16. Orion
CHAPTER 16
Orion
I knew what was happening, even as I tried to rebel against it. She was the enemy, a Vanderbilt, the spawn of the man that killed my family. I should have hated her. I should have bucked against the instinctual pull inside me.
But every day that went by after she crashed into that tree, I grew more attached. After her transition and the intimacy of our shift together, I could no longer deny that she completed me in ways I’d never imagined. She brought out the playfulness in me, a side I thought died with my parents, and I grounded her in reality, bringing her down from her life of privilege to how the world truly worked.
Mine, roared the wolf inside my head. Mine. Ours.
Fuck, that thought should have scared me more than it did, but I couldn’t get enough of her. After we both came, our hormones finally settled to a point where I could think clearly. I rolled off her and collapsed against the bed, wrapping an arm under her shoulders to pull her closer. She draped an arm over my stomach and rested her head on my chest, our combined contentment settling deep in my gut.
I reveled in that intoxicating strawberry floral fragrance that set my wolf to pacing. It had mixed with oak and wood and something distinctly me. My scent…my bonding scent…had etched itself into her molecules, emanating from deep inside her body.
She smiled and nuzzled her head under my chin, rubbing her tight little body firmer against me, which got my cock’s attention. It pulsed again, despite the fact that I’d just gotten done having her.
Fuck, will I ever stop wanting her?
It seemed not because she noticed and glanced up at me with that devious grin.
“Ry, what if I wanted you to mark me…for real? How…” She cleared her throat and bit her bottom lip, making me want to dig my own teeth into that delicate flesh. “How would that work?”
“Hmm.” My wolf liked the thought of her wearing my teeth imprint permanently. “So eager for a love bite, huh?”
She leaned forward and lapped her tongue over my pulse, and the touch sizzled through my body, electrifying my nerves and clenching in my balls. I’d had her multiple times already, but I could not stop myself from groaning and giving in to my own gluttony.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me how it works. Tell me everything.”
“It’s easy,” I explained, wrapping my fingers in her hair and giving it a firm tug so she sat up and faced me. “Once our primal sides agree on the mating, I’ll need to nip you hard enough to break the skin right”—I ran a finger over her collarbone to the part where her trapezius muscle met her neck—“there. My saliva will mix with your pheromones and leave a scar. After that, you’ll smell like my scent forever, even if we’ve spent weeks apart.”
That sent me into a tailspin that I didn’t want to think about. I needed to be near her. Having her in my bed made all the nights without her seem worth it, and when I woke up after the moon with her flowery feminine scent buried deep in my nose, I thanked whatever fates had brought her into my life. Without that crash, we would have never gotten as close as we did, and I would have never known what it was to be so close to someone else.
I wanted to sink my teeth into her skin to make it permanent, to do all the things I told her about, but now that we were so connected, I sensed her trepidation even more than I had before her transition. Something held me back, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It had to do with her being a Vanderbilt, with why her family hadn’t been more eager to rescue her from this situation. Did she not tell them the truth about her whereabouts? If not, why had she lied? Was it to protect us…or herself? And if it was to protect herself, what had made her so scared?
I remembered thinking she’d been hiding something when she first got here, and I couldn’t shake the thought Isolde was still keeping something from me. Until I knew what it was, I couldn’t trust her completely. If I marked her, it would be permanent…even more so than whatever we had now. In a few weeks, my magic would be gone from her blood, and until we sealed the mating, we might be able to go our separate ways.
My wolf, on the other hand, snarled at that idea. He’d already made up his mind about her, no matter what.
“Would I get to bite you, too?” Her eyes lit up with excitement, and a thrill of anticipation shot through our connection.
I chuckled and shifted my hips under her, brushing my quickly growing cock up against her soft, warm cunt.
“Of course, little fox,” I said, my tone dropping deeper as my beast came to the forefront of my mind. He, of course, loved the idea of her sinking her cute dainty teeth into my neck and claiming me for life. But I needed to be patient, to make sure I knew exactly what I was getting into.
“Can we do it now?” Her amber eyes shimmered in the afternoon light and she moved against me, wiggling so close, all of our skin was connected from chest to toes. The delicious tangy scent of her arousal rose up between us and I took a deep inhale, my mouth watering at the thought she got off on wanting to bite me. “Can we?”
“It’s a ritual,” I said, grabbing her hips to try to slow her down. “We need Kodiak to bless the union?—”
“Bless the union?” She raised her eyebrows. “Why do we need his approval?”
“I’m a member of his pack. I’m the VP of the Royal Bastards.” Despite it all, a part of me loved her impatience, like she couldn’t wait to get her greedy paws on all that she could have. I wrestled with the same impatience myself. “Waiting for Kodiak is a part of the deal.”
“Okay, if you insist,” she said, letting out a small, comfortable sigh. “I never want to leave this bed.”
“Hmm.” I chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “The work at the Fiver doesn’t stop just because we’re fucking.”
“Hmm,” she said, mocking my own hum. “You smell good.”
“Yeah?” I rubbed my nose against her head until she looked up at me, where I leaned down to kiss her. “So do you.”
“We’re starting to smell the same,” she said. “Is that normal?”
“Uh-huh,” I replied, curling my lips into a grin. “It’s normal for us.”
“Why?” Furrowing her brows, she glanced up at me with curiosity dancing behind her eyes. “Because we’re fucking?”
She deserved the truth, didn’t she? I wanted to tell her. But could I trust her?
I took a deep breath and decided it was now or never. I needed to voice my concerns and be out with it, no matter the truth, no matter the reason. Whatever it was, I’d have to deal with it. A shifter only mated once, and they mated for life. It was part of the evolutionary drive to find the most suitable partner and breed. The combination of her magic and mine would make powerful cubs, if we decided we wanted that sort of thing.
“Little fox, why hasn’t your family come to get you?” I glanced at her and watched as she shifted her gaze to the tiny space between us, pulling her body away. I reached out to touch her chin and force her face toward me. “What are you hiding?”
“How do you know I’m hiding something?” Her voice cracked and another rush of rotten nerves radiated from her into my chest, hitting me in the gut. I smelled it on the air, tangy and salty with her sweat.
“I can sense it.” I shook my head. “Whatever it is, it’s better if you tell me rather than keep it a secret any longer.”
She took a deep breath and dug her palms into her eyes, her cheeks turning a bright shade of rose as she exhaled on a sob. “I’m supposed to be engaged.”
If an asteroid had suddenly dropped out of the sky and slammed me into the earth, it would have surprised me less.
“What?” The word came out as a growl, and she snapped her gaze up to mine, tears beginning to streak down her cheeks.
“I don’t want to be,” she confessed, “and as soon as I get home, I’m going to figure out how to get out of it. It was arranged by my stupid brother, and I hate it. I hate everything about it.” She told me about how her father had died and their ranch hands refused to work for a man they didn’t trust. I didn’t blame them. Her brother sounded like a fucking prick, and the longer she spoke, the more solidly that opinion formed in my head. He’d made a deal with the Bloody Scorpions, and in exchange, those fucking leeches had demanded her as a sacrifice.
I knew what they wanted to do with her. They’d change her into one of them, make her a vampire in service to them for the rest of eternity. And if not, they’d turn her into a thrall, a human servant addicted to feeding them her blood.
Not that any of that was possible now. Shifters and vampires notoriously didn’t get along, and if they got a hold of this new version of her, they’d spend days getting high on her blood, draining her slowly for their own pleasure.
“He wanted to marry me as soon as the snow melted,” she said, wiping the tears off her cheeks.
“Well, that’s not fucking happening now,” I roared, barely able to keep my canines from extending in my rage. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up and twisting the blankets under her arms to cover herself. “I didn’t think it would matter before the moon, and now that I know what I am… who I am…I was waiting for the right time.”
Fury boiled in my blood from both the fact she’d withheld this massive secret and that her brother could do such a horrible thing to his own family. Of course, he didn’t know the Scorpions were vampires, just like he didn’t know his own sister had turned into a shifter and now she had a pack behind her. How could he? The one thing both vampires and shifters agreed on was keeping the public out of our business.
“Orion,” she pleaded. “Say something. Please. Say you understand. Say you forgive me. Anything but silence.”
“Stop,” I snapped, perhaps too aggressively because she hissed and grimaced and icy-hot fear echoed down our bond. “I should have known this was too good to be true.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, taking a deep breath to try to settle the fire in my gut. I wanted to fucking hunt down her brother and strangle him. I wanted to find the leader of the bloodsucking Scorpions and rip his head clear off his shoulders, regardless of how it might escalate the war between our families. I wanted to tear the bond with Isolde out of my chest and shred it to pieces.
“I’ve felt terrible about holding this in,” she continued. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know what to say. I was hoping I could deal with it when I got home and it wouldn’t matter.”
I’d had trouble trusting people all my life, and now that I’d found someone who could be my mate, she’d been lying to me since I met her. Perhaps it was the fading essence of the moon or the lingering exhaustion from her transition, but when she tried to grab my arm to get my attention, I ripped it away from her and stood.
“Ry,” she whimpered, her eyes red with tears, her cheeks blushed as her shame spread to us both. “Please.”
“You know the Bastards and the Scorpions are enemies,” I snarled. “You know this makes everything more complicated. How am I supposed to bring you into the pack now?”
“What—what are you saying?” Her shattering heart punched me in the gut, nearly making my knees shake.
“I’m saying you should have been honest with me from the start.” My voice boomed off the walls as I struggled to contain the wrath scalding through my nerves.
She hung her mouth open and blinked, perhaps trying to come to an understanding about the whole thing herself. Then a spiraling inferno replaced that confusion, and she glared up at me.
“You’re the one to talk,” she said, crawling out of bed to grab a pair of sweats and yank them up her legs. “Just being around you turned my entire world upside down.”
“That’s not my fault,” I said. “If it were up to me, I would have protected you from all this. I would have sent you home as soon as I could or left you in your?—”
I cut myself off before I said something I didn’t mean. But she caught the gist of it anyway because her features turned to stone, and she grabbed a shirt off the floor, pulling it over her head.
“So, this was all for nothing, wasn’t it? The bonding scent and your magic in my blood.” She wiped at her eyes and shook her head, and I clenched my hands into fists to keep from going to her and wrapping her in my arms. I hated that I hurt her, and I hated this sudden separation even more.
But if she could lie to me about this for so long, what else could she be lying about? And if I let her in, how long would I have her before Marx came for her and put the whole pack in danger as a result?
When Kodiak found out, he could force me to reject her. I’d disobeyed an order from the alpha, and it had ramifications that could destroy our entire life in Helena. He’d be within his rights to command me never to see her again, and I’d have to make a choice: my mate or my pack. Sitting there in that moment, I wasn’t sure which one I would choose. My pack was my family, but Isolde…She was just some girl I’d met twelve days ago, some girl that had snuck under my skin and ripped my soul to shreds. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted this.
There were too many variables, too many things to be pissed about.
“I’ll never be good enough for you, will I?” She let out a deep sob and grabbed a hoodie next, slipping it over her arms. “I’ll never be good enough for anyone.”
She went for the door and yanked it open, stomping into the hall before going into her room. I thought she’d slam the door behind her and cool off alone. But a moment later, she emerged with her purse and soiled clothes, the only things she had on her the night of the crash.
Stop her, the wolf screamed. Stop her. Stop this.
But I didn’t. Orion, the man, had to protect both beast and human from any further complications. I needed a moment to get my temper under control, to clear my head so I could think clearly about what to do. But things were slipping through my fingers like quicksand, and my rage got the better of me.
No, the wolf howled. No!
“Lycan,” Isolde called as she stormed down the stairs.
“Well, good morning, your worshipfulness,” Lycan said. “What’s wrong?”
“Can you take me home?” Her broken voice and sputtered request launched me into action. I grabbed a pair of jeans, stuffed my legs into them, and followed her downstairs where I found both Poe and Lycan staring at her while she clutched at her midsection.
“What the fuck did you do?” Lycan snarled, shifting his mean gaze to me.
“It’s not his fault,” Isolde said. “Please…please can you just take me?—”
She never got the rest of it out because the front door slammed open to reveal an angry six-foot-seven figure with a deep, raging glare.
“Orion!” Kodiak snarled, and he was pissed.