Chapter 2
EMME
Talon fucking Riverson.
He’d never needed a name to be powerful and enticing, but now that he had two—adopting the same family name as Slade—he felt even more magnetic.
I love you. Those words were on repeat in my head as he kissed the sanity out of me. Like, this man could freaking kiss, and considering I was the one and only shifter he’d ever touched this way, it was all instinct.
He’d told me he loved me. He. Loved. Me.
And I loved him.
I’d expected with our horrible beginning, those words would be hard to say, but they’d burst from me like I’d been holding them back for years. My feelings for Talon were strong and complex, and I already knew I couldn’t live without him. I couldn’t live without any of my mates.
When I pulled back from the toe-curling kiss, my breaths were ragged and heavy, and I tried to ignore the pulsing in my core. We had a bond that was ninety percent complete, and there was only one step left, which both of our beasts pushed us toward.
After a morning swept up in grief for Cora, Warrick, and their pack, it was nice to have a brief moment of normalcy.
“Damn,” I huffed. “That was perfect, Tal.”
His chest rumbled, and the dark planes of his gorgeous face briefly lit up as he smiled. “I could kiss you all day, sweetness.” His voice lowered. “And all night.”
I resisted the urge to rub up against his dark cargo pants, as the scent of my arousal spilled through the cab.
Talon’s nostrils flared, and I cleared my throat while I scrambled back over to my side of the car, fixing my dress as I went.
“Enough of that, mate. We have an appointment to keep, and since you are more than competent driving on a straight road, how would you like to try heading into the city?”
Talon never asked a lot of questions, as he generally trusted what I asked of him. No doubt that had a lot to do with the way he’d been trained to follow commands and never think for himself. “If you lead, I will follow,” he said, as if to reiterate my thoughts.
I shook my head. “That’s not how this pack works. If you’re not comfortable driving in the city, or if you’d like to observe the shifters in their natural environment, then I can drive us there.”
His big hands flexed against the poor steering wheel again; it was a miracle it hadn’t shattered yet under his hold. “Actually, I would like to observe. I have chosen my path in life, and it is you, but I still find myself curious of the reasons Fletcher wanted to destabilize everything.”
The death of Fletcher Davenport, aka evil asshole, hadn’t miraculously resulted in Talon completely abandoning the dead alpha’s philosophy.
He still believed, to some extent, that falling back under a single alpha rule was the way for our species to prosper.
A part of him would always worry that we were diminishing our animal instincts by domesticating into cities.
It might be good for him to immerse himself in the way we lived now—not that he had time to do much more than glance out the window today.
We were busy trying to stop Jewels from destroying our world.
She was worse than Fletcher, wanting to bring all shifters under her control, our beasts no longer ours to command.
A future I’d rather die than let happen.
Hence why, outside of this brief interlude for a driving lesson on our way to the ceremony, we were on the clock and counting down to the next full moon.
The deadline helped me compartmentalize the sudden appearance of my father and the truth he’d brought with him. A truth that changed everything. I was not only shifter.
Witch-shifter.
My darker thoughts were disturbed by a tap on my window.
Hunter leaned against his bike, his charcoal suit jacket open and displaying the expanse of his wide shoulders.
He wouldn’t normally dress this way on a motorcycle, but we were all in our ceremony outfits.
When he crouched down toward me, he stared straight into my damn soul.
The stormy gray of his eyes were light, as if the dumpster fire of a world burning around us didn’t bother him. “You okay, baby?” he asked, voice muffled through the door of the armored vehicle.
I was tempted to haul myself onto the back of his bike and lose myself in my entitled alpha and the speed of his motorcycle.
Backpacking for Hunter was one of my top-tier fantasies.
I’d never allowed myself to even think about it with Slade, the other dragon shifter in our pack.
Mostly because he had a strong touch aversion, and I wouldn’t want him to feel uncomfortable with me plastered to his back.
But Hunter… Hunter liked touch. Very, very, much.
I hit the button to roll the window down. “We’re good,” I said, sensing Talon lean closer behind me. His smoky maple scent was strong and steady. Calming. Just like Hunter’s mocha. “We’re ready to head for town now.”
Hunter’s visor was flipped up to show the small crinkle beside his eyes as he smiled. “Okay, little mate. We’ll follow as your guard.”
Talon rumbled. “She doesn’t need any guards beside me.”
Hunter’s shrug said he didn’t completely disagree, but we’d also learned the hard way that there was magic not even a dragon could withstand. “We’ll see you in there,” he said, dropping his visor and kicking his long leg back over the bike.
Slade, the silent giant clad all in black, remained comfortably perched on his bike.
This dragon shifter was the only one of my pack I didn’t wear a claiming bite from, and had always been the hardest alpha to get close to.
Even after everything that had happened, we hadn’t talked about our relationship outside of confirming that we would bond today.
It bothered me that it might be out of necessity and not choice, but circumstances dictated the timeline, and I had to roll with it.
At least he had confirmed that he’d found peace in his dragon bond and no longer believed he could destroy me. So there was that. I just wasn’t sure it was enough.
We had to go into this final battle as strong as possible, and Constantine, the shifter claiming to be my father, didn’t believe I could access true magic until my shifter soul was complete. He had a lot of claims.
I had no idea how I felt about any of them, or even if I believed a single word from his mouth.
But we’d learn soon enough if he was right.
When I went to open my door, Talon leaned over and captured my arm. “Wait,” he ordered, unintentionally dropping dominance into that command, even though it wouldn’t work on me.
What did work on me was the mate bond, and I remained in an aching, flustered heap as he raced around the car to open my door. No one raised him to be an alpha of honor, but the instinct was deeply ingrained. He’d shown that from the first moment he brushed my hair and soothed my beast.
When he helped me out of the Benz, he leaned down to drop a kiss on my cheek and escorted me to the driver’s side. I felt the burn of Slade’s gaze, even unable to see his expression through the dark tint of his helmet. That dragon took tall, silent, and deadly to a whole new level.
The urge to prank the cold bastard again was a niggling need, but it would take a hell of a lot more planning with the way he monitored me via the approximately eleven billion security cameras he had installed everywhere.
After helping me into the driver’s side, Talon clicked my seatbelt in, before he jumped into the passenger seat.
Wasting no time, I swung the car around and got us on the road to town.
Talon had barely even needed a driving lesson, having mastered the basics already.
Even though flying would always be his first choice, it was good to know that he could drive if required.
Which meant it was time to head to the sacred space we’d reserved for our pack bonding.
This morning’s ceremony wasn’t the kind that involved sex and bites. It was an energy sharing between the alphas that would strengthen our quintet. Hunter, Kellan, Finley and Slade had already had this ceremony before, but Talon needed to be brought into the fold.
After that, the sex and biting would happen with the twins and me.
I was the heart of our group, and the only one who would fully claim the alphas. They would be brothers in essence, and together we’d form the strongest bond of our kind.
A bond I no longer feared would spell my death.
“You want to be part of our pack in this way, right?” My need to give Talon an equal voice, as he’d always been dismissed by his alpha, had me double checking. “Not just with me.”
There was no hesitation in his reply. “Yes. They already feel like my brothers, and I guess I can handle sharing you with them.”
After today he’d be a full pack member, registered with the Alpha Council and everything. They’d taken the news of a second dragon surprisingly well, but they were trying to mend bridges with the Reeves pack, after dismissing our concerns over Fletcher.
Which ended with a massive battle in our street.
Talon and I didn’t talk again until we reached the built-up areas of Golden Claw. He was the sort of alpha I could exist in comfortable silence with; the warmth remained without any need for conversation.
In the city, he pulled his enigmatic gaze from my face to observe the shifters around us.
His dragon focus locked in on the various alphas, betas, and deltas hurrying about their daily lives with work, school, and college.
We had sports teams, we had office buildings, and we had many cafes and restaurants, quite a few owned by the very pack he’d found himself part of—not that money meant anything to Talon.