by Lora Leigh
He could smell Ria, Dane. Another man was taking his mate from his presence. Another male’s scent surrounded her now, that male enclosing her in his strength. Only one thing was saving Dane Vanderale. There was no lust in his scent. Only protectiveness. Only pain. But he was taking Mercury’s mate, and for that he would have to pay.
And Mercury felt the animal. It was free. Adrenaline was spiking through him now in crashing waves, the feral displacement threatening as the animal clawed at his mind in rage.
He felt his muscles thicken, blood pumping into them. He felt the strength he had once known pouring into him. His senses became sharper, brighter. Suddenly, Mercury knew every shift of every body around him, each individual smell, each ounce of anger that was filling the hallway. And the suspicion, the knowledge, that the woman that pressed herself so tightly against him was no more than an elite player.
Calculating. Manipulating. A woman who was there for much more than what she claimed.
As Alaiya’s lips pressed harder to his, her tongue against the closed seam of his lips, his hand released her arm, shot out and gripped the wrist of another hand nearing him. He tightened his hold on Alaiya’s other arm and peeled her from him easily, despite her struggles.
She had been attempting to gain access to the hormone filling his tongue now, his mouth. The hormone that had begun racing through him as he danced with his mate earlier, the scent of her panic and fear jerking at the animal until it stretched, paced and reached for her.
That had been the first moment Mercury knew his animal wasn’t dead. The first moment he had known that everything his soul had told him was true. Ria was his mate.
He drew Alaiya away, ignoring the scent of her desperation, the scent of her anger, and turned his head to see Jonas, the extraction vial in one hand, the determination to take blood filling his silver eyes. But there was no threat—only concern, only a need to know.
He stared into the other man’s eyes, swirling silver with power, and knew the reasons why he would attempt to take rather than ask. Because they knew the animal screaming inside him now. Jonas knew. And he might not fear it, but he did fear for it.
Mercury smiled. A baring of canines as he took the vial, shoved the needle in his vein and watched the blood, brilliant red, fill the small attached canister.
“Is this what you need?” He pulled the needle free and looked around.
He knew Ria was gone, but he could still feel her. Her agony was reaching out to him, causing the animal inside him to roar in rage, to shred his control with the overwhelming fury within it.
He tipped his head back and roared. Anger was a living, breathing entity inside him now. He was no longer half a Breed; parts of him weren’t even human. More parts of him than ever before.
He slapped the vial into Jonas’s hand, a small part of him realizing that the community as a whole would need the answers within it. They couldn’t confine him simply because the animal was back. And if they tried, they would die.
He moved to follow his mate.
“Mercury, where are you going?” Alaiya was on him again, blocking his path, her body slithering against him as he snarled in distaste.
“Mercury, she’s safe.” Jonas’s assurances behind him did nothing to ease the fury tearing at him. “Let’s take care of this first. Dane, Lawe and Rule are watching over her. You can go to her soon.”
“The hell he can.” Alaiya’s hands were digging into his shoulders, her expression twisting in anger. “Do you think I’ll lose you to that weak little human?”
A hiss of silk at her movements and she rubbed against him as he inhaled her scent. The smell of other men clung to her body, the scent of anger and jealous rage. The smell of a woman who wanted things, simply because they weren’t hers.
He remembered that about her. He remembered a time when it had been a challenge to him, the thought of taming that part of her. She had pricked the animal’s sense of fairness, and he would have taken her to mate because she was the strongest female, the most defiant and, at the time, the one he felt the most need to fuck once her body matured.
But that was no longer true. Now her scent was an affront to him. It was nothing compared to the sweet scent of his Ria. With all her little contradictions, her honor and her fears. It didn’t compare to Ria’s warmth, her gentleness or the pleasure he found in each smile that he drew from her.
The scent of his mate was an elixir. It was nectar to his senses. And the scent wrapping around him now was waste and blood. It was death and disease.
He allowed her touch. Allowing her, for only moments, to cling to him again, staring down at her, letting her realize there was nothing here for her. Her touch was an abomination to him. And the only way her animal would realize it was to sense the feeling of it.
Then he gripped her arms, ignoring the discomfort in his palms at touching her. His tongue was thick and swollen, the hormone pumping furiously into his mouth now, and he swallowed. He swallowed and snarled in triumph.
The animal that had slept, that he had feared would return, was merging with his mind, tearing its way to that cold, empty place that had only been filled when Ria touched him.
And he realized it was because Ria had allowed the animal to awaken from whatever isolation those drugs had forced it into. That cold, empty place inside his mind had been a result of the drugs, and Ria had saved the animal now filling it.
“You’re my mate.” Alaiya’s claws dug into his forearms, pricking him with anger rather than with desire, as she refused to acknowledge every instinct he knew she felt, that she was touching something that could kill her for the insult she was dealing to his mate.
“So where have you been then?” he asked her, his voice dark, fury pouring through him.
The need to get to Ria twisted inside him. He reined back the animal, just for the moment. Ria’s turn would come, and he would make certain she never walked away from him again.
Alaiya’s eyes dilated and he felt the lie before it ever passed her lips. He scented it, a dark, acrid smell that offended him.
“I was kept from you,” she whispered.
“You lie.” He shrugged from her touch. “You’ve played as you always played. You’ve done as you wished and given little thought to those you left behind in those labs. You were fucking your trainer, Alaiya. I knew it then. You killed him and you escaped, and you hid like the coward you’ve always been. And I ask you again, why come here now?”
Her lips thinned.
“You heard of Ria,” he answered for her. “Which means you have ties into Sanctuary. Ties you shouldn’t have.”
Her gaze flickered over his shoulder, to Jonas.
“She turned herself into the Bureau six months ago, Mercury,” Jonas told him. “I’ve had her working as an undercover agent in certain sectors since then.”
That was Jonas. Always making use of a tool, no matter how flawed it was.
“And you didn’t tell me she had been found?” He didn’t take his eyes off her. He watched her, as he would a snake, while he watched the lies darken and lighten her eyes.
“She’s not your mate.” He heard the shrug in Jonas’s voice. “Her scent isn’t a part of you, and when I had Ely run the mating tests, they showed nothing. There was no reason to inform you.”
Mercury nodded slowly. Reining in the fury, pulsing, pounding in his head, wasn’t an easy thing. The animal was roaring in his head, demanding that he go to his mate. His true mate.
“That isn’t true,” Alaiya snapped. “The mating was there in the labs.”
Mercury pushed her away. “The need to fuck was in the labs,” he snarled back at her. “The lust was there, for the only female of any strength.”
“Then explain the tests,” she cried out, fists clenched, jealous fury pouring off her like body odor. “The tests they did. The same ones the tabloids are screaming over. Everyone else may think those rags are full of crap, but I remember the test results, Mercury. I remember them and I remember how
possessive you were each time they allowed you near me. It was mating heat. The same as the matings I’ve read about since working with Jonas.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about those tests, Alaiya. This heat is for one woman. My mate. For Ria.”
“Breeds only mate once,” she hissed, her face flushed in anger.
“We didn’t mate,” he reminded her before turning to Jonas. “I want her secured for further questioning.” His gaze locked with that of his commander. He recognized the animal in Jonas as well now. And he smiled. The secrets Jonas held weren’t that far beneath the skin, and animal sense met animal sense in an acknowledgment of strength.
Jonas nodded slowly. “I’d already decided that when she arrived tonight claiming to be your mate.”
The timing was perfect. At the moment, the three strongest Breed males were not at that party. They were distracted, and Mercury was in full feral displacement. He could feel it. Under any other circumstances blood might have flowed.
But the animal was more experienced now, more mature, more intelligent. And the man knew freedom. A freedom the animal hungered for.
“Secured?” Alaiya growled. “I will not be secured. I came here for you, Mercury. You went insane when you thought you had lost me. How can you say I don’t matter?”
He turned back to her, his eyes going over the perfect figure dressed in the perfect clothes, and she didn’t hold a candle to Ria.
“How do you know what happened in those labs?” he asked her softly. “It’s top-level information, Alaiya. You couldn’t have gotten it unless you had a contact within those labs.”
The battle to stay sane now was one he was going to lose soon if he didn’t leave her. If he didn’t get to his mate.
He swallowed, his knees nearly weakening with the taste of the mating hormone. It reminded him of Ria, tasted as though it were infused with her scent, with the sweet desire he’d licked from her body more than once.
The thought of sharing it with her, of watching her burn with him, was making his cock thicker, harder than it had ever been.
As he spoke, a Breed unit stepped into the corridor. Four silent Breeds, their eyes on Alaiya, knowledge of their orders in their eyes. They would make certain she was held until she could be questioned.
He moved to pass Alaiya, nothing more imperative than getting to Ria.
Damn her, she had dared to walk away from him. To leave her mate with another woman. He’d show her the error of that quickly.
But even as that thought passed through his mind, still his heart melted for her. She had loved him enough to let him go without recriminations when she thought his mate had returned. When she thought the mating heat Dane had smelled on him was for another woman.
She was stronger than he. He would have never let her go.
“Mercury.” Alaiya’s hand gripped his arm, over the material of the jacket he wore. “I never forgot you. Never.”
He stared down at her, and for once he saw the truth in her eyes. For all her weaknesses, there had been parts of Alaiya that had been funny, intense, that had once given him hope that she would be a worthy mate to walk by his side. But he had found a woman that called to both the animal as well as the man. Ria had saved the most elemental part of him. She had called it forth. And she controlled the beast.
He pulled his arm from Alaiya’s grip. “Don’t let me catch you in the presence of my mate, ever again,” he warned her. “The pain you dealt her tonight, deliberately, was uncalled for. You touched what you knew, what the animal inside you warned you was not yours to touch. Do it again, Alaiya, harm my mate in such a way, ever again, and what I did in those labs the day when they told me, in exacting detail, how you supposedly died, will look like fun and games. Do we understand each other?”
She paled, staring back at him with eyes that flickered with fear now.
“You were part of my pride,” he reminded her. “And admittedly, the woman I would have taken as my lover once you matured. Whatever mating hormone was showing up must have an error. Or some anomaly. You are not my mate.”
“How can you say that?” she whispered.
Mercury could feel the animal clawing harder, screaming out in rage in his head. The hormone was pumping into his tongue, making it hard to think past the haze of lust consuming him now.
This had to be dealt with. No matter the distaste that filled him.
“I say it very easily,” he growled. “I was pride leader then. In those labs, you were my responsibility. You were my woman, just as the other female was mine as well. I was an animal there. The animal ruled me and it guided me, and the animal needed to mate. It was that simple.” He turned and stared back at Callan, recognizing the animal there. Powerful. Honorable. The animal inside Callan blended perfectly with the man, in accord, strong and enduring. And Callan ruled.
As powerful as Mercury knew himself to be now, knew his animal to be, he had no desire for the responsibilities that came with the pride leader position.
“You’re Callan’s responsibility now. Perhaps he can deal with you.”
“I won’t let that bitch take you.”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the animal struck. His hand was around her neck, not bruising, but definitely threatening.
She gasped, fear finally contorting her expression as Mercury leaned close to her and inhaled. “The smell of the men you’ve lain with permeate your pores. The scent of your jealousy and your greed, the maliciousness of who and what you are, sicken me. Your calculation to steal what you know belongs to another enrages me. Come near my mate again, and I’ll not be able to help myself, Alaiya. I will kill you. No one, neither man nor woman, threatens what’s mine. Do you comprehend me?”
Her eyes locked with his, the need to challenge his power flickering within her gaze as his hand tightened around her throat and he growled in warning.
“Yes.” Her eyes lowered, went to his shoulder. Acknowledgment of his strength filled her scent now, as did her submission to it. The animal inside her, that part of her genetics, the strength he knew she held, the qualities that had made her survive, he respected. The woman, he would never trust.
He jerked his hand back from her and turned back to Callan and Jonas. The two men he followed into battle, respected and fought for.
“We’ll talk later,” he growled back at them. It wasn’t a request. As much as he respected them, as much as he owed them, his mate came above them.
Callan nodded as Jonas glanced at the vial of blood in his hand.
“Run the fucking tests,” Mercury snarled. “Perhaps we all need to see exactly what we’re dealing with now.”
He knew what they were dealing with. Pure animal genetics. Inside and out. Mercury was indeed a lion walking on two legs, and that blood would prove it.
“Blade,” he told the Wolf enforcer at the head of the unit. “Inform them outside to have my Harley brought around.”
“It’s snowing, Merc,” the Breed Enforcer informed him carefully. “Hard.”
The Harley would go through a blizzard. Mercury had made damned certain of it.
“Tell them now.” He turned back to Alaiya.
She stood against the wall, watching him carefully, calculation filling her eyes before she jerked them away from his gaze.
“Fuck with me, Alaiya, and it will be the last mistake you make.”
He walked away from them all then and allowed the animal driving him freedom. It had been confined, so deeply hidden within him that even he hadn’t known it still lived.
It wasn’t confined any longer, and it was going for its mate.
As he stepped outside the mansion and moved for the Harley, he inhaled deeply.
He could smell them now. Knew where they were. Each living, four-legged lion that wandered the grounds, protecting its two-legged cousins, following them.
He roared out into the night, the animal and the man announcing their presence, their strength. And the calls came back to him. A sympho
ny of animal screams, roars that filled the mountain, the acknowledgment from the animals that all moved to be near him, in triumph.
He was aware of the Breeds guarding outside, watching him warily now. The sounds of the lions called back to him, roaring out their greeting, their challenge, the echo of the fury they heard inside him.
He roared out again, filling the night with a sound he’d never known he possessed. His head tipped back, rage and triumph and the call for his mate tearing from vocal cords that were now more animal than human.
And the animals answered. He felt their response, felt them moving toward his destination. They were his pride and they would protect what was his. His woman. His mate. Their alpha female by choice and by nature.
The Breed that brought him the Harley stood back, wariness and respect filling his gaze as Mercury strode to him.
The Breed was awed by the sight of him. Eyes so blue they could rival a summer sky, the thick mane of hair flowing back from his savage features, his shoulders appearing broader, his body larger, than ever before.
The Lion Breed male saw something that both terrified and awed him, because this vision was a true Breed. The pure merging of lion and human. And he was enraged. That roar had been one of pure fury, and in it, it had held a message. A message so primal, so demanding, that the Breed himself nearly followed it.
Protect Mercury’s mate.
Ria heard the roars in the exhaustion of her sobs. They still tore from her, but the screams were no longer ripping through her. They were trapped inside her now, flowing out with the tears that had swollen her eyes and left her wrecked, clinging to Mercury’s pillow, his scent the only solace she could find.
The memory of his smile flitted through her mind. The knowledge in his eyes when he stared at her. He knew her. There were things she hadn’t had to tell him. He knew who she was, when no one else ever had, even the Vanderales.
She hadn’t wanted others to see who she was, so she had hidden it. But Mercury had seen her. He had felt her. And now she was losing him.
She had walked away. Should she have fought for him? Her sobs became deeper at the thought. Oh God, she wanted to fight for him. She wanted to claw that woman’s eyes out. Tear her away from Mercury and rip at that perfect hair that had framed those perfect features.
And what good would it have done? Where did love fall into place within mating heat? She had done her homework. She knew there was no denying the heat. And the heat hadn’t been between her and Mercury. At least, not with Mercury.
She was bleeding agony through every pore of her body at the thought of another woman touching him. How would she survive it? How was she going to do her job then walk away?
She curled tighter around the pillow she held to her. She couldn’t stay here. Dane was right. There was no way she could survive it, but she couldn’t survive returning to South Africa either. Where Elizabeth would fuss over her and Leo would watch her with sad disappointment. Because she had messed up and let herself care again.
No, that wasn’t it, she realized. It was because he knew her. He knew she refused to share her hurt, and he’d always been disappointed in her because she didn’t fight when she hurt. She hid, and she tried to heal. And Leo only knew how to fight.
And Dane? Dane always brought her baubles, trinkets and bling when she hurt. As though he knew no other way to try to ease her pain. And she had always taken them, because she had always known it comforted him. Even if it didn’t comfort her.
She was the poor orphan relation because she had allowed herself to become one. Because, as Mercury had accused her, it allowed her to hide. It kept men at a distance, and it kept her heart safe. Because she didn’t want to hurt. Because that six-year-old child still existed within her. The one who knew that life could so easily take the center of her world.
She heard the lions roar outside again, just outside the cabin.
Did animals feel the death of a soul? A heart? Were they moving in like scavengers to partake of the destruction? She had seen the lions on Leo’s estate. Large and powerful, they always attacked the weakest in a group first. The ones that were injured. That couldn’t fight.
For the first time in her life she was willing to fight for something or someone, and she knew the battle was hopeless. A woman couldn’t defeat mating heat.
But he had made her promises. He had called her his mate. He loved her. Love could fight biology, chemistry. It could move mountains.
She shook her head. She would destroy both of them in the process, wouldn’t she?
“From all evidence I’ve gained, as well as the tests I’ve conducted on myself and Leo, I have to say mating heat always comes with emotion.” Elizabeth had stood before her more than a year ago, frowning as she worked, while Ria went through Leo’s transmissions and updated the security of his encryption. “What do you think, Ria? Does love conquer all?”
Ria had looked up from the computer to meet Elizabeth’s gaze.
“How would I know? I’ve never been in love.” She had smiled back at the other woman.
“But you’ve helped me with many of these tests,” Elizabeth pointed out. “The matings are strengthening in the American Breeds, though we’ve had rare matings among Leo’s pride.”
Ria snorted. “Leo’s pride rarely leaves the plains. What are they supposed to mate? The zebras?”
And Elizabeth had laughed at that one, agreeing with her.
“Look at this. Devotion, Ria.” She laid out pictures that had been taken of the mated couples. “Look at their eyes, their expressions as they watch each other. These are more than biological, chemical or pheromonal. That’s why the mating tests are not always conclusive. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they aren’t.” Ria knew Elizabeth often worked secretly with the Breed scientist Ely Morrey. “This is love. Love, the predisposition for it, or the animal sense that that woman is somehow more perfect, more worthy than others. It begins the mating heat.”
Ria had stared at the pictures. The pride leader Callan Lyons and his wife at a news conference after they announced to the world what the Breeds were. Taber Williams and his mate, Roni. Tanner and Scheme. An enforcer, Tarek, and his mate, Lyra. In their expressions that extra something that had always fascinated Ria. It was love. It was always love. Mating heat had managed, in every instance, to combine the chemical, biological and pheromonal with love.
Mercury loved her.
She heard the roar outside. Closer, throbbing with rage, reminding her of Mercury.
He loved her. She knew he did. Her soul was being ripped from her body without him.
He didn’t love Alaiya. Mating heat came with love. Mercury had shown signs of the mating hormone in those labs. Not mating heat.
She buried her head deeper into his pillow, drew in his scent.
He was hers. He was meant to be hers. Yet what should have been hers had come alive for another woman. The scent of mating heat that Dane had smelled. The moment Mercury saw Alaiya.
She was tensing to move, to force herself from the bed, when the slam of a door had her stiffening. A snarl filled the cabin and the bedroom door burst open, thrown into the wall with a force that shook the room.
She jerked up in the bed. The light from the bathroom speared over him.