle.
He sobers slowly. “What?” he asks, still smiling.
My hand goes around the back of his neck and I pull him down to me. I kiss him hard. He chuckles against my mouth.
“Seriously, not that I’m complaining ...”
“You are even more beautiful when you laugh,” I murmur against his lips.
He nuzzles me. “I think that’s supposed to be my line.”
I kiss him again. “Who cares?”
He cocks his head, really thinking about it. His arms wind around me, and he lifts me against him as he lowers his mouth to mine. “Good point.”
THE GUYS PULL OUT OF the coven house’s parking deck, SUV’s loaded to the brim with weapons and able-bodied warriors.
Caine sighs wistfully next to me. “Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”
Raina rolls her eyes as she turns back around, and I laugh. “You volunteered, remember?” I ask.
His lips spread into a coy smile. “Did I? Did I really, little bird? I’m pretty sure I was ... coerced .” His hellfire eyes flash, and Raina and I both make sounds. His laughter is devious. Delighted. “Just checking.”
The vampire queen glares and starts walking back to the rear entrance of the compound. “You better pray I don’t tell Markus about that.”
