by Scott, Helen
“There’s a rush on it,” I murmured, filling in the words for her. My tone was grim, and I knew she knew me well enough to recognize how unusual that was.
Her head tilted back, so she could stare into my face. Only the moonlight slipped in through the tiny pane of glass that served as a window in her quarters. It let her see my features and enabled me to see how fucking tiny this room was.
A woman as powerful as Marcella should not be lumped away in this broom closet, but she was, and that was such an injustice it made my wolf want to crawl out and maul someone.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “Do you think they know I slept with Cade?”
“If they knew, we wouldn’t be . . .”
“We’d be imprisoned,” she replied for me. Then, she blinked. “I’m sorry I got you into this. I didn’t realize I’d–”
“Hey,” I shushed, reaching up to cup her jaw, I slipped my thumb along her cheekbone. “Don’t say that. Look, that night none of us expected it. But it just confirms that we were meant to be. Cade would never have taken you if he—”
“No, Barclay. No,” she interrupted. When she gnawed on her bottom lip, I tugged it free. “We weren’t meant to be,” she countered. “We do what Westbrook wants.”
“In this instance, that’s the last thing any of us need. You and I both know that.”
She shuttered her eyes against my words, then they flared wide as I leaned down and pressed my mouth to hers. The second our lips connected, she released a moan that said it all.
This was meant to be.
It was no bullshit. No spiel. No lies. It was the truth. She was mine as I was hers, just as my brothers were, too.
Lily would not tear us apart. Her brother, that motherfucker, would never have the chance to control us, to use us as his puppets for the LeFauvre line’s gain.
Even though I knew we didn’t have time for this, even though I knew I had a strict timetable to uphold, I couldn’t stop myself from slipping my tongue between her lips.
Knowing that Cade had sealed the bond, as well as our fate, a few nights ago, had every possessive instinct in me clamoring. I wanted to make her scent of me—my beast insisted—but also, I wanted her irrefutably bound to us all.
I shuddered as she accepted my kiss, but that acceptance didn’t lead to a meek courtship of our mouths. It became a battle as we devoured each other, our tongues and teeth tangling and clashing as we fought a passionate war that would have no winner and no loser. She tasted of wine and blood and woman. More than that, she tasted like mine.
Maker, how I wanted her. How I wanted to sink into her, slip my cock free and push inside her snug pussy, take her as mine, as ours.
I groaned, and the sound was loud enough to jerk me from my heady thoughts. The females around us had strong senses, and the last thing any of us needed was for someone to hear Marcella and I making out.
A shiver wracked my spine as I pulled away from her. She whimpered, too, her lips parting, the moisture on them making my cock ache with the need to feel that liquid heat against the tip, to watch her swallow me whole, to take all I had to give.
With my beast urging me on, demanding I claim her, I had to pull back. It hurt. How it fucking hurt, but I succeeded. I managed to force myself away from her, even as her whimper of dissent told me she hated the distance I pushed between us as much as I did.
I was so far gone that I had to lean over and press my hands to my knees as I shoved away, the lust crawling around my system.
When she pressed her hand to my shoulder and murmured, “It’s okay.” I shook my head.
“No. It’s not. We don’t have time for that.” My tone was too harsh, but her flinch wasn’t at my tone, but the words.
“What?”
I hated the hurt in her voice, so I tempered my own, “We have to get you out of here.”
“Out of where?” she asked, her confusion evident once more. I wasn’t sure if I’d struck her dumb from my kiss or if she just wasn’t processing what I was saying.
“Out of the Academy. Out of the area. Out of the fucking country if we have to.”
Her mouth worked as she gaped at me. Even though that perfectly round O made me think of blowjobs and her working my cock with those beautiful lips, I forced myself to focus.
“We can’t do that,” she hissed.
“We have no choice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself, Lily tried to kill you.”
“She’s always wanted me dead. This was the first time she acted on it, though.”
It was my turn to gape at her. “You know how fucked up that is, right? Everything you just said is so beyond inappropriate that I can’t even . . .” I shook my head again and held up a hand. “You’re clinging. This is the only place you’ve known, and even though it’s a shit one, it’s home. Trust me, I’ve been where you are, sweetheart. When we graduated, though we all hated Eastbrook, leaving the fucking shithole was harder than I’d admit to any of my brothers. I’m nearly one hundred percent certain they felt the same, too. But, we’ve had intel. Your death is sanctioned, sweetheart.”
“Sanctioned?” she repeated the word blankly. “What does that mean?”
“It means that Lily went to her brother who is the Enforcer of the LeFauvre line. She told him you’re a threat to her becoming our Sixth, and that the only way you won’t win is if she takes you out. She was supposed to do that today, but I’m assuming you bested her.”
Her eyes rounded and again, those delicious lips of hers bobbed open and closed like a goldfish as she tried to process what I was saying. When it finally sunk in, though, she lifted her hands, physically telling me to back off. “No. Just . . . no.”
“Yes, sweetheart. Yes. Raven mind-walked. While we were sealed in, it was killing us being away from you. He wanted to connect with you, find out if you were okay, but when he did, Lily was nearby. We think she was eavesdropping. We don’t know for certain—it wasn’t like we could open the door and ask her. But he slipped into her mind and saw the memory. The LeFauvre line wants you dead, sweetheart.
“The only way we can save you is if we get you out of here.”
I hated myself for being so blunt, but I could see that was the only way we’d get her to move. I didn’t have the time to let her process this, but also, I knew I couldn’t just move her along, push her into action. She’d just learned she had a mark on her head, for Maker’s sake. Maybe Cade was prick enough to hustle her, but I wasn’t.
While she processed, I moved her back into my arms, hugging her stiff body, trying to warm her up and calm her down at the same time.
“I-I don’t understand,” she whispered eventually, and I knew that was the shock talking. She understood perfectly, but she didn’t want to.
Who could blame her?
It was one thing to be bullied, and it was one thing to be unpopular. But to be wanted dead by a classmate? That was a whole other fucking ball of wax.
“You do, sweetheart, but I can explain more later. We have to get you out of here.”
“H-How?” she asked dully.
“It’s about time you experienced some of the joys of being a Sixth to a brotherhood that includes a shifter,” I told her gently, my tone teasing as I tried to warm her up from the inside out.
These people here didn’t matter. The only ones who counted were here in this room and back in ours, plotting to keep her safe.
“What are we going to do?”
I hesitated. Gideon seemed certain she wasn’t sure what she’d done that night . . . “You know that glow? The night we found you in the woods?” Her eyes flashed, but she stayed silent. “We didn’t back off, we didn’t repudiate your claiming. Then, you slept with Cade. . . . Officially, you’ve bound us to you. That means you have the perks of being our Sixth.”
Her mouth worked. “But . . . there’s protocol. It’s hard to trigger the bond.”
“Trust me. We were just as surprised as you. But we
didn’t reject your claim, Marcella. We’ve wanted you from the beginning. Now, questions later, hmm? Let’s get you to safety.”
I pressed my lips to her forehead, and when she sagged against me, I knew she would do as I asked even if she didn’t understand everything I’d said.
“You’re going to hold on tightly to me. You’re going to close your eyes, and think back to that night in the woods, okay?”
“How could I forget?” she retorted, her tone drier now, more like herself, which gave me some relief. She was a fighter, not a weeper.
I grinned at her. “Well, you sought us out, do you remember? Spiritually?”
She gnawed on her bottom lip again. “I-I think I do.”
“I need you to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because when I shift, my beast is going to bind himself to your spirit.”
She tensed in my arms. “Why?”
I bopped her on the nose with my finger. “Why, why, why?” I teased, my grin widening as she glowered at me. “Because when you open yourself to my beast, you’ll turn into a wolf, too.”
12
Marcella
I was a wolf. W-O-L-F. Wolf. An animal. Yet I’d never felt as free as I did running through the woods with Barclay in that moment. Everything around me beat with the pulse of life.
Scents, sights, feelings, it was all heightened and made me want to run for as long as possible.
The wolf brain had taken over for the most part, acting on instinct as I had followed Barclay out of the main Academy building and into the woods, but now the human part was seeping back in, reminding me why we were running.
Not only had I just run away from Westbrook, I’d also run away from the place that was my home for more than a decade. The place that had saved me when my own mother had almost killed me, but had stepped aside to let Lily kill me.
That last thought was what pushed me to keep up with Barclay. If I’d been accepted as a servant or even as a student then I might have felt some regret, but I never had been, and now that they were willing to turn a blind eye to someone trying to kill me? It wasn’t somewhere I belonged.
No, as much as I’d been championing the method of denial the last few days, I knew that my place was with the brotherhood I had come to care for more than I had ever expected.
Barclay’s wolf circled a tree a few times and I followed suit, curious as to whether or not I could tell what he was looking for. I scented it just as I reached the front. All five guys had spilled a drop of blood on the ground here. It was something only a shifter would notice, and maybe a druid, but to me the different scents danced in my mind telling me a story.
When I turned back around, Barclay was human again. I’d expected to shift back with him, but I hadn’t. I didn’t know why. Was something wrong? His rich brown eyes stared down at me with satisfaction glimmering in them. As I watched, I realized I was discovering more about him in wolf form than I ever would in human form. His whole body dripped with the scent of lust, not for my wolf, that would be weird, but for me, for us.
I whined, wanting to be human again but unsure how to go about it.
“Focus on your human self, push the wolf back to me through our bond. It will be easier once we . . . uh . . . finalize the bond.”
I wanted to chuckle. I’d made him bashful, and wasn’t that just adorable? My wolf form felt like a piece of clothing in a way. If I were a true shifter, then I would share my soul with that of a wolf, something that had always fascinated me, but since I was just borrowing Barclay’s powers it was more like his wolf was stretching to cover the two of us. Now that he was human again, I felt the weight of the full wolf, and I pushed it back to him.
My bones cracked, and my skin crawled with sensation as my body moved within and without. Hair that had sprouted from every pore receded, and my jaw began to realign itself as my snout turned back into a nose. It was all relatively painless and took less than a few seconds.
Part of me had expected my clothes to just appear, but, as it turned out, that was a skill I apparently needed to practice. Barclay had at least managed to manifest some pants, whereas I was butt naked. It took him a second, but once my shifter realized I was in my birthday suit, he spun around to give me some privacy.
“Sorry, I probably should have reminded you to focus on clothing as well.”
He left the door wide open for me to tease him, and I couldn’t help but step through. “So, you don’t want to see me naked?” I put my hands on my hips and cocked my head to the side, while he seemed too stunned for words at my comment.
“I don’t want to assume anything. I’d rather have you ask me,” he grumbled without turning around.
“And if I ask you to kiss me again?” My voice had gone breathy at the end, dammit. What I’d said, with the intention of teasing him, now seemed like something else.
Every fiber of my being wanted to go to him, wanted him to claim me in every way, just as he had started to do in my room. By the Maker, that kiss . . . just thinking about it made me all hot and bothered.
I could feel my body respond to my thoughts, the cool air skating over my sensitive nipples.
The question had barely even left my mouth when Barclay spun on his heels and stalked over to me. He was every bit the predator and, Maker, help me, it only made me want him even more.
His hands curled around my waist, sliding up my back as he pulled me into his body tightly, before his lips descended on my own. They were soft at first, testing the waters, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want him to be gentle with me because of some misguided attempt to be chivalrous. I wanted him to want me just as badly as I desired him.
My teeth found his lower lip and bit down, not hard enough to draw blood, even though I couldn’t deny that was what I wanted, to taste him in the most intimate way possible. At the sensation, Barclay let out a low moan that had my toes curling into the soft loam of the earth beneath my feet.
“If you don’t stop that, sweetheart, then the big, bad wolf might just eat you up,” he breathed in my ear before nipping at the lobe.
“What if I want him to?” I said breathlessly as I raised one leg and wrapped it around him, so my knee rested against his hipbone and my calf against his ass.
“I want to do a lot more than just eat you, Marcella. Maker . . . I want you so bad it hurts, but I don’t want our first time to be somewhere like this,” Barclay said with a sigh as he pressed a tender kiss to my forehead.
“Why not? I love the woods, they have been my area of refuge for a long time now, and I want to share them with you, to share myself with you,” I said, opening myself up to him emotionally and bracing for the pain that usually came after such a thing.
“You don’t think it’s dirty? Beneath you?” Barclay asked. When I looked up at him, his eyes were watching a bird on a branch off to the side, and I wondered who had made him think such a thing. In that moment, I didn’t care, though, I’d get to the bottom of it one day, but for now I needed him, I needed our bond to be cemented, and most of all, I needed to feel his body moving within my own.
“Is it beneath you? Do you think it’s dirty? I’m perfectly fine with it, but I don’t want to insult you by asking you to fuck me in the most serene, peaceful place I’ve ever known.”
His nostrils flared at my language and those deep, chocolate-brown orbs found mine once more. Need had flared to life within them, and a second later, his mouth was pressed to mine as he backed me up against a tree.
“Say the word, and I’ll stop, I don’t care if I’m two seconds from coming,” he panted between kisses.
“Just get naked, would you?” I giggled.
Barclay shucked his pants off, and I was pleasantly surprised to find him buck naked under them—he hadn’t conjured briefs. Yum.
His mouth found my neck, and he nipped at the area where I wanted him to bite, before raining kisses over my skin. Long, thick fingers found my breasts and tweaked my nipples until I was crying out i
n pleasure, while his cock nudged at my folds. With each movement, he teasingly slid a fraction inside of me, until it became too much for us both, and he thrust home in one fluid movement.
His hands moved to my butt, cupping it and protecting me from the tree, even though I didn’t care about bark burn. When he withdrew, I had to fight to get myself to relax and enjoy the slow pace he was setting, especially when what I had been craving was hard and fast.
This was our first time, and I wanted to remember everything about it, so I appreciated his restraint, even if it wasn’t scratching that particular itch just yet.
I rocked my hips up to meet his when he thrust forward again, and he pulled his head away from where he’d been kissing my neck to look at me. As though he’d made a decision, he spun around to lay me down on the forest floor.
The tree had scraped against my back as we moved, and my blood scented the air. Barclay froze immediately, and a different kind of hunger stirred within each of us. His hand ran up my back, and I felt his finger slide into the wet drip of blood. He pulled away then, and looked at the ruby liquid on his skin. His eyes flashed to mine, and the hunger in them sent a thrill through me as he sat us on the ground without ever letting his cock slip out of me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his hips.
“Taste it if you want,” I whispered.
Without questioning my words, he slipped his blood-coated finger into his mouth and licked it clean. “Fuck, sweetheart. . . . You’re fucking delicious,” he said, which made me grin. When his hand went back to the wound, it had already closed, so I tilted my head to the side.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I just nodded and kissed his collarbone. “May I?” The words seemed to slip out before I could stop them.
“Are you sure? I’m not a pureblood. I’ll taste different.” His eyes were darkened with worry, so I squirmed on his lap just a little, enjoying the amazing full feeling he gave me. His cock didn’t feel as long as Cade’s, but it was wider, and that gave me pleasure in a different, but no less fantastic, way.
