Twenty One
“ I s everything all right?” Shuuhei Saito asked as I hung up the phone, squeezing it so hard that I heard the casing start to buckle and crack.
No. Nothing was fucking all right, but Shuuhei didn’t need to know that.
“I’m sorry, but we are going to have to cut this meeting short.”
Shuuhei blinked at me, clearly surprised as he watched me stand up from the table. “But we haven’t even really gotten started. Do you know how hard it was to arrange this meeting without the rest of the families finding out?”
He wasn’t wrong. Whatever information he was bringing to me about who had framed him and his guys for ambushing my weapons shipment had to be good if he was insisting on meeting in the next city over and disguising it with other business.
I’d spent the day busying myself with other work in anticipation of it while trying not to think about my wife who I’d much rather be with on a Saturday afternoon. The same wife that had now seemingly gone missing.
Just thinking about it made hot, acidic bile rise in my throat like I was about to throw up.
“We are going to have to reschedule,” I insisted, nodding at Collum who in turn said something into his earpiece.
“Edison—” Shuuhei began, so flabbergasted that he forgot that in official meetings he was supposed to use my last name. “You really need to know this.”
“It will have to wait.” I needed to get the fuck out of here and to wherever the hell Rhodes was.
I swept out of the abandoned office building where we’d set up our meeting, my guys falling into clip behind me as I strode towards the car.
“Boss, what do you need from me?” Collum asked as he opened the car door.
“Get into contact with Rhodes’ team. I need a minute-by-minute playback of how the fuck this could happen.”
She was just supposed to be going to a friend’s for girls’ night. That was about as innocuous as it could get, so I was struggling to understand the situation and how Rhodes of all people could have lost her.
It was an hour and a half back to the estate and the longer I sat in the back of the car stewing, the more I kept thinking about my own mother.
The story of how she’d been kidnapped by the Serbians was famous—almost legendary—in our circles.
It was two weeks after she married my father and she was out with a full security detail at a flea market.
All eight of her security members had been killed and she was taken.
War broke out with people falling in line and by the end of it the Serbians were gone and my mother was irrevocably broken.
She should have spent the rest of her life in convalescence somewhere out of the city. Somewhere nice.
But my father had paid far too much for her and her father was the loudest voice of the branch families for her to be able to do that. So my mother had spent the rest of her life ricocheting between lucidity and screaming like she was being murdered.
My next breath caught in a wheeze as I thought about Perrie meeting the same fate. The constant need to be sedated, the puttering aimlessly, the inability to even make her own decisions.
The inner alpha, which normally sat happily in the back of my mind, was now doing its damndest to take over and find the omega we’d all but claimed.
Find, find, find, find, find, it repeated over and over like the beat of a drum and I felt a pounding headache coming on.
Then, about halfway through the ride, my phone pinged. Fearing the worst, I pulled it out and read the message:
RHODES : Got her. Heading back to the house.
“Boss,” Collum called from the front seat, probably also getting a text from the other guys on the team.
“I know, Rhodes texted me. Let’s get there as fast as possible.”
The car accelerated and I slumped back in my seat, still trying to regain control over my composure.
But my inner alpha was still protesting, not believing the rational side of me that knew Perrie was safe and she was with Rhodes.
If anything, the panic continued to grow.
Perrie was supposed to be my wife by contract only—partners who were friendly but in it for a greater purpose of creating a generation of Keanes free from the bullshit traditions and the influence of the branch families.
That had started to change the moment she came into my study and I had her underneath me… and the subsequent weeks following where I spent every spare moment I had with the omega.
The tower which had previously been a dark place for me where I’d almost punish myself daily taking care of my mother’s plants had become completely Perrie’s now.
From the printed copies of the pictures she’d taken on campus and around the estate lining the walls to just the general shift in the air whenever she would come downstairs and sit in one of the wicker chairs to watch me care for the plants.
Maybe it was time to finally stop kidding myself. About how I felt about Perrie and how I felt about Rhodes, all of it was bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
The car had barely pulled into the long circular driveway before I was throwing the door open and hopping out.
“Sir!” I heard Collum call behind me but I ignored him as I stepped inside the large front door where Oona was waiting for me. She was dressed in her nightgown instead of her usual gray dress and apron, probably because it was just after eleven o’clock at night and she was in bed when all of the commotion began.
“Where is she?” I asked, ignoring the older woman’s fluttering as she tried to take my jacket.
“In the east wing, sir, Rhodes took her there as soon as they returned. May I ask what is going on? The two of you have looked like right thunderclouds as soon as you stepped through the door and no one will explain—”
“Later,” I promised, turning my feet in the direction of the tower.
I barely remembered the walk there, or even crossing through the greenhouse to the stairs, but in a blink I was throwing open the door to find her and Rhodes sitting across from each other mid-conversation.
It all hit me as Perrie turned to me, her eyes guilty. I had done this. I had put her in this fucking tower like it was some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. It was like I had practically put out into the universe that I wanted my wife to be kidnapped and it was firing off a warning shot.
My inner alpha, which I’d barely been keeping at bay, finally took over and the normal, rational Edison Keane was gone and in its place was something far more feral.
“Edison—” Perrie began, starting to stand.
I crossed the room in two long strides, pulling her right off of her feet and throwing her over my shoulder.
“Hey!” I vaguely heard her squeal as I turned to get her the fuck out of this tower.
“Edison, hang on,” Rhodes said, grabbing my arm. It was clear he expected me to be levelheaded about all of this. Perrie was fine and it was obvious there had been some kind of misunderstanding and she hadn’t been taken by anyone dangerous.
But it was all too damn close.
“ Mine ,” I bit out a growl at him, incapable of forming any other sort of words to verbalize how I was feeling and the other alpha flinched away from me before holding his hands up in surrender.
We stared at each other and for a moment the haze of rage and fear cleared enough to see that he was worried—about Perrie or about me I wasn’t sure—but there was so much of it on the normally stoic man’s face that it nearly knocked me right out of it.
“Can you please put me down?” Perrie’s voice was muffled by her face on my back, reminding me exactly of the events of the night and it all came crashing right back down again.
I ignored Perrie’s question and turned to leave, hurrying down the stairs and away from Rhodes. He wasn’t my pack, he’d made that clear and my instincts wanted nothing to do with him at the moment.
No. All I wanted to do was get Perrie back to my room and look over every inch of her skin for any kind of blemish or injury.
“Sir! You can’t just carry your wife like she’s a sack of potatoes!” Oona gasped as I passed by her again.
“I don’t think he’s exactly listening right now,” Perrie called comfortingly to the housekeeper, her head bouncing against my back as she did so.
“Oh, oh my!” Oona continued to follow us through the house as I made a beeline for my rooms. “Do you want me to get someone to, I don’t know, stop him?”
Another growl rattled out of my chest at that. I’d like to see anyone try. My inner alpha seemed to agree, pleased that I was finally letting it drive as we stepped into the final hallway that would take us up to our destination.
“No! It’s fine, I can handle it,” she said and I didn’t hear anything else from the older woman so I assumed she’d left us alone.
My bedroom was dark and quiet when I shoved the door open and kicked it shut behind us. Only then did I finally put Perrie back down on her feet again.
She was dressed in a too-short skirt that hugged the top of her thighs and had apparently ridden up while I’d been carrying her through the house. Then there was the halter top that clung to the curve of her breasts in a way that made me want to shred the thin material with my teeth.
Both pieces were things that I’d never seen her in before and were outside of the realm of what she usually wore.
“Edison?” Perrie reached for my face, her auburn brows drawing together as she tried to reach me.
But I was too far gone to be the usual gentleman that she always saw.
Grabbing the front of her shirt, I tugged it up over her head, making her squawk in protest as I chucked it somewhere into the dark room.
“Edison, we should talk about—” Perrie said, covering her breasts with her hands, her glossy pink lips pulling down into a frown.
“ Later ,” I barely managed to get out through gritted teeth.
The need to have her, to possess her and never let her leave this fucking room again was riding me so hard that my vision seemed to tunnel in on the omega in front of me.
All that mattered right now was her and I needed to feel her satiny soft skin against mine or I was going to lose it.
Perrie seemed to understand what I needed because her fingers were already working at the knot of my tie, sliding it from around my neck.
I didn’t have the patience for the slow undressing that she was used to. There was going to be nothing languid about this. I hungrily dropped my face down so that our mouths could come together in a mess of teeth and tongues.
Shrugging my jacket off, I gave Perrie a shove towards my bed and watched as she flopped down onto the brocade comforter, her red hair fanning around her head as she looked up at me.
“Well,” she said, pulling her bottom lip in with her teeth. “You’ve got me now, Edison, what are you going to do next?”
Mate, mate, mate, my inner alpha chanted and I realized that I was almost painfully hard, my cock straining against my dark slacks.
The sudden need to be completely naked filled me and I shredded yet another shirt, my buttons flying off as I chucked the white material over my shoulder and moved onto my pants next.
“You’re going to run out of shirts if you keep this up,” Perrie joked as she watched me finish undressing. Gray eyes sliding down my torso to my stiff erection. “Though I don’t necessarily mind you looking like this all the time.”
I didn’t say anything and instead grabbed the hem of her tiny ass little skirt that she decided to walk around in tonight and ripped it clear down the seam, shredding her panties with it.
Normally, at this point I would stretch her with my tongue or fingers, readying her to take my length, but tonight my instincts were riding me in what I only vaguely understood was a rut.
It had been almost ten years since I’d experienced one and I thought it was something that only young, inexperienced alphas found themselves getting tipped into.
But now, as I notched the head of my cock at Perrie’s weeping entrance, I realized that it may be one of the most powerful ones I’d ever had and it was only spurred on by my omega’s moan of need as I slammed home.
Perrie’s arms locked up underneath my arms, her fingers dimpling in the flesh of my back as I pulled out and pushed in again, our hips connecting in a loud slap of skin-on-skin.
All of the times that we’d slept together before, I held myself back, afraid to hurt my little wife. I kept myself in near-complete control, just happy if Perrie had a good time.
Now, as our bodies writhed together on my bed, Perrie’s fingernails dug a line down my back as her lips were open in a keen of pleasure.
“Don’t stop!” Her words were a loud gasp in my ear as I suckled on the side of her neck, the top of her collarbone, and then eventually on one of the stiff peaks of her nipples. Reddish-blue bruises formed in my wake and I fixated on them as Perrie left her own marks on my back with her nails.
Soon enough, I felt Perrie clench down hard around my cock, her body twitching underneath mine as she came with a garbled shout.
I paused to give her a moment, but my inner alpha was having none of it.
More, more, more , it chanted and I gave into my baser instincts, slipping out of my omega and flipping her over onto her knees before pressing my cock to her still twitching entrance again.
“I need a second, Edis—” Perrie began, but I was already sliding in, my hands gripping her hips tightly as we continued our mating.
Her back, one of the things I loved the most about her slender body, twitched under my lips as I continued my quest to cover her pale skin in as many of my kiss marks as I could manage, my teeth nipping here and there as another suggestion came down the line from my instincts.
Bond, bond, bond . It made almost complete and perfect sense in a way—even to the rational part of my brain that was pushed so far back in my mind that I wasn’t sure I would ever get it back at this point.
Suddenly, Perrie was sitting up on her knees, her back pressing into my chest as she grabbed the back of my head, her fingers curling into my hair as she pulled my face to hers. “Do it.”
I frowned at her, confused by her words.
“Bite me, Edison, bond me. I’ll show you I’m not going anywhere.”
I hadn’t realized that my inner alpha’s words in my head had also seemingly been coming out of my mouth like repeated prayers that only Perrie could answer.
It was at the moment that I normally would have let cooler heads prevail. Give her more orgasms and knot her to me so she couldn’t go anywhere—stick with my plan to figure out all of the shit that was going on with the five families before I took a step as big as bonding with the omega in front of me.
Hell, I would have also waited for Rhodes to finally make a decision so that we could bond her together… because even as I told him that I didn’t want to do anything with him anymore, there was always a secret hope in my head that we’d still end up together in the end.
None of that mattered now, though. No, as Perrie brought my lips to hers in another long kiss, all I could think about was biting her. My teeth ached fiercely and I realized it was because the glands in my gums that all alphas had—the ones that were filled with the bonding hormone that would create a psychic connection between an alpha and their beta or omega lovers—were filling up and almost willing me to finish the job.
Perrie rolled her hips back into mine, bringing my knot just inside of the entrance of her pussy. “Do it, Edison.”
Her purred urging was all I needed to let go and do as she asked, like a siren calling a sailor from the safe decks of his ship and into her enticing waters, I was ready to jump in feet first.
Sliding one hand down the front of her body, past her navel and down in between her legs, I spread the lips of her pussy and shoved my knot deep inside of her. It was almost ready to be stuck, I just needed Perrie to do her part.
My thumb worked at her swollen clit and I felt Perrie’s breathing speed up as we kissed, her fingers tightening on my hair as she held our faces together.
Then the walls of her pussy were tightening around my knot, locking us together as I pulled away from Perrie’s seeking mouth, my own mouth held open by the drive to bond.
My eyes scanned Perrie’s body, trying to figure out exactly where to bite her. My first inclination was to bite her on that perfect back of hers, but I didn’t want to permanently mar the perfect expanse of it with more than bruises.
No, I wanted the mark to be somewhere that couldn’t be covered easily by a shirt so that all of the horny alphas on her college campus knew she belonged to me and I would make them disappear if they so much as looked at her sideways.
Perrie’s pulse thrummed in her throat as she continued to come, oblivious to my thoughts and I zeroed in on the spot on her neck just underneath the side of her jaw.
Perfect , my inner alpha purred and I didn’t need any more encouragement.
My teeth sank into Perrie’s neck, the pressure in my teeth dissipating almost immediately as the hormone in them began to seep into her body.
My heart hammered in my chest as we stayed locked together, Perrie’s back arching as she came a second time around my knot and her scream echoed off of the vaulted ceilings of my bedroom.
Then I felt a second heartbeat pounding alongside my own: it was Perrie’s. Emotions that weren’t my own started to filter down what felt like a mental string connecting us together.
We collapsed down into the bed, Perrie still knotted against me as I began to nurse the mark, sealing it and making sure it took.
As we lay together, I felt more swelling emotions and worked to try and pick them a part. Pleasure was easy to figure out, it rippled out of her in heavy waves as she gave my scalp gentle scratches where she’d quite nearly pulled my hair out from the roots while we were making love.
Then there were other emotions that felt like guilt and worry.
“I’m sorry for going to Kailey’s house tonight. It was stupid and I should have known there would be more to it than playing board games,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “I guess I’ve learned college parties aren’t for me, after all.”
I still hadn’t heard the full story about how my mate had gone missing tonight and a growl rippled out of me at her words. I wasn’t anywhere near done with my rut, but my instincts were temporarily sated by the fresh bond mark on Perrie’s neck.
“What would have happened if someone really had taken you?” I asked, finally managing to find my words after communicating in grunts and growls for the past hour.
Perrie turned to look over at me, her face still flushed. “I know that you’d come and find me. Both you and Rhodes.”
I scoffed at that. I’d been almost two hours away dealing with a shitstorm that had barely just begun. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t forced her to marry me.
Maybe in another life Perrie had good parents and no cancer and she was happily married into a boring but nice pack that all worked nine-to-fives. Maybe she ran a photography business or maybe she did whatever the hell she wanted to because she was far away from the five families and the rest of the fucked up world that lurked just under the surface of the city streets.
“Sometimes,” I started, trying to find the right words to say. “Sometimes I wish that I could just leave it all behind.”
“Leave what? The Keane family?” Perrie frowned. “Sweetheart, you ooze Keane gold through and through, I can’t imagine you doing anything else.”
Perrie’s endearment temporarily distracted me—she’d called me it a couple of times, but only ever in passing like she was trying it on for size.
“I don’t know about that,” I said, threading our fingers together and holding our joined hands up so that our wedding rings could shine in the dim light of the room. “I always thought living in a nice little house somewhere in the country with no other houses in sight would work for me.”
“And a bunch of birds to go with it?” Perrie teased with a grin.
“You and Rhodes are still convinced that I like birds that much?” I asked, frowning at her as she let out a little giggle that sent shockwaves of stimulation through me.
The haze of my rut was slowly starting to seep back in again and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I needed her more.
“Well the doves and swans at our wedding, not to mention the entire empty falconry on the property that Oona told me you built yourself don’t do a lot to disprove that theory do they? I’m surprised you don’t have a chicken coop anywhere.”
“Who knows, maybe I’ve got a whole flock of them in the basement,” I joked. There were no birds in the basement, just holding cells, but Perrie didn’t need to know about those.
“Why do you like them so much? Did you own a bird when you were little or something?”
I shook my head. “My father never tolerated pets without purpose, no. But on my mother’s good days we’d go down to the water and feed the ducks.”
It was one of my few good memories of her and they usually only happened in the summer when the sun was out for longer and the oppressiveness of her tower didn’t seem so bad.
“We used to sit and watch them until they flew South at the end of the season, it was really nice.”
When I was really little and still believed in the good in the world, I used to imagine myself flying away with them to a place far away from the Keane estate.
Then, after my mother died when I was thirteen, I never went back to see the ducks again.
“That’s nice,” Perrie said, stretching her arms over her head with a yawn, her back pressing into my chest. “Maybe we’ll have to go watch them next year when they come back.”
The brush of her skin against mine was enough to remind my inner alpha that we were still, in fact, the middle of a rut.
“There’s no time for sleep right now, pet,” I purred in her ear as my knot deflated enough to let my still hard cock slide out of her tender pussy. “We’re not anywhere close to being done.”