Chapter Four
Genie awoke in a strange place, but the first scent she smelled was Dev’s, and she knew she was safe. He wasn’t in the room, but he’d tucked her in after eating a meal of eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, and gravy with her.
Dev was a large man, and he’d put away a ton of food. Genie had been famished after feeding the vampire, so she’d eaten more than usual as well.
She looked at her phone to doublecheck the time, nearly six in the evening, scanned through her text messages, and replied to Frost, assuring him she was fine.
Apparently, Brooke was awake already and had contacted Mad Dog to apologize for the breach in protocol.
Genie understood the supernaturals took a promise of safety and protection seriously, but she hadn’t actually been hurt. Only scared.
Her phone rang, she saw it was Frost and answered, and he told her, “If we’d known you were attacked, we’d have brought you home before you had a chance to feed Brooke.”
“I wasn’t hurt. I was scared, and yeah, I could’ve been hurt, but I wasn’t. I’m okay.”
“I promised you’d be safe when I handed you over to Dev. We’ve accepted her offer of monetary compensation, and she’s agreed to our requirements for punishment of those involved. You are entitled to a percentage of the compensation, so you’ll receive twenty thousand dollars.”
She wanted to protest that she didn’t need money, but she’d come to Birmingham to try to bank enough to buy her own house, so she told him, “I appreciate that. Thank you.”
“I’ve seen video of the two men being punished, and I’m satisfied with it.
I’ve been assured Dev’s punishment will happen in the early morning hours before the sun rises, once he’s handled his assigned tasks for the night, and that I’ll be able to watch it in person if I choose, which I do.
Mad Dog and Khan will accompany me, and you are welcome to do so as well. ”
“Thank you for the offer, but I don’t need to see it.”
“We won’t be sending people to feed Brooke without a guard unit in the future. If you go again, you’ll have at least three bikers with you, and Brooke will pay for our time, above and beyond what’s been negotiated for us to provide food.”
“Frost, I get why ya’ll can’t let it go, but I’m not upset with you. Dev rescued me and then took great care of me. I’m not upset with him or you.”
“You were put in danger in the first place because Dev didn’t do his job of securing the new cats.” He sighed, and she could hear his frustration. “Did you offer sex to Dev?”
“I flirted with him, and…” She hadn’t thought of it as an official offer at the time, but looking back on it, she supposed she had.
“He asked about my nickname. He wondered what my magical talent might be, and I said something along the lines of maybe I’d show him someday, if he was interested. I was flirting, and I didn’t think of it as anything official at the time, but yeah, I’d be interested in spending time with him.”
“Little Genie, we have grounds to insist our guards accompany anyone who goes to feed Brooke, but if you go for a personal tryst, we can’t send someone to guard you.”
“He isn’t going to fuck up again, Frost. They had new people show up while you were walking me inside and while something else happened that needed his attention, all at the same time.
He wasn’t aware the new guys had taught themselves how to defeat the kinds of locks on their door.
They are no longer in a suite of rooms, but in the dungeon, according to Dev. He isn’t going to let me get hurt.”
“Do you like him?” His voice was soft, serious. Genie got the sense this wasn’t a casual inquiry.
“He knew what I needed, when I panicked.” Her turn to sigh, because that wasn’t what had made her basically offer herself on a platter, but she couldn’t exactly say that his soul seemed to speak to her soul.
She kept talking, trying to explain in more tangible ways.
“He carried me, he held me in his lap when Brooke fed from me, he ate a meal with me when I’m certain he was needed elsewhere.
Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but I think it’s possible we both feel an attraction to each other. ”
“Well then, I suppose you need to spend some time with him and see what happens, but please keep me updated.” After a few seconds, he amended that to, “Me or Mad Dog.”
“Okay. As far as I know, once I let them know I’m awake, they bring me what I told them I want for my waking meal, and then they take me home after I’ve eaten and showered.”
“Crush is patrolling the apartment complex tonight. Have them take you to the business office. We’d like them to hand you off to one of us, for appearances’ sake.”
Rather than bitch about supernatural politics, she told him, “Thank you for making sure I’m safe. Do you need me to text you when we’re on our way?”
“Yes, please. I’ll let Crush know you’re headed out, so he’ll be waiting for you at the office and not patrolling the grounds. If anything else comes up, please let me know. Anything, Genie. Good or bad — I need to know.”
She was tempted to say, “Yes, Sir,” but for many of the bikers, that seemed to be a code word that turned them into an uber-Dom.
She enjoyed kinky power-exchange scenes, but she preferred to play those games with someone she had an emotional connection with, and for the bikers, she was just a fuck-girl.
Scenes with Khan were the exception to that, but he somehow took care of her after an intense session without the risk of making her fall in love with him, which was a handy skill.
And okay, maybe she was more than just a fuck-girl to the bikers, because they claimed her enough they had to posture about keeping her safe, but none of them were emotionally connected to her.
It was the whole reason she’d gone to the bikers in the first place — a way to have sex without all the damned strings.
But she wouldn’t mind a few strings with the snake shifter. She’d be leaving Birmingham in a few months, after all, so any relationship they formed had a guaranteed end date.
Chapter Five
Dev stood in the shadows, masking his scent, and watched the adorable little owl shifter with eyes of golden-brown strip out of her nursing scrubs, sparkle into a tiny owl with yellow-gold eyes, and then fly into the trees.
The biker took a few seconds longer to remove his boots and then his jeans.
He stripped the shirt off, stowed his clothes into the truck along with the owlet’s clothing, and then shifted into a mighty snowy owl with better than a six-foot wingspan.
He took to the air as well, wings thumping the air at first, but then he was totally silent.
Dev’s home encompassed a little over twenty acres, and all structures were below ground. He had a bedroom in most of the Birmingham coterie houses, but this was the one he called home.
On this night, Brooke was staying here so she could feed from the tiny owl once she was back in human form.
He watched the miniature owl swoop down and catch a small field mouse. Twenty minutes later, she caught another. The snowy owl caught and ate a squirrel, but he noted the larger owl kept an eye on the smaller one even while he ate.
Snakes aren’t generally territorial, but the human parts of Dev needed to know who was in his space. It was more about security than a need to mark his land.
If you look up the largest prehistoric snake, you’ll find information on what archeologists call a Titanoboa, as big around as a school bus, with an estimated weight of over two thousand pounds.
Dev wasn’t quite that big, but by modern standards, he was huge when he shifted into his full size — his body bigger around than a refrigerator, and his head half the size of a small sports car.
Usually, he shifted into a smaller version of himself, so he wasn’t as hard on the wildlife.
Buying a bison and having it delivered ahead of time before a change was expensive.
If he was half his normal size, three or four good-sized deer were enough to fill him up.
The tiny owl shifter wouldn’t be a meal for his snake under any circumstances. Dev’s snake wouldn’t consider the larger snowy owl worth his time.
When it was clear the two were simply going to fly and enjoy the night once they’d fed, he went back belowground to finish preparing for the cougar shifters Brooke had agreed to take on.
Their paperwork warned their control wasn’t great, which was to be expected. What had their mother been thinking? When her boyfriend had been killed she’d gone to cougar and stayed the cat. She’d given birth to them in animal form — cubs rather than babies.
No one is certain how the mother raised the cubs in their first months.
It’s possible they stayed in animal form until they were old enough to learn to walk on two legs.
Their paperwork said they appeared approximately three years old in human form when they were found by werewolves running in the forest. At that time, the boys were in their two-legged forms, smelling of mountain lion, with no mother to be found.
If the infants had stayed in animal form from birth until shortly before they were found, it’s possible they were only a couple of months old even though appearing to be three years old.
He knew the swans raised their babies in bird form for several months, so the first time they saw them in human form, they were toddlers.
But birds are hatched, and need their parents to change them between animal and human forms until they grow strong enough to manage the change on their own.
Mammals are born, and aren’t supposed to shift for the first time until puberty. Nothing about these young men was like it’s supposed to be.
The new acquisitions would need to be kept isolated until he could properly assess their strength and control — or lack of it.
Brooke had purchased them on the auction block to keep them from being sold as sex slaves, which was what they’d been trained to be.
She’d sell them as sex slaves and make a profit on the sale if they couldn’t be domesticated, but she was depending on Dev to do his best with them, so he would.
They had a room on the lowest level, rather than a cell.
He wanted to start things off with them gently, if possible.
If he determined they needed to go into a jail cell, those were available, but from what Brooke said, they were looking forward to proving themselves capable of becoming freepersons, so he’d begin with that mindset.