Escaping Death

Ace

“I hate that I can’t keep you,” I confess. I hold her against me, my length still inside her warmth, attempting to burn this feeling into my memory. I haven’t allowed her, or myself for that matter, to admit just how perfectly matched we are. The sparks skittering across every inch of my skin are only physical manifestations of how my wolf yearns for her, how strong the pull of our bond is.

I recognize that giving in like this will make it only ten times harder to send her back to the Grove, but nothing else has changed. Whether either of them admit it or not, it is painfully obvious she and Hunter are still in love with one another and still hurting.

If she stays I’ll either end up hurting Hunter and Eli, or if she and Hunter finally make up she may end up choosing him and then how could I stand to look at either of them anymore?

I’ve said this from the moment I met her…she’ll be the death of Death if she stays.

“Maybe I don’t want to be kept,” she whispers into the sliver of space between our lips. Her words lack the conviction they usually carry.

“Then we agree?” I nip at her bottom lip, unable to resist the way it taunts me. “Once your bounty is lifted you’ll be free to go.” Our mouths seal together in a tender kiss. My tongue sweeps across her mouth seeking to imprint her taste onto it like a tattoo.

Fuck. This is going to be impossible.

Slowly, I slide out of her warmth. My cock jerks back to life ready for round two as my cum starts to leak out of her perfect pussy. The urge to clean her up with my tongue is painful to fight, but I use the towel she was wearing to gently wipe her clean before my wolf can act on that impulse. Cleaning her becomes more intimate than I intended. I sweep her folds, gathering my spilling cum onto the towel.

And that’s when my stupidity hits me.

My head jerks up, eyes snapping to hers in horror and panic. Fuck. I didn’t wear a condom, I didn’t even think to ask her if she was on birth control, I just rutted into her bareback like a hormonal fucking fledgling.

She tugs at the other end of the towel, bringing it up to cover her body from me. “Stop panicking. You really think I’d let you knock me up?” She says, reading my face like an open book.

What I want to say is that I’d never abandon her to raise a child on her own and that I don’t want her to feel trapped here with me if that were the case. But I also know the last time she was ‘knocked up,’ as she puts it, was by a man she loved and then both of those things were ripped away from her. I’m not the evil monster she thinks I am, I don’t want to hurt her. But in this situation I can’t comfort her without bringing up a painful part of her past. So which is the lesser of the two evils? Saying nothing, or risking hurting her?

I mull over my options as I sift through a few boxes in the back of my office, rummaging around for clothes that she can wear home. We’ve had so many girls coming through lately I’ve had to store some items in my office in the event of an emergency extraction.

“Here,” I offer her a pair of new leggings and my shirt. “In case you wanted something more comfortable to wear.”

Her lip curls up in disgust and she leans away from me like I’m handing her something radioactive. “I don’t want the clothes your whores leave behind,” she says before muttering under her breath, “it’s bad enough that I have to smell them on you.”

“Those whores are women we rescue from breeder circles and traffickers,” I state simply. “Like the three from the yacht job.”

“The ones Reef was looking for,” she says absentmindedly before accepting the clothes I’m still holding out to her. “He knows you took them.”

“He suspects… or suspected, rather.”

“You repaid him?” Her incredulity is upstaged only by the contempt in her tone.

“No,” I spit. “I killed him.”

“Why? I thought he was your business partner? He’s the one who hired you to take out the other Alpha.”

She finishes adjusting my shirt over her body. Gods I love the way she looks in my clothes. I walk back towards her and cup her chin in my hand gently enough that I won’t hurt her but firmly enough that she can’t look anywhere but at me.

“I killed him for the disgusting things he said about my mate. I killed him for making you doubt your safety. He was always going to die, I just didn’t expect it to be this soon.”

A fragile silence grows patiently between us giving me time to remember what brought us to this point; her disobeying orders again, her going rogue against a man known for breaking girls in half, culminating in me walking in on Dean with his tongue buried in her sweet cunt.

Her soft voice gently breaks the silence. “So, how does it work? You find girls and whisk them off to safety so you can feel good about yourself?”

“We get intel, yes, that there are girls being trafficked locally and we intercept. For that I have many more on the crew than the five of us.”

“What happens to them?” She asks, her voice impossibly small.

“We get them set up in temporary housing and provide some basic necessities,” I gesture to the pants she still holds in her hands, “like clothes.”

She looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Why?” She breathes at last.

I release a heavy sigh, leadened by the skeletons in my own closet. “My dad was the Apha of his pack. He was getting older and hadn’t found his mate but needed an heir, so he bought my mother to use as a breeder. After I was weaned off of her he sold her back to traffickers. A few years after that he found his mate, she gave him a more legitimate heir, and we all lived unhappily ever after.”

“So is this to get back at him or to find her?” She asks not unkindly.

“It may have started as both, but he’s long since paid for his crimes. As for my mother, I don’t hold my breath. I thought we might have found her a few years ago…we picked up talk of a hybrid coming into auction but comms went silent the day of the transfer.”

Solana shimmies into the leggings I gave her and I can’t bring myself to look away as her heavy breasts bounce beneath my shirt. “Did you ever find her?”

I nod, “yeah, eventually. Years after the fact. But it wasn’t my mother, it was another hybrid.”

“And where is she now?”

I fight the growing smirk on my face while I take her hands into mine, “it so happens that she’s standing directly in front of me.”

I rub my thumb over her knuckles before lifting her hand and placing a soft kiss on her hand, quietly lamenting that we weren’t there to save her four years ago.

Solana snatches her hand out of my grip and folds her arms defensively across her chest. “Of course he fucking told you,” she scoffs. She’s right, Hunter told us about this girl he had loved being forcibly sold into auction. It wasn’t until recently, obviously, that I realized if Solana is the girl he loved, then she’s also the hybrid they were trying to traffic.

“Death has no secrets, Solana. Which is also how I know how you ditched Dean, snuck into Mitch’s room, and –”

“And stabbed him in the fucking face before your guys could even unlock the door,” she touts proudly.

I approach her once more, placing my hands on the desk on either side of her hips, caging her in my arms. My wolf growls out loud as I drag my teeth against the marking spot on her neck. “Has it occurred to you that I do know how lethal you are? I don’t keep you out of things because you’re not capable, Solana.”

“Then why are you trying to collar me? Because of my dads?”

I shake my head and sigh against her skin, “No. Because whether I like it or not, whether I admit it or not, every instinct I have demands that I keep you safe.” I swallow the lump in my throat, debating the advantages and disadvantages of what I’m about to admit. “I can barely keep my wolf from ripping apart my own brothers for putting their hands on you let alone the scum that we hunt. It’s not about you, Solana. I can’t handle you being involved in what we do.”

The wheels of her mind spin in her eyes for a moment before she makes an offer. “I think there’s a way for both of us to get what we want.”

I don’t say anything, I just hold her gaze until she continues. “You want me out of your hair as much as I do. If we go after the people who posted my bounty, then the sooner I’m gone.”

My entire body stiffens at her words. In the abstract I know this job will end and she will leave, but I’m surprised by how sour the taste of her freedom is in my mouth. “Your dads are handling your bounty. Besides, we have a few more loose ends to tie up before we buckle down on Nightshade. That’s our focus.”

“Well that’s a waste of time,” she mutters under her breath, a bemused smile dances on her soft, pouty lips.

She never tires of getting under my skin. Admittedly she seems to have it down to a science. Where others have failed to rattle me, she shakes me to my core.

“Your faith in us is humbling,” I quip. “But, we should get back, the guys are getting worried.”

“I have two favors to ask of you,” she says slowly, cautiously. “Please don’t tell them that we’re mates.”

I school my outward reaction to show no emotion but internally my wolf is howling and pacing frantically. It feels like a sucker punch to the gut that she wants to deny that we’re mates and ask me to keep it from the rest of the guys. Before none of them were any the wiser about us being mates, but they’re going to know we slept together the minute they catch our scent and I’ll have to lie straight to their faces about why.

“And the other thing?”

She squares her shoulders and looks me confidently in the eye, “you need to apologize to Dean for interrupting.”

If the memory of Dean’s tongue on my mate’s cunt didn’t emblazon me the way it does I’d throw my head back and laugh in her face. Fortunately enough I manage something in between. “Don’t worry about him, he’ll get over it. Denying him probably has him more turned on than ever.”

Her mouth pops open in an enticingly perfect little O shape. I beam at her shocked expression and teleport us back to the house, landing in my room.

We don’t speak once we arrive. Solana dons the hoodie from Dean that she still hasn’t returned, adjusts my bedding and the blanket she stole from Eli, and finally the pillow she stole from Tate and climbs into my bed. She peers expectantly over her shoulder at me, so I climb in behind her, pulling my mate close to my chest and relishing in the way our scents mingle together.

Tonight she’s still mine, but tomorrow the wolves will unquestioningly descend upon her.