22. Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Tank
I paced the length of our chambers, the bear begging to be released to go on the hunt for our mate. Rolling my neck to release the tension from my shoulders, I held tight to my control. Rampaging through the palace wouldn’t help right now.
When we’d woken to find Alyssa gone, Dean had slipped into a frenzy, especially when he tracked her scent and realised that she’d slipped out of the bathroom window in the night. Wherever he’d gone in his rage after that, I was hoping it wasn’t to wherever Alyssa was right now. I knew he wouldn’t hurt her, but she’d pushed the alpha wolf too far and he wasn’t about to let her forget it easily.
“Why does she do this?” Maddox gritted out.
I could tell he and Ryder were struggling to stay in their human forms as much as I was. It was impressive that they’d done so for this long. In fact, given how pissed off he was, it was impressive that Dean had stayed in control as well.
I sighed. It would be so much harder for them than for me. I’d had the luxury of spending years at her side. I knew Alyssa as well as I knew myself. It was easy to forget that they hadn’t known either of us for that long. We all just gelled together so easily.
“Because this is all she’s ever known,” I explained, finally stopping my pacing and turning to the two other concerned men in the room. “Alyssa came to the human realm having experienced a loss many wouldn’t have survived. She was young, alone, and in a foreign world. All she had to rely on was herself. Then, when she finally found people to be around, she didn’t know if she’d be putting them in danger just by being with them. Alyssa has spent years not only guarding herself but trying to save everyone else around her. She doesn’t know how to rely on anyone else. Not when she always thought the danger was her. Even when she lived here as a kid, they kept her isolated, afraid others would find out about her magic.”
Maddox and Ryder said nothing at first. I knew it sounded like I was making excuses for her, and maybe I was, but I genuinely felt like we were going about this entire issue the wrong way. We couldn’t demand that Alyssa changed. We needed to show her we weren’t going anywhere, that she didn’t have to be afraid for us.
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like,” Ryder eventually said. “Even when I felt like I had nothing, I still had my brothers to turn to. I was never truly alone, even if it felt like it sometimes.”
Maddox nodded in agreement. “We should try to find Dean. Calm him down before he sees her. He’s going to go off on her the minute he sees her, but it’s only because he’s afraid. He knows he won’t survive losing her, especially not so soon after losing Damon.”
“We’re going to get him back,” I told him firmly. “I know we said it was impossible before we came here, but we were wrong. He’s here, and he’s alive. There has to be some hope in that.”
“And we’re stronger now. More than we should be,” Ryder added.
Maddox nodded again, and I could see the way he started to assess our situation. “We have to learn how to get stronger. At the minute, we know we have magic, but until we can actually use it, it’s of no use to us. Training to fight with blades will only get us so far. In fact, given what we’re going up against, it won’t get us far at all. We’re going about this all wrong.”
He was right, and the more that I thought about it, the more I could see how much time we’d been wasting. Magic was the problem here, and we wouldn’t solve that with brute force.
“You’re right. We need to find out more about the magic we have and what we can do with it. You need to practise your shifts too. You clearly have exceptional control, but you need to learn to shift in a single breath. It could be the difference between life and death in a fight. You have to be able to hold back your animal when it tries to take control out of a need to protect you. Holding that control can be distracting if you aren’t used to it.”
“This is good,” Maddox murmured, getting up from his seat and heading to the door. “We have a plan, direction. This is what we’ve been missing.”
“Erm, where are you going?” Ryder asked as Maddox reached for the door handle.
He looked over his shoulder at us in confusion. “To find Dean, that’s what we just said.”
“Right! I’ll come with you.” Ryder jumped up out of his seat and jogged to his side.
I knew I should probably go with them, but my bear was having none of it. Alyssa slipped out through the bathroom window to avoid the fight of telling us she needed to do something alone. She’d come back the same way, hoping that we hadn’t noticed her absence. I knew she would. I didn’t want her to come back and find us all gone, but mostly I wanted to stay to make sure that she actually was unscathed from whatever it was she’d got herself into this time.
“You should stay,” Ryder said softly, almost as if he could read my mind. “You can feel that she’s all right through the bond. She hasn’t come to any harm. But you need to see that with your own eyes.”
I nodded, feeling kind of stupid that I couldn’t say something so simple aloud. I’d waited for her for so long, stood in the shadows, waiting for a reason to tell her she was supposed to be mine. Now that I had her, I didn’t know how I’d suffered through her absence for all those years.
“We’ll find Dean, calm him the fuck down, and then see if we can find Fizzle. He’s going to be the best person to figure out how we need to train,” Maddox said, already heading out through the door as he spoke.
I didn’t respond. They were already gone anyway, but there wasn’t really anything else left to say. Alyssa and Fizzle seemed to have worked through their problems yesterday. We’d agreed that we were staying to fight by their sides. What other choice did we have but to trust them? Fizzle had kept the secret of Alyssa’s magic for so long, we just had to hope he’d keep ours as well, if not for us, then for her.
I dropped into one of the seats in front of the fire and settled in to wait. The fire wasn’t really needed. The palace was warm enough without it, but there was something comforting about losing yourself in the dance and crackle of the flames.
My mind flowed back to the day we’d stepped into this realm. The rush of magic that had floored Alyssa when she’d finally made her way home. Every time something happened here, it seemed to be accompanied by the power that she held getting stronger. I couldn’t help but wonder, how much could one person hold until it became dangerous? Is that why she was different? Why she had links with the courts she wasn’t supposed to?
Then there was us. I couldn’t remember when I’d started to feel differently or if I even did. No, that wasn’t true. There was definitely something going on inside of me. A hum in the background of my mind that hadn’t been there before. Had it come when I’d slept with Alyssa? The bond might not have been fully formed that night, but there had been enough for my bear to be satisfied that he’d finally claimed his mate.
“She makes us different,” a voice said inside my head, and I found myself nodding in agreement at the thought. “ She makes us who we were always supposed to be. ”
She did. Alyssa had shown me I was more than just a bear on the outskirts of his sleuth. She wasn’t afraid of me and I’d even learned how to manage my bear’s emotions while I’d been with her at the garage. Yeah, I still shifted when he flew into a rage, but it had been becoming less and less over the years. There had been hope that I wouldn’t always be such a liability.
“Mate makes us one. Makes us strong.”
I sat up straighter as the thought echoed through my mind. Except that wasn’t exactly what it was. Yes, it was a thought, but this one wasn’t one of my own.
“What the fuck?” I muttered, looking around the room like there was some kind of explanation in here as to why I was hearing voices all of a sudden.
When a chuckle that wasn’t my own echoed through my mind, I waited for my bear to fly off the handle. But then he didn’t.
The shock of what was happening was enough to have me considering my sanity because this wasn’t what being a shifter was like.
“How do you know what being a shifter is like? We were nothing but a shadow before.”
“So… it is you then,” I said aloud and then felt weird because I was essentially talking to myself.
“You’re not talking to yourself, you’re talking to me.”
“Yeeeeahhhhh, but that’s the problem, isn’t it,” I mumbled, standing up and pacing over to the small table that seemed to be constantly refreshed with food and drinks even though we never saw the person who was doing it.
I grabbed a glass and filled it with water from the jug, wishing it was beer even though it was early morning.
“I can talk to my bear,” I thought, more to myself than the animal in question. “This isn’t a problem, this is… happening.”
A wave of panic threatened to take hold of me, but I shook it off, suddenly seeing the upside to all this.
“Why the fuck have you been such a raging dick all my life?” I roared into my brain. At least now I could give this fucker a piece of my mind.
“You try being stuck in the back of your mind and never being free, never being who you were supposed to be. What the fuck would you do about that?”
I could hear the pain in his voice, and I actually felt bad. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Stuck in the shadows, with no way to tell anyone what I wanted.
“I’m sorry.” I gulped down the water before sitting the glass back on the tray. “Is this why I feel different? Why I feel more… controlled?”
I didn’t want to suggest that I had more control over him, given what he’d been through, but it was a valid question.
“Mate makes me calmer. Make us both who we were always supposed to be.”
“And gives us magic,” I thought.
The bear all but shrugged in my mind and I knew it was pointless trying to get information out of him. He knew as much about this as I did. He was the one that had been stuck inside me, after all.
Maybe this is what shifters were always supposed to be? Maybe we were always supposed to have magic?
And then a horrifying thought came to me.
“Is every shifter back in the human realm stuck like you were?”
He grumbled and then slunk away into the back of my mind, and I knew he was sulking. What he was sulking about, I had no idea.
I felt like I needed to do something, but the inability to know what that was had me frozen. I couldn’t do anything for the shifters back home. I couldn’t even do anything to help my sleuth. They’d moved on, and I had no idea where they were. Besides, until we had the situation here under control, we wouldn’t be returning to the human realm, and even then we might never return.
But there was no time to think about what we were going to do at the end of this whole. The elusive end that we didn’t even know if we’d make it to.
As I paced the sitting room, trying to figure out the answers to impossible questions, a noise came from the bathroom, followed by someone softly swearing.
It would seem a certain errant mate was finally home.
And with her came a need that I had absolutely no intention of suppressing.
I strode to the bathroom door, flinging it open so hard that it slammed into the wall with a bang. Alyssa spun on the spot with a guilty look on her face. She knew she’d been caught in the act, and her mouth opened as if she’d try to explain, except no words came out.
She barely had time to make a squeak before I was on her, pushing her against the bathroom wall as I plundered her lips.
Her arms went to wrap around my neck, but I captured her wrists, pinning them above her head as the bear swept back into my mind. His need to dominate, to prove himself, came roaring to the surface, and I was done trying to hold him back.
“You’ve got some explaining to do, minx,” I growled, the bear pushing through in the rumble of my voice. “Do you enjoy making us worry?”
Alyssa looked at me as lust filled her gaze. Her hips rocked as she sought some kind of friction, only to find herself denied.
“I… I had to find out…”
I kissed her again, punishing her with my lips even though I’d been trying to persuade the others to give her their leniency.
The bear had other ideas. If his mate couldn’t see that he was strong and capable, then he was going to prove it to her.
I definitely liked the way he was thinking.
Releasing her wrists, my hands wrapped around Alyssa’s waist as I picked her up and threw her over one shoulder. As she tried to escape me, my hand crashed down on her ass and instead of her outrage sending her into a fury, she melted against me.
I gripped her hip with one hand, a fascinating idea filling my mind as I slowly kneaded the cheek I was about to punish.
“Do you like that, minx?” I asked as I strode from the bathroom, giving her no time to answer as I hauled her off my shoulder and threw her down on the bed. I crawled onto the mattress, hovering over her body as I licked my lips at the sight of her. “Do you like knowing that I’m going to punish you for making me worry?”
She bit her lip, slowly nodding her head as she did. I could see how her pupils were blown wide with lust. She wanted this as much as I did. I’d never thought she’d want to be dominated, but now that the bear was at the forefront of my mind like he’d never been before, it was all I could think about. Holding her soft body beneath me as she took my punishing thrusts. Showing her she didn’t have to always be in charge.
The bear pushed to the surface, and claws came to the tips of my fingers. A part of me felt like I should pull him back. He was too angry, too needy to be gentle with her. But as we shredded the clothes from her body, my cock twitched at the contained violence of it all.
I’d never hurt her and neither would the bear, but knowing that we could be ourselves and she’d still have that look of desperation in her eyes was everything.
“Don’t hold back,” she said, almost like she could read my mind. “I want all of you.”
Maybe she could. The bond we shared gave her access to the deepest parts of me.
The bear growled in appreciation as I stared down at her naked beneath us, and I licked my lips, trying to decide where I wanted to start.
It was an easy decision to make when I saw the shine of come between her legs already. My bear was desperate to taste his mate’s honey.
Grabbing her hips, I hauled Alyssa up, draping her legs over my shoulders as I buried my face between her legs. Licking a long line along her seam.
She squirmed in my hold, but there would be no escape for her.
I dipped my tongue inside her sweet pussy, practically drinking the juices from her body. Her taste was addicting.
I wasted no time moving my attention to that tight little bundle of nerves that made her pant and moan. Her sweet gasps for air laid the path for every flick of my tongue and when I felt her thighs started to tighten around my head, I backed off, denying her the climax I knew she’d soon be begging for.
“Tank,” she whined, and I couldn’t help but grin as my tongue moved back to her hole, sweeping inside for another addicting taste.
“Hmmmmm?”
“Don’t hmmmmm at me! You know exactly what you’re doing,” she snapped, and I laughed again.
“And what about this whole situation makes you think you’re going to get what you want, naughty mate?”
She didn’t answer then, and when I glanced down at her beautiful body stretched out before me, I saw the pleading look on her face. It was nearly enough to break me.
But not quite.
Instead, I dropped her legs back down to the mattress and stood. I saw the way she leant up on one elbow, getting ready to protest, but the words stalled in her mouth when I started to remove my clothes instead.
Her eyes tracked every movement as she licked her lips and watched. The bear inside me preened at the attention. We may not have been her only mate, but right now, we were the only one that mattered.
When I stepped closer again, she rose on her knees.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked as I crowded in, pushing her back on her knees into the centre of the bed.
“I need you, Tank.” She panted as she spoke, and I knew the lust was riding her hard.
I could feel her through our bond. It was like her need rubbed up against my own and it was driving my bear to distraction. That combined with her scent lingering thick in the air, and I was having a hard time holding him back.
“You have me,” I reassured her as I swept her up into my arms and kissed her.
Perhaps I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought, because I was powerless to her draw. I wanted to draw this out. I wanted to show her she didn’t need to always be in charge.
But I couldn’t do it.
Not when she looked at me like that, not when I could feel exactly what she was feeling in this moment.
She was everything to me. Always had been and always would be.
We fell back to the mattress as she kissed me with a frenzied passion that I’d already stoked inside her.
I was so lost in her kisses that I didn’t even remember the moment I finally slid my cock inside her. One moment I was teasing her and then she was there in my arms, as I slowly glided my length in and out of her heat.
Alyssa pulled back, her gaze locking with mine as we gave ourselves over to each other. She clung to me so tightly that I could taste her on every breath I took.
But this time was so different from the first time we’d been together.
Because I didn’t just feel her in my arms, I felt her through the bond—inside my heart and my head.
The bear withdrew into the background, and Alyssa became my entire world.
“Don’t leave me,” I whispered as the rhythm between us slowly built. “I won’t survive if I ever lose you. I wouldn’t want to.”
She didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. I could feel her so keenly in this moment that I knew exactly how she felt. There was a sadness and a shame that I hated for even touching her heart. But then there was a love that shone so fiercely it pushed everything else aside.
We chased our high together. Our hands became frantic as we tried to pull the other closer. I was barely thrusting into her now, so desperate to keep her close that we became a sensual movement instead.
I wouldn’t last. It was all too overwhelming to expect this moment to draw out any longer. And as soon as her pussy fluttered around my length, heralding her release, I was done for.
“Tank, Tank, Tank,” she whispered as her movements grew stilted.
Then I watched in fascination as her head tipped back and her mouth opened in a wordless scream as she finally came.
I gladly followed her over the edge. It would have been impossible not to. Her orgasm flowed through our bond, latching onto mine and forcing it to the surface. My cock twitched as I emptied inside her.
Neither of us moved as we still clung to each other as tightly as we could, coated in a sheen of sweat that made her skin glisten temptingly. My tongue darted out, and I licked across the mark I’d laid on her neck, only to have her hiss in response.
I grinned knowingly as she looked at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Did you know it could do that?” she asked.
“Do what?” I tried to sound innocent, but there was no pulling it off when the bear was practically crowing in happiness inside me.
“I can feel that all the way…” And then she clenched the muscles in her pussy that was still wrapped tightly around my cock, and I swore as a wave of euphoria swept over me in response.
“Okay, point taken. I promise not to do it again.”
“Well, let’s not be too hasty,” she said cheekily. “We have all morning, after all. I seem to remember I was supposed to be learning a lesson, and we got kind of sidetracked. I’m very stubborn, you know. I might need you to give it another go. You know, to make sure I fully understood all the finer points.”
“Oh… that’s how it is. Is it?”
She purred in response.
There had been worse ideas than spending the morning wrapped up in my mate’s arms.
“Well, it’s a good thing I got a full night’s rest then.” I arched an eyebrow at her and she shrunk back a bit at the jibe.
We may joke about it now, but I really needed to make sure that Alyssa understood how we all felt.
“This morning, when I woke up, and you were gone…”
“I’m so sorry,” she interrupted. “I always throw myself into every fight, thinking I can save everyone around me. But you’re right. I can’t keep pulling shit like this. I know I’m reckless, impulsive…”
“That’s my mate you’re talking about there,” I said, interrupting her myself.
I hated that she felt even an ounce of insecurity. Couldn’t she see what we all saw when we looked at her? Alyssa was a survivor, and even after everything, there was never a doubt in her mind about whether she should stand up and fight for the people around her.
“What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry, Tank. I shouldn’t have made you all worry like that. But I also know myself better than to promise that I won’t do it again. I am reckless. I can, however, promise that I will try to be better. I’ll try to think more before I do anything stupid.”
I kissed her, powerless to stop myself whenever it came to her. “That’s all we can ask for. We’re here because we want to be. You don’t need to stand in front of us or behind us. All we ever want is to be at your side. To fight with you.”
She nodded, her eyes looking far sadder than I was comfortable with.
“Now, about this lesson you seem to need reminding of…”