by Quinn Loftis
Decebel tried to catch Costin as he lunged for the two female wolves who’d come running out of the back of the bar. As soon as he’d finished dismembering Jericho, he seemed to calm a bit. But then, out of nowhere he attacked the girls.
“Whatever Sally is thinking about, tell her to bloody stop,” he snarled into his mate’s mind. “Costin is tearing apart a she-wolf from Jericho’s pack.”
“Jericho used magic to get Sally to sleep with him. He mated with her last night and he marked her,” Jen thought the words so fast that he nearly missed it.
Decebel saw red. Sally wasn’t even his mate, but she was his because she was pack. He couldn’t imagine what Costin was feeling. His Beta would have seen the memories in Sally’s mind. That’s why he was attacking anything that moved. His attention snapped back to his Beta and he saw that he had killed both females and was now ripping out the throat of another male wolf. Damn, how many were there?
When all of the enemy wolves, that they could see anyway, laid at their feet, he turned on them. Costin eyed the females wrapped around his mate. “Vasile!” Decebel managed to yell as he lunged at the exact moment Costin did. It took, Vasile, himself, Fane, and Cypher to hold him back from attacking the females.
“MINE,” Costin said as spittle flew from his snarling mouth. He was gone. If he was willing to attack his own female pack members, then his control was gone.
“Get her out of here,” Decebel told his mate. “Costin is trying to kill you all.”
Jen stood up abruptly and turned her angry glare on him. What the hell had he done now?
“Of course, he’s trying to kill anything that is between him and his mate!” she yelled at him. “And you want me to take her further from him? Have you lost your ever-loving mind?”
“But, he’s—” Decebel started, a growl forming as his mate refused to submit.
“He doesn’t need to be further from her, fleabag. He needs to be closer.” To his utter shock his mate started crying. “He’s been separated from her for months without the bond. He didn’t know where she was or what was happening to her and now he’s found her. But he found her unknowingly in the arms of another wolf. And you want me to separate them again?”
Peri stood up then and patted Jacque to do the same. “We will walk over to the other side of the room,” the high fae said calmly. “We will leave Sally right there with nothing stopping him from getting to her.”
Jacque looked down at her friend and it was obvious that she didn’t want to let Sally go.
As soon as the females were out of Costin’s line of sight, the males released him and he went straight to his mate.
Costin fell to his knees as he wrapped his arms around his Sally. He pulled her shaking form into his lap and curled his body around hers. His wolf settled as soon as his flesh touched hers. He wanted to console her but he, himself, was weeping just as deeply. Mine, his wolf rumbled and rejoiced at having their mate in their arms again. He buried his face in her hair and breathed. He ignored the scents that weren’t hers and pulled in the scent that only he could smell. All of the rage and chaos faded from his mind as the light of his mate penetrated all the darkness that he thought had destroyed him. His hands shook as he ran them down her back and arms. “You feel so good,” he said out loud. He wanted so desperately to hear her voice and he wondered if she wanted to hear his. So he continued to speak out loud instead of through the bond. “I’ve been lost without you, Sally. Please, beautiful, talk to me.”
She laughed and it sounded cruel. “What do you want to talk about, Costin? How I’ve been unfaithful to you for months? About how another male touched me, kissed me, took me to be—”
“DON’T,” his wolf warned her as he lifted her chin to look at him. “Now is not the time or the place. I love you. Nothing. Nothing, is going to change that. Just—” He paused and hated that he sounded insecure. “Do you still have feelings for me?” He needed her to confirm that her heart was still his. He needed to hear her say that she wanted him.
Her eyes widened as she looked up at him. “Why would you ask me that?
“Because all I can feel through the bond is that you don’t want me to touch you. I feel your need to get away from me, and I need to know why you’re feeling those things?”
Sally glanced over his shoulder and Costin growled at whoever was intruding on their time.
“Costin, I’m going to take you and your mate home. This is not the place,” Peri said. “I’ll need to touch you, as well as Sally. Can I touch your mate?”
Costin’s wolf wanted to say no. He didn’t want anyone else’s hands on his mate. He didn’t want anyone else’s scent on her. But instead of saying no, he nodded. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to go home and be alone with his mate.
He felt Peri’s hand on his shoulder and saw where the fae placed her other hand on Sally’s shoulder. She flashed them and the next thing he knew, they were in their suite at the Serbian pack mansion.
“Before I go, Sally,” Peri addressed the healer. “You need to know that the bracelet he gave you was covered in a magic. Its purpose was to cause incredible desire for the person who presented it to you. Simply put, a monkey could have handed it to you and you would have laid down willingly. It wasn’t you. You didn’t want him, not like that.” And then she was gone
Costin knew they’d have to talk about Peri’s words at some point, but first he needed to know the answer to his original questions. Though her lack of response was killing him, Costin was scared of pushing her when she seemed so fragile.
When he pulled his face back to look down at her, he saw the bite mark that wasn’t his. His wolf surged forward. Costin tried to stop it, but the beast was not having it. She was theirs. “I’m sorry, Brown Eyes,” he told her and then he struck.
Costin’s teeth sank down into her tender flesh and he drank her blood—her very essence. Her scent mingled with his own. When he released her, he heard her whimper. He licked the mark and watched in awe as the power of the true mate bond negated any other claim by a male that was not her true mate. The bite Jericho had given her was gone. The scent—the foreign scent, the tainted scent—that had been left on her vanished and all that remained was Costin’s claim.
She sobbed even harder and tried to pull away from him. Like hell, he thought.
“I’m sorry, love. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I needed to mark you. My wolf he—”
“You’re sorry?” she asked, cutting off his words and pulling back to look up at him. His breath caught in his lungs at the perfection before him. Her hair was no longer blonde with purple streaks, it was back to it’s beautiful, chocolate brown. “I’m in awe of you,” he whispered. He could feel her disbelief and growled at her. “Feel me, Sally. I’m telling the truth. You, incredible female, are mine and I am humbled.” He felt like he was going to come undone at the seams. The fear that she didn’t want him was threatening to suffocate him. His wolf was pacing now, no longer at peace because their mate wouldn’t tell them what she was feeling.
“I love you,” she whispered. It was so soft that he barely heard it. Costin pulled her tighter against him. But then she turned and straddled his lap, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. She buried his face in his neck and held on as though something was going to try and pull her away.
“It’s just so much,” she began. “I…” Her shoulders shook and she held him tighter. “Why did this have to happen to me? I love you more than I ever thought I was capable and I would never, ever betray our love, but that’s exactly what happened.”
A huge part of Costin—mainly his wolf part—didn’t want to think about or discuss any part of her relationship with the other male while her memory had been cloaked. But he knew she would need to and he was going to have to reassure her that it didn’t matter. Nothing could ever change the way he felt about her.
“Do you still want to be with me?” Costin asked.
Sally’s heart broke again as she h
eard the fear in her mate’s voice. He thought, because she didn’t want him to touch her, that she was rejecting him. She just didn’t know how to explain what was going on inside of her.
She brushed her lips across his neck and the memory of their Blood Rites filled her mind. Costin had just bitten her again because he needed to reestablish his claim. Maybe if she did this too, he would realize just how desperately she wanted to be with him.
She opened her mouth and bit—hard—on the spot she’d bitten once before. Costin’s arms tightened around her and he moaned as she pulled the blood from his body. She didn’t want to stop. She wanted to keep the connection between them so that he wouldn’t doubt her, no matter what her feelings seemed to be saying.
“Beautiful, that’s enough. I hear you,” Costin whispered to her as he ran his fingers through her long hair. She was so thankful that her hair had returned to normal. She hadn’t expected this to happen, but she was glad to be rid of anything that would remind her of her time in Oceanside. She released his neck and licked the wound and then pressed a kiss to it. Hers, she thought. He was hers.
“Always,” he told her as he pulled back to look at her. The need burning in his eyes scared and excited her. She needed him, holy hell how she needed him. But she didn’t feel like she deserved him. She felt as though her body was tainted, contaminated, no longer fit for him to touch.
He growled as her thoughts filtered through the bond. “Your body is mine. No matter what happens to it, it will always be mine and I will always want to touch you.”
Tears formed in her eyes again as Costin ran a finger across her jaw, down her neck, and across the tops of her breasts. He let his other hand roam up her thigh and across her backside and then up her back until he was grasping her neck. It was as if he needed to show her that he wanted to touch her and that he would touch her.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked her as his eyes dropped to her lips.
Sally hated that he felt like he needed to ask.
He shook his head at her. “I don’t feel like I need to ask. But you’ve been through something terrible. Someone touched you against your will. I want you to feel in control of your own body. I will respect whatever you need or want. If you want me to strip you out of your clothes and kiss and touch and love every inch of you, I will. If you want me only to touch your hand, I will. All I beg of you is that you let me touch you in some way. Even just your ankle, I need your flesh against mine.”
She was speechless. She stared at him, watching his hazel eyes shift back and forth from wolf to man. She’d missed him. Even though she hadn’t remembered him, her soul had remembered him, and she had missed him so very much.
When he leaned forward, she did as well and before she knew it, his lips were devouring hers. He nipped, kissed, sucked, licked, and repeated on her lips. It was as if he were reclaiming them. They sat there kissing for a long time. And Sally drank him in like a desert drinks the rain.
Finally, he pulled back. He was breathless, as was she. “I would love to continue this and if you allow it, we will. But now I think showers are in order.”
Sally looked down for the first time at his clothes. He was covered in blood. She looked back up at him and saw no remorse for those he’d killed.
“How?” she asked. He understood that she was asking how he killed Jericho.
“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked as his eyes began to glow again.
She nodded.
“Tell me first, what was Peri talking about before she left?”
Sally’s heart plummeted. “Costin, it has to do with last night.”
He looked shocked, but then recovered quickly. “So it happened last night?” he asked. His voice was gravelly from his wolf.
She nodded.
“Is that the only time?”
“That’s the only time it went that far.” Her memories of the different encounters with Jericho rushed forward, no matter how she tried to keep them at bay. “I didn’t desire him. I only thought of him as a friend.”
“Why did you continue to see him?” His question wasn’t accusatory; he just wanted to know what happened.
“You’re going to think I’m stupid.” She tried to hide her face but he wouldn’t let her.
“I could never think you’re stupid, Sally mine.”
“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” she said quickly.
Costin nodded slowly as if he were considering her words. “Did he ever push himself on you? Other than when he used the bracelet?”
“No, not really. He was intense. Bloody hell, Costin, how are we going to do this? I can’t talk about him with you.”
Costin growled. “I’m your mate. I’m the one you should talk to about this. Sally, trust me. Trust my commitment to you.”
He picked her up as he smoothly rose from the ground and walked toward their bedroom.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“To take a bath. We can continue our discussion there. We need to talk about this and I think the sooner you get it all out the sooner you can start healing. But I won’t lie, it is hard to hear. It will help if we have more skin touching. It reassures my wolf that you are his—no one else’s. I want you here with me, present in mind and body.” He set her down in their bathroom and it felt as though it had been years instead of months that she’d been here. In fact, the last time she’d used their bathroom she’d been taking a shower with Costin. Sally felt her skin blush.
“Are you comfortable with taking a bath with me?”
She nodded.
“Do you want me to turn around so you can undress?”
“Do you want to turn around?” she countered.
He gave her a dry look. “You’re asking me if I want to look away as you get naked? No amount of turmoil or pain will stop me from wanting to see you naked.” He winked at her and her heart skipped a beat. He was so freaking handsome and sexy and funny and, holy smokes, she’d missed him.
She wasn’t surprised when he stripped off all of his bloody clothes without any hesitation. Costin had never, ever been bashful about being naked in front of her. He could even have a fight with her while he was butt naked. She had to have clothes on to argue with him. She felt too vulnerable to be naked and fighting. And he wouldn’t keep his eyes on her face while she growled at him.
He was grinning at her, obviously listening to her train of thought. “Come here,” he told her.
She obeyed, walking over to him. Costin began to undress her, his movements confident. As her skin began to be revealed, he would groan and would stop and kiss her wherever his mouth happened to be. By the time he’d filled the tub and added bubbles, he’d run his hands over every inch of her flesh.
He sat down in the tub first and she climbed in, sitting down in between his legs and leaning back against his chest. She felt his chest rumble in satisfaction and felt his contentment through their bond.
“Now, start at the beginning and share your story with me.” His hands began to slide up and down her skin, touching any part he could reach.
Sally realized that he was right. It wasn’t going to get any easier to talk about. In fact, it would probably get harder. But, for whatever reason, being completely surrounded by his body against hers, she felt safe to talk to him about her ordeal.
Sally started with the moment she’d arrived in Oceanside. “Oh,” she said before she got too far in. “Are my parents…alive?”
“I haven’t heard otherwise,” he said just before pressing a kiss to her bare shoulder.
“Can we go see them soon?”
“Of course.”
Then she continued her account of the time she’d been gone. The entire time she spoke, Costin listened patiently. There were times his touch got more insistent. During those times, he’d stop her to kiss her and then let her continue.
Touch, it was so vital to his wolf and she realized it was vital to the man as well. It settled both of them and gave her the security she needed
in order to talk to him.
That night, after they’d talked and bathed, Costin helped her dress for bed and then tucked her in next to him. “Costin?”
“Yes, beautiful?”
“How is Titus? Is he still unaware of what we are? I know I haven’t asked about him. I just don’t feel ready yet to face him. I’d like to see him tomorrow, but tonight—” She paused.
“Tonight was about beginning the slow process of healing and about reuniting with your mate,” he finished for her. “We will talk about Titus, and other things, like the fact that he doesn’t about what we are, tomorrow, after we’ve both rested.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead and pulled her tightly against him. “You aren’t the only one feeling shame. You poured yourself out to me and trusted me with your heart, mind, and body. Tomorrow, I will pour myself out to you.”
Sally’s stomach clenched and she felt tears fill her eyes. Without her, without their bond, Costin would have been fighting the growing darkness. He’d gone through that all alone, without her.
“Shhh,” Costin said gently. “Rest. If you can’t, I can occupy you until your body is worn out and then you can sleep.”
She smiled and it felt good to smile. “You still want me?”
Costin growled. “If you won’t believe my words, then believe my actions,” he told her as he pulled her shirt, which happened to be one of his, over her head.
Sally closed her eyes and nearly cried out at the rightness of her mate loving her. The completeness she felt when he touched her was overwhelming. How anyone could let someone other than their mate touch them baffled her because nothing compared to her mate’s touch. Oh, how much it soothed her, reassured her, and strengthened the bond between them.
She knew that the aftermath of her ordeal wasn’t over. She wasn’t magically healed. The insecurities, guilt, shame, and sickness over it would return, but at least she knew that Costin wouldn’t leave her. He would be with her through it all. She wouldn’t be alone ever again.