Chapter Three
Genie stepped out of the shower and into the bathroom of the guest suite she’d been assigned. Frost had handed her over to a snake shifter, assured her the club had a treaty with the coterie and Dev would keep her safe, and then left.
She knew without a doubt that the MC guys would keep her safe, and if Frost said Dev would watch over her, he would, but she was still nervous. She hadn’t known she was to be left on her own in a vampire’s lair. She took a breath and corrected herself. It was a vampire’s coterie, not a lair.
Though she wasn’t certain there was a difference. There was a whole underground house beneath the property she and Frost had hunted on, and she hadn’t known.
She had a backpack with comfortable cotton leggings and an oversized cotton shirt.
She assumed a vampire in a child’s body wouldn’t want her to look sexy, but now she was worried she might be dressed too casually for an ancient being.
With a sigh, she pulled out the jeans and shirt she’d brought to wear home.
The shirt hugged every curve, which wasn’t the plan, but she hadn’t brought anything else to wear.
Maybe she should wear the oversized shirt with the jeans, rather than the leggings?
She tried both on and put the tighter shirt back on.
The other seemed too sloppy, too informal, and old vampires were almost always formal and extremely well dressed.
Not that the jeans and T-shirt were formal in any way, but they were the better of the two choices.
She had natural blonde highlights in her deep brown hair.
Most shifters didn’t have hair that matched their fur or feathers, but her kind of owl did.
She pulled the for-hair-only scissors from her backpack and took ten minutes to cut her too-long hair shoulder length at an angle on one side, and then supershort in the back and on the other side.
She fluffed it around, angled it a little more on the long side, and then blow-dried it, which made it an inch shorter than her shoulder on the long side.
A little eyeshadow and contour, a lot of eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick, and she was as ready as she’d ever be.
Everything went back into her backpack, and she settled it on the floor between the bed and the wall, so it wasn’t easily seen when someone first stepped into the room.
Dev had told her to wait for him to come get her, but she opened the door into the hallway to look out, and two men were standing with their backs to her, looking down the hallway.
“I’m sure we came from this direction, so we should go the other way.”
“He turned us around so many times, I can’t say the direction, but we didn’t walk terribly far after the last turn, so I think we came from the other direction, and we should go this way.”
The men had their backs to her, but she could see chiseled arm muscles coming out from under their short-sleeved shirts, and could see the definition of sleek, carved muscles in their backs.
“He brought me in from the other direction, if that helps,” she told them.
Both men turned to look at her, and she nearly fell into their eyes, so blue she wasn’t sure they could be real.
They were gorgeous and identical. Twins, and all male.
They smelled of cat. Big cat. Her inner owl wanted to slink away, but she forced herself to stand taller and meet their gaze.
Most mammal shifters couldn’t tell the difference between the scent of a great horned owl and a screech owl, and had never even heard of a saw-whet owl.
“Birdy birdy, in the sky,” one of the men said.
“Why’d you do that in my eye?” the other finished.
She shook her head. “Sorry, I’ll just go back to my room.”
Genie was in the process of closing her door when one of them pushed it open, knocking her down.
Terror took over and she scrambled backwards like a deformed crab, trying to escape them.
She usually carried a gun when not at work but hadn’t been allowed to bring one with her to the coterie’s property.
She knew better than to show fear to a predator, but she couldn’t tamp it down.
Still, she had to try. She stood and looked at them, standing her ground rather than running, though there was nothing she could do about the rancid scent of her fright.
She’d learned Krav Maga, but someone had to come at her for that muscle memory to kick in.
She tried to think of something to do, but with two of them, she wasn’t certain she could do much of anything.
“I’m Genie,” she told them. “There’s no one to properly introduce us, so we should do that ourselves.”
One of the men stopped in his tracks and said, “I’m Ezra, this is Elijah.”
“We like to eat little birds,” Elijah said, and she saw his cat in his eyes — yellow with rounded pupils, which generally meant one of the larger cats, but she’d known that from their scent.
She’d spent some time around a tiger and a leopard, and she was pretty sure they weren’t either of those, but beyond that, she couldn’t be certain.
“Thankfully, I’m a human at the moment.”
“And you are all woman,” Elijah said. “Look at those tits, Eazie.”
Elijah stepped forward and grabbed her breasts, and the Krav Maga muscle memory finally kicked in. Genie knocked his hands loose and punched him in the face before she realized what she was doing.
The other brother, Ezra, made the inhuman noise of a cat’s growl, stepped forward, grabbed her arms, and twisted them behind her back. He put his face next to hers and said, “Not cool. Apologize to my brother.”
She had no idea where she found the courage to stare him in the eyes and stand up to him, but she told him, “I’m the one owed an apology.”
He shook his head. “This is the sex slave floor, yes? You don’t knock someone’s hands away when they touch your tits, sweet cheeks.”
“I’m a free person, a nurse, here to feed Brooke, the Master Vampire. I’m no one’s slave.”
Elijah’s hand was on the way to slap her across the face, and Ezra grabbed his wrist to stop him six inches before he made contact. Ezra still held Genie’s wrists with his other hand, and he released them and stepped back, pulling his brother farther away.
“She speaks truth, brother, and we haven’t been here long enough to mess with the Master’s food. We should return to our assigned suite.”
“You should not have left your suite,” a voice said from the hallway, and Genie’s knees nearly gave out. She took two steps back and sat on the sofa, though it was more of a collapse and completely ungraceful.
“Are you okay?” Dev asked her, and his dark brown eyes meant safety, rather than the danger of the too-blue-to-be-real eyes of the cat shifters.
She wanted to tell the huge snake-shifter she was fine, but then she began to hyperventilate and she couldn’t stop.
Fuck, she thought she’d gotten beyond this.
She could handle the biggest emergencies with clearness of thought and purpose at the hospital without thinking twice as long as there was no threat to her, but the slightest danger to her own physical safety, and her body wanted to hide in the shadows.
The snake shifter pulled something from his pocket, and within moments, both cats were face down on the floor, their wrists and ankles bound together with what appeared to be a zip-tie made especially for a hogtie, and the snake was beside her, sitting on the sofa.
He gingerly pulled her into his lap and held her.
“Brooke has gone through their minds and telepathically replayed their memories of what happened so I could watch. I told you to stay in your room, little owlet.”
She barely managed to wheeze between breaths, “I didn’t know it was … dangerous to look out … my door!”
“It shouldn’t have been, but these two arrived while a few other things happened, and I put them into what should’ve been a locked room, but it seems they’ve learned how to defeat electronic locks.
Are you okay to go to Brooke now? She expected to feed in the hours before the sun’s return, but I failed to keep you safe, so you are no longer obligated to provide sustenance. ”
Genie shook her head. She was doing this for the bikers, and she needed to follow through.
“If I can just get something to drink?” She could manage a whole sentence, but had to gulp air in for the next. “A couple of shots of whiskey would be great, but tequila is fine.”
“Your metabolism won’t burn through it?”
She shook her head again. “Faster than human, but not as fast as most shifters. It’ll give me five to ten minutes of calm, and once I’m settled, I can hold onto it.”
* * * *
Dev adored the little owlet. Such a curvy, cute little package.
There’d be hell to pay for not keeping her safe, but he’d face those consequences later — as would the two cats currently hogtied on the floor.
He telepathed someone to bring some top-shelf whiskey and a shot glass, and he held Genie in his lap while she downed three shots, then three more, and finally sat relaxed in his arms.
“The bikers usually give nicknames, yes? Is Genie your real name, or a nickname?” He wanted to know more about this woman, and it was the only question he could think of that didn’t sound inappropriate.
“It’s Georgina, but I’m fine shortening it to Genie.”
“They didn’t give you a nickname?”
“Yeah, they did.”
He caught the hints of, not embarrassment, but discomfort over sharing. So, Genie wasn’t her usual nickname, but one they’d decided to call her. Knowing the bikers as he did, this meant she had some magical skill, but not real magic. Something sexual, most likely.
“What is it you can do that is magical, little owlet?”
She snuggled her face into his chest. “Maybe I’ll show you, someday, if you’re interested.”
“Oh, I would very much be interested, but I’ll need permission from my Master, since you come to us through our treaty with the bikers.”