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Between one blink and the next, he saw her sprawled out on their bed, her breasts rosy-tipped from his mouth working them, her legs spread, her sex swollen, glistening. He’d loomed over her, his arousal in his hand, his fangs descended, his hunger sharp as a blade. Even though he’d been dizzy with the need for her blood, he’d slid into her first, before he’d taken her vein. He hadn’t wanted her to feel even a pinch.
“Your phone is—”
“Always ringing,” he cut in. “The war can wait.”
Z followed the lapel down to the tie that circled her waist. Under the folds of flannel, which were rough compared to the feel of her satin skin, hisshellanwas gloriously naked, and every time he breathed in through his nose, he smelled his own bonding scent on her body—which was the purpose of it. She was marked as his, and other males of the species would recognize instantly that she was claimed. It didn’t mean she wasn’t her own person, with her own choices and life. It did mean that if you fucked with her? You were going to know who was coming after you with their bare hands.
Oh, and even though he’d had her just twenty minutes ago, his sex thickened behind the button fly of his leathers.
“I want to be in you again,” he said softly. “I like it when you come and I can feel it.”
Lowering his head, his upper lip curled off his fangs in a way that pulled at the scar that curved from the bridge of his nose, onto his cheek, and down to the corner of his mouth. Even though he knew he was ugly, even though he was marked with the tattooed bands of a blood slave at his wrists and his throat, even though his back was roped with the whippings his mistress had given him… somehow Bella always saw beneath his surface, to that place that no one else, even his brothers or his own daughter, got to go inside.
His mate could have been hispyrocant.
Instead, she was his savior. Hisrahlman.
With a graceful arch, Bella rose up onto her toes and pressed her lips to his. “I like when I smell of your dark spices. When you go, you’re still on me—”
His phone interrupted again and he squeezed his eyes shut. “I swear tofuckingGod, I am going to stab that thing.”
“I think you have to answer it.” She lowered herself down, her hands resting lightly on his leather jacket. “Someone needs you.”
“Do you really want to ruin this moment.”
“No, but I want to know what’s going on that they’re calling you so much.”
“You and Nalla are safe here.”
“Yeah, and you and the Brothers are always out in the field, and our daughter leaves this house every weeknight to go to work. You know how much I worry about her, even if she hates it—and don’t get me started on you out fighting those undead monsters.”
Z repositioned the collar back where his mate had it, then tucked the robe’s folds tighter over her sternum.
“Tell me,” she ordered.
He hated the war even more than he hated phones. Then again, the two were intertwined. No matter how much privacy he and his mate had here in the quarters they shared with their daughter, therewas always an interruption looming, and again, never for a happy reason. Always death and pain and fighting and the reality that some night, he might never come home—some night, that bed they shared might become only hers, his scent on the sheets and her skin nothing but lingering proof that yes, he had lived imperfectly, but he had loved her to perfection, and their daughter was an echo of him to haunt her and keep her going by turns.
Wrath’s death had shattered the illusion that dice could be endlessly rolled, and thirty-three years later, they were all still grieving in the aftermath.
“Don’t hide the truth from me, Zsadist. That’s not fair.”
As he thought about responses, he decided that in his next life, he was coming back as an accountant. So when his mate asked how hard his work was, all he had to report was that his calculator broke and someone reheated cod in the break room’s microwave.
“We’ve found another induction site.”Fucking Lash. Just like his father, capable of turning humans by the dozens.“And it’s a big one.”
“Where.”
“Downtown. So nowhere near here or Luchas House. Don’t worry, no one is getting anywhere near Nalla’s work.”
She closed her eyes for a heartbeat. “Who are you going out with?”
No one.“Tohr will meet me there.”Eventually.“Even with the trainees and the soldiers, we’re stretched thin, so I have to go.”
“You’ll be careful?”
“Always.” He kissed her forehead, pressing his lips just below the off-center part her dark hair always seemed to find. “I’ll be home before dawn.”
She stared into his eyes, into him, like she was trying to see the future. Or maybe influence it. “The war is heating up again. And I…”
