One
“Where is my fucking wife!?”
I lunge for Maddox, not caring that he’s my brother. All I want is to see him bleed beneath my knuckles as he tells me where she is.
My nostrils are flaring. My heartbeat is running wild. I breathe in deep, focusing on one particular scent that is fucking everywhere. My wife’s blood is sprayed liberally across the floor and walls of our family home. But I can’t smell her raspberry-and-cream body wash.
I can’t hear her cracked voice calling for me. Can’t hear her mourning our baby, who now lies dead in the palm of my left hand. I can’t hear her screaming. Can’t hear her rage or pain. Or her vows to kill the fucker responsible. To kill me for having left her alone with only one bodyguard and my mother.
I can’t sense her heartbeat anywhere in this house.
Because her blood is here. Her blood is here in fucking bucketloads. But everything that makes her her is gone.
“Fuck!”
Maddox tries to flee, triggering a hunting instinct inside of me. It boils through my veins until my teeth ache and bloodlust fills me, coaxing me to feed, to kill.
To lose myself in the violence until I kill everyone in this fucking city so there’s no one left to hide my wife.
Grabbing my brother by the throat with one hand, I slam him into a wall. A low growl builds in my chest as I lean in.
I know the fucker likes my wife.
I know she likes him.
If he’s fucking hiding her, if her absence is nothing more than an elaborate plan to steal her from me, to get me to believe she’s been kidnapped by the Boss of the Death Hunt rather than by him, I will. Kill. Him.
“Where is she?” I roar.
His dark-brown eyes widen. Maddox holds his hands up. “V, I’m not –”
I cut him off with a snarl, not wanting to listen to his lies. brother has already betrayed me. I can’t trust any of them.
Especially not the one in front of me. Maddox likes to play with people like they’re toys. He keeps them locked up so he can break them. So he can have fun with them. He’s a twisted little psycho.
“Did you have fun with Dayne and Bambi?”
I growl as my fingers tighten around his throat. “Have you kidnapped my wife to have more fun with her?” I can smell his panic now, can feel the terror beating away in his pulse. His guilt is so clear across his fucking face. He grabs at my hand, trying to peel me off his neck. But my fingers only tighten. My eyes don’t leave his. He should’ve known I would do anything to get her back.
He gasps, panic in his eyes.
His heartbeat starts to thrash just like his legs.
And still I keep squeezing.
“What the fuck, Varius?”
Leno shouts from further down the hall, having just entered the scene, alongside Krypto and Ezriel. My senses push out in half a second, clocking where the rest of my brothers are through the beat of their hearts.
Enoch is in his bed upstairs, half-dead but stable. Rudy is in a chair beside him, and Khalid isn’t back yet, having left with Mother and Aleric some time ago.
But they might be back at any moment, and once they are, I’ll be too greatly outnumbered. A trapped animal with no way to save my wife. I need to end this now.
Baring my teeth, I yank Maddox forward only to slam him back into the wall. His head cracks. His eyes roll.
“Fuck! Ez, get him off!”
Leno shouts.
“I can’t! His entire makeup has chang–”
Pivoting, I throw Maddox at Ezriel. I can’t let him get a lock on me. His telekinesis can stop me in my tracks.
And I cannot stop until I find her. Save her. Apologize for having failed to protect her and our daughter, who still lies protected in my left hand. I will never leave her again.
Ezriel ducks to avoid being hit by Maddox even as Leno’s vines shoot forward to catch him. Hidden by Maddox’s bulk, I dart forward, then drop into a slide halfway there. Ez’s eyes widen at the sight of me barreling towards him.
“Oh, shit!”
As he dodges to the side, I twist to my right to follow him. Placing all my weight on that hand, I swing my left leg up and kick him in the face. His head snaps to the side. My foot sets down beside my hip, and I kick out like a donkey with my other. He flies back with a groan.
Shifting my attention, I lunge for Leno.
He opens his mouth, words forming in their infancy, but I tackle him around the torso. My shoulder slams into his solar plexus, and all that leaves his lips is a painful gasp. The back of his head hits the ground hard. Maddox falls to the floor behind me as Leno loses control of his vines.
Raising a fist, I go to slam it into his face for a knock-out blow, but a large furry body barrels into me first. Teeth latch around my forearm. Krypto snarls and growls as he drags me away. He shakes his head. He bites me deeper, but I can barely feel the pain over my bloodlust.
He releases me and moves back as one of Leno’s vines wraps around my right arm and yanks it across my chest. As he starts to drag me away, I twist on the ground and hook my legs around Ezriel’s. He was just starting to regain his feet, and as I jerk mine, he topples towards me.
He reaches out instinctively to catch himself. His hands land on both sides of my head. I twist towards the right and bite down hard on his wrist, tearing through his tendon. Blood spurts into my mouth, filling me with an explosion of magical power and ecstasy.
But with a feral growl, I refuse to swallow. Despite every part of me urging me to feed on him until he’s dry, to sate the Craving setting fire to my veins, I refuse. He is not my wife, and I will not feed from anyone but her.
So as Ezriel screams, I keep rolling, forcing his arm to collapse. As he starts to fall fully on top of me, I strike out twice with my left elbow, moving with hybrid speed. The first strike to his ribs breaks a bone. The second one impales it into his lung. Fuck! It just missed his heart.
He gasps as I finish rolling him beneath me, his flesh still between my teeth, his blood still pouring down my lips. But just as I’m about to rip Ezriel’s radial artery apart with my teeth, I catch the scent of an angel.
And everything fades – quieting, pinpointing until all that’s left is the smell of her.
My wife.
Not just her blood, which already paints this hall.
But her.
Her raspberry-and-cream body wash.
The mix of mint ice-cream and pickles, a craving she’s taken to in her pregnancy.
The particular scent of sweat that covers her pillow.
All the little smells that make up Micha fucking Shadow.
My wife is home.
Tears burning my eyes, I release Ezriel and stagger to my feet. I turn, chasing her scent, and find her stumbling into the house through a hole in the hallway wall.
There are bruises on her face and cuts on her hands and arms – defensive wounds from fighting off an attacker. Her brown eyes land on me, so bright with pain and fear and a need to be held – a weakness she rarely ever shows. Blood pours from a hole in her stomach, right where Bambi used to be, curled up and protected. Both her hands press over it as if she can still protect our little girl.
But she can’t stop the blood seeping down her fingers. Can’t relieve the weight in my left hand as I hold what her womb should be holding.
“He… he…”
Her face twisting in pain, she stumbles to her knees, her hands still clasped protectively over her stomach.
My heart stops as I stare at her, wanting so badly to believe she’s real. But my paranoia spikes, and I turn back around to find Maddox. If the little shit’s turned into her –
But no.
He’s there, lying on the floor, bleeding from his cracked skull.
Micha is real, and she is home.
With a choked cry, I run towards my wife. I don’t care that she’s most definitely a trap. I know she couldn’t have escaped on her own, which means Antonio wants her here. But whatever poison he has laced her with, whatever dark spell he has had his witch cast on her, we will figure it out together. Right now I just need her in my arms.
Dropping down beside my wife, I pull her into my lap. She cries into my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her and breathe in the scent I thought I would never smell again. I listen to her heartbeat. I feel the trembling of her body. I smell the richness of fresh blood...
Then the full force of the Craving hits me in the stomach, and I jerk forward, sinking my teeth into her throat.