Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Damien
I woke up feeling lighter than I’d felt in years, the scent of Raven heavy in my lungs.
Half asleep, I reached out for her, undone by my savage need to have her in my arms as I had for the past couple of hours, to feel the warmth of her skin against mine, to press my lips to her skin and feel her shiver.
My fingers grasped air and a tangle of cooling sheets. I bolted upright, my eyes flying open, the sight before me confirming what I’d initially felt.
Raven was gone.
It felt like déjà vu. A sibling to the panic I’d felt that morning at the hotel when I’d woken up grasping for a stranger I could barely remember, only to meet emptiness. Only this time, I remembered her with aching detail, and Goddess help me, I didn’t think I could ever forget her.
I trembled as I had then, a sharp pain that felt like betrayal lancing through me. She was gone. She’d left me again and—
The shower turned on in the bathroom, a soft, familiar, feminine gasp penetrating the air. My panic drained out of me in an exhale of relief as I found my footing, making my way across the room unsteadily with an urgent need to see Raven, to know she was still here.
Raven didn’t notice me step into the bathroom, consumed as she was with lathering herself up.
Her head was tilted back slightly, water running in rivulets from her dark, drenched hair down her curves, catching on the slopes of her hips, as her hands trailed down on a path I longed to follow across an expanse of alabaster skin I’d marked and claimed thoroughly the night before.
I felt myself harden as I watched her, completely enthralled. She was a vision of perfection made flesh and mine. Oh, so completely mine.
I didn’t understand how Raven had gotten under my skin so easily, when other women had tried for years and failed.
I didn’t understand why my wolf was obsessed with her.
I didn’t understand why her touch and the very sight of her undid me, but I realized I didn’t care very much either. Not as long as I had her.
I must have made a sound because Raven stiffened suddenly, swiftly turning to meet my gaze. Raven released a startled gasp, hands moving to cover herself, a beautiful flush of embarrassment creeping up her cheeks.
“How long have you been standing there?” She questioned, her voice almost breathless.
“Not long,” I lied.
Raven’s flush deepened, the fog from the shower curling around her like smoke.
“Wait your turn,” She blushed. “I’ll soon be done.”
But I was already in the shower, my movements a blur as I pinned her against the reinforced glass of the shower, the hot water beating down on us. Raven’s gasp of surprise was as soft as those moans I’d wrangled from her earlier when I’d taken her.
She made one more futile attempt to cover herself from me, and a growl left my throat, my fingers threading through her hair and forcing her gaze to meet mine.
“Let me see you, Raven,” I said, my voice tight with need.
With the remembrance of those hours so fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but lean in, hungry for a taste of those lips—soft and warm, with the faint edge of sweetness and an undercurrent of something darker that undid me.
Groaning against her mouth, I chased the flavor, deepening our kiss, and Raven’s lips parted eagerly beneath mine, wet hands grasping almost blindly at my shoulders as I brushed her hair back, my lips moving from her lips to her chin to the fragile line of her nape, my need for her only growing.
“Damien,” Raven moaned, her gaze heavy-lidded, her body shivering and supple beneath my touch.
This woman would be my undoing. But as I kissed my way down her body, my lips on her swollen tits, her beautiful stretch marks to the sides of her belly bump even paler than her already pale skin, I found that I didn’t care one bit.
My knees hit the tiled floor in front of her, and Raven’s lips parted with shock.
“What are you—oh.”
I buried my mouth between her thighs. Raven bit her lower lip, her head tilted back as she cried out in passion, one hand braced against the fogged glass, the other buried in my hair, legs shaking as I gripped her ass to hold her still, tongue worshipping her with an obscene reverence.
Her taste was addictive, and I let myself get lost in it, in her, tongue slipping inside her, lips finding her clit.
She begged without words, only broken sounds and quivers.
And when I eventually took her, Raven was a blubbering mess, nails ripping into my skin, sobs of need and desire against my chest, as I sheathed myself to the hilt within her in a single, long, deliberate thrust, hips rolling against hers, slow and deep.
“All those dreams I had of you,” my words were a whisper against her skin, a confession to myself as much as it was to her, “None of them compares to the reality of you.”
Raven’s inner muscles quivered, her lips parted on a shocked breath, wide emerald green eyes on mine. Cupping her cheek, I pressed my forehead against hers, and in that moment, I was undone, a realization settling over my shoulders.
I wanted more days like this. I wanted days to lie in bed with her and worship every inch of her skin.
To argue with her about the most mundane things, if only to hear her voice.
To have Raven continue to look at me as she was right now—soft, warm, and with the depth of emotion I felt reflected in her gaze.
I knew at that moment there was no coming back from this.
Raven was asleep in her bed when the message came in. My lips burned from the lingering kiss I’d planted on her lips before leaving, fighting the fierce desire to stay at her side and take her again and again and again, as long as she would have me, and to hell with the world.
But the trackers had finally gotten a lock on the murderer’s scent. It was time to end this war business with the humans. I tracked the bleeding murderer through the storm drain, Sinclair alongside three others of my elite team flanking me. My trackers laid a trap for the beast, and it had fallen.
For hours we hunted, and as we rounded the corner leading farther into the depths of the system, the acrid stench of blood, waste, and madness, but a few steps away, a vicious, bloodcurdling growl rent through the air.
I froze at the sound, a chill sweeping through my veins, my team falling still at my side.
“Hold,” I commanded through our pack link.
My warriors exchanged similar looks of confusion, and Sinclair began to speak. “But Alpha—”
I was already walking ahead towards that animalistic growl that was as familiar as it was unfamiliar. It took a few more steps before I saw the horror that was the murderer.
The murderer was small, crouched as it was on all fours, insanity barely banked in its wild gaze, its jaw nearly unhinged with canines as long and sharp as knives protruding from its mouth, the rest of its skinny body stuck in a partial shift that was more beast than human, fur and skin matted with blood and grime and Goddess knew what else.
My heart stuttered, my pace stumbling as the scent of the murderer finally hit me in all its potency, shock threatening to obliterate me as I took a step towards the wolf.
“Rielle.”
My former mate let out a shuddering cry that was more wolf than human, clapping her furred, clawed hands over her ear, her body spasming as she twisted her head side to side as though she couldn’t bear the sound of my voice. I took another step towards her.
“Rielle.”
Heartwrenching sobs joined her keening and thrashing, but her claws were beginning to retract.
I crouched right in front of her, unbothered by her threatening snarls and growls.
“Rielle.”
Her azure gaze met mine, but no recognition sparked in it, and she kept screaming. Ignoring the sounds of shock from my men behind me, I closed the distance between us.
“It’s alright,” I whispered, pulling the woman who’d betrayed me and upended my life into an embrace. She stiffened but didn’t struggle, and in a small shudder, I felt Rielle fall out of her partial shift, becoming smaller still in my arms. The sounds leaving her lips were heart-rending sobs.
“It’s alright,” I said once more, the bitter taste of the lie heavy on my tongue. “It’s alright.”
“She was the murderer?”
Alpha Matt’s voice was a study in heartbreak as he stared at Rielle. From the intense heartbreak his gaze held, no one could have looked between them and suspected that Rielle and Matthew didn’t share a drop of blood between them, adopted as he was.
Scrubbed, sedated, and cuffed to the hospital bed, Rielle slept on, oblivious to the world. She looked like she hadn’t aged a day in the past decade, her features deceptively harmless and innocent.
“The murders were a result of her feral state,” I explained.
No one had been able to uncover what exactly set off a wolf’s feral state. In some cases, it was a severe trauma, the death of one’s soul mate or parents. Experiences that some wolves went through unscathed broke others.
They went feral, entering that state of mind where their wolf’s baser instincts and inhumane urges prevailed. The feral state could only be broken by a strong will or the far more likely option, death.
A brief recount of all the murder cases had drawn up the sordid truth of the situation.
All the victims had been in transit, unintentionally crossing the “boundary” of sorts her wolf had set up around her temporary residence and the areas she rustled through garbage to eat.
Feral, territorial, and half insane, she’d murdered them.
I placed a hand on Alpha Matt’s shoulder, knowing my words were a cold comfort.
“She doesn’t seem to remember any of it. Or anything at all.”
When questioned, Rielle just stared, her gaze as empty as her mind.
Piecing the puzzle of where she’d been all this time had taken seconds of analysing the small den of sorts her wolf had created in the storm drain network.