AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She turned up the volume on her earbuds, hearing a collective gasp from the crowd, which she estimated numbered close to one hundred.
A woman walked down the center aisle in a glittering gold gown, wearing gold cuffs on her arms. She held the arms of two older men, but with tigers’ long-life it was hard to tell just how old anyone was.
Shifters did get married, but generally the marriage ceremony was part of the mating ceremony, which bound the couple together in front of their people. But even without a ceremony, shifters were mated once one of them bit the other.
Her mind briefly flitted to the wolf couple she’d seen at the airport. She didn’t know if tigers marked with fangs on the neck or another place, butallshifters marked one way or another to tell the world that they were mated.
So what she was watching was a mating ceremony.
Interesting.
It would explain the extra security around town, but she could also explain the security because Brent and their people had been attacking the tigers for the last couple of weeks. Unsuccessfully.
Which was why she’d been called in.
She lifted a pair of binoculars and scanned the crowd.
She located the wolf alpha and his mate. What was his name?
Adam. And Cinder, who was some kind of magic wolf, which was why their people hadn’t gone after the wolves yet. Brentwantedto, but he thought the tigers would be easier to take out. He’d been wrong of course, because no shifters fell easily from what she’d learned over the years.
She recognized the vampire leader, Mishka, because he was sexy as hell and also dangerous, and she was definitely the sort of girl who was attracted to bad boys, as evidenced by her last boyfriend, who’d been part of Humans Against Shifters and on the frontlines in the battle against the wolf pack. He’d ended up getting killed, and while she was sad about his loss of life, she hadn’t been in love with him.
Hell, she wasn’t sure she’d ever loved anyone. Not romantically, anyway. She’d loved people—her parents, her sister, friends over the years. Now she didn’t really love anyone because the one person she’d loved above all others had been struck down by claws and fangs.
Internally sighing, she focused on the shifters.
So Midas was mating the woman in the gold dress, which meant she would be the queen of the tigers and lead alongside him. Mentally flipping through what she remembered of the tiger dossier, Brent had shared that she was wiccan and had used her power against them when they’d kidnapped her. The tigers were good at picking powerful mates, it seemed.
She lowered the binoculars and leaned against the tree, closing her eyes. Her heart hurt. It had been aching in a dull way since she’d infiltrated the town earlier in the day, but now, as she stood close to the shifters, it ached something fierce. Like it was being squeezed in a vice with the pressure slowly increasing.
Rubbing the space over her heart, she focused on the feelings coursing through her. There was always anger burning deep and dark in the background of everything she did. But there was a new emotion there, a shadow of longing that she hadn’t experienced before. Surely she wasn’t wishing she was part of the ceremony tonight? That didn’t make a bit of sense.
She tried to push away the strange, new feeling, but it only seemed to grow stronger. Something feral within her bloomed for a hot second and she gasped, her eyes popping open. Rubbing the space over her heart again, she shoved the new feeling away and focused on the anger. It was the most familiar feeling she had, comforting like a blanket on a cold night. The anger was always surrounded by loneliness and loss, and those feelings spurred her to do things she’d never considered doing before: spying, for one. Being party to the deaths of others too.
When she felt like the strange feelings were subdued and left with the familiar ones instead, she took a few deep breaths to clear her head and rolled her neck. Then she lifted the binoculars, peeked around the tree trunk, and peered through them. She swung them slowly from one side of the clearing behind the king’s house to the other, looking at faces and trying to decide if they were tigers or another animal.
And then she froze.
The man standing next to Midas was positively the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life. Short hair, broad shoulders, and the fact he was naked from the waist up, revealing muscles upon muscles, glowing golden in the torchlight? Holy hell.
She swallowed hard at the sudden lump in her throat.
Heat rose inside her, flushing her skin and making her feel sweaty even in the cold night.
Like moments earlier, she felt something feral inside her, like there were invisible claws gently stroking all her sensitive parts.
What the actual hell was going on?
She blinked slowly and focused on the man, ignoring her suddenly curious inner hussy. The man stood next to Midas with his hands clasped behind his back, his head slowly moving from side to side as he seemed to scan the crowd and woods.
She focused not on how sexy he was but the information she could gather by watching him. He was clearly highly ranked within the ambush, and judging by the sharp-eyed gaze, he was also part of the security team. If he was standing with Midas, he was probably his second-in-command.
And damn, was he sexy.
She mentally chastised herself for thinking he was sexy. Again.
He stopped moving, freezing in place as his gaze landed on her. Her breath caught in her chest, her heart suddenly pounding as she met his gaze. That feral something within her that she’d never experienced before clicked again, and she felt like she’d been waiting her entire life to stare at this man and have him stare back at her.
