The bed quaked with his fury, his irises burned bright enough to light up the room. “You fucking bitch!”

But she was beyond caring now. She was slick and swol en between her legs, her breasts were tender and heavy, and his flavor permeated her mouth, deterring thoughts of fleeing as she might’ve done if she’d had any sense of self-preservation left.

“Let me loose.” He clawed at the bed with the heels of his boots. “Fucking let me go… now! ”

Vash fought to be free of her catsuit, struggling out of both it and her boots in a near-mindless frenzy. Once naked, she fel on his twisting body, wrestling his bucking hips to yank open his button fly.

“Vashti!” He arched violently. “Not like this, damn you. Don’t fucking tie me up like an animal.”

As always, Elijah was commando beneath his jeans, ready to shift forms at a moment’s notice. Nothing impeded her mouth from his cock, which she swal owed greedily, her lips and tongue tightening around his raging length.

“Shit,” he hissed, bucking his hips in an attempt to throw her off. “Get your bloodsucking mouth off me!”

She couldn’t. If the entire den poured into the room and found her fel ating a lycan, she didn’t think she could stop. Her hunger for the taste of him was too great, her need to bring about his surrender even greater. Pumping the thick root with her fist, she tongued the wide head, her mouth sucking hard and quick as she drove him relentlessly toward orgasm. He fought the whole way, his powerful thighs bunched with strain, his chest rumbling with furious growls, his torso twisting back and forth to dislodge her.

When he climaxed, it was with a wolven howl that brought goose bumps to her skin. The baying sound was high and plaintive, purely animal with none of the human evident in it. Tears stung her eyes even as she drank him down, something ancient and primal within her ravenous for the heady flavor of his savage virility.

“Damn you.” He panted, his chest heaving as she shoved his jeans to his knees. “Damn you to hel , you traitorous— Fuck!”

Her fangs sank into his femoral artery and she lost what tiny bit of humanity she clung to. His blood mingled with the semen in her mouth, creating a blended essence that was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. She circled his powerful thigh with both arms, embracing it like a lover, her throat working with each gulping swal ow.

“Fucking bitch,” he spat. “You goddamned fucking bitch. You’re stealing my right to give what belongs to me.”

She heard the anchors in the wal creak in protest as Elijah strained against his bonds, a testament to how strong he was, so strong that the silver that incapacitated most vamps wanting a true submissive experience was barely enough to contain him.

Dizzyingly intoxicated, Vash slid her fangs free and closed the punctures with soothing licks of her tongue.

“I can’t stop,” she whispered, achingly empty and needing him, despite the terrible effort she’d made not to. No lycan could tolerate being caged, and Elijah was no mere lycan. He was an Alpha. As rare as a new angel and in some ways just as fragile.

She crawled over him, putting her back to his enraged face and training her eyes on the door. A door that would see them exiting far differently than they’d come in. His fury was pulsing off him in searing, battering waves. Yet she couldn’t stop herself from gripping his stil -hard cock and positioning herself over the massive crown.

“Don’t do this,” he warned in a thick, hoarse voice.

She licked the taste of him off her suddenly dry lips. “I…need you.”

“Not like this, Vashti. Don’t take me like this.”

Their intimate flesh touched. The lips of her sex hugged him, flexing gently around him. Her hand gripping him shook like a junky’s in need of a fix.

“This is the only way I can have you.”

Vash sheathed him in a swift plunge of her hips. He roared as she cried out, her body shocked by a penetration it hadn’t experienced for over half a century. The cement wal behind the bed exploded with a deafening sound; dust and debris burst in a cloud around her. She was catapulted forward violently, her body thrust toward the door and down, her torso slammed into the mattress with breathtaking force.

She was mounted before she knew what hit her, Elijah’s rock-hard body nailing her to the bed with a powerful thrust of his rigid cock into her aching sex. The coils of cable that had failed to contain him thudded to the floor, the sound reverberating through her.

Elijah wrapped his forearm with the spil ed length of her hair. Fisting the tresses at the root, he pul ed her head back and growled in her ear, “You can’t tame me.”

He shifted his hips, pul ing free of her clinging depths only to drive into her again. “You can’t chain me.”

Yanking her up by the hips and hair, he brought her to her hands and knees. “And you goddamn can’t rape me.”

His next lunge hit the end of her, driving his supremacy home with a heavy surge of his hips. She cried out, completely at the mercy of his primal need for her and her own for him. He pounded into her, riding her hard and deep, stroking over and over and over a tender spot inside her that made her shake and moan. She had no leverage, no way to move or participate. Or so she told herself.

It was a lie, of course. He was stronger than she was, but she could fight him off. She could hurt him, make him work for it. They both knew she could. Yet she let him have his way, for reasons she couldn’t grasp.

Something broke free inside her.

Set adrift, she clung to Elijah as the only anchor against the storm that whipped through her. Tears fel . Her chest ached. Her body burned with the feverish pleasure buffeting her from al sides, shattering the wal s that had protected her for so long.

He gave her no quarter. Elijah fucked her like the animal he was, rutting into her with unmitigated ferocity. She climaxed in a helpless rush, screaming his name because he didn’t relent, didn’t falter. He kept driving the ecstasy into her, making her take it. Al that he was. Everything.

Beyond what she could handle, what she’d tried to limit herself to.

He fol owed her down when she melted into the mattress, her head and shoulders hanging off the edge. “You’l take me as I am,” he snarled.

“You’l want me as I am. Or you won’t have me at al .”

His knee shoved her legs wider; his big cock sank a fraction deeper. His grip on her hair pul ed her head down toward the floor, forcing her into the most submissive of poses. She felt his teeth sink into the nape of her neck, his canines inhumanly long, his bite firm enough to break the skin but not tear it.

Subdued, mounted, and dominated in every way, Vashti came again and again, sobbing her pleasure, shame, and guilt. Begging him to forgive her. To finish her. To fil her.

Which he did, hours later, pumping his lust and fury into the greedy depths of her body, emptying himself with a serrated groan that sounded like the sweetest agony.

CHAPTER 7

From his vantage point high on a rocky hil, Adrian Mitchel surveyed the blond fledgling vampire attempting to sneak up on three of the most fearsome angels ever created, one of whom was his lieutenant. They stood with their winged backs to her, their focus on the papers spread out on the teakwood patio table in front of them.

Dawn had passed and now the morning sun rose in the east. The soft pinkish golden glow that would have fried any other minion caressed her pale limbs and austerely beautiful face just as his lips had done mere hours ago. Behind her, their house clung to the hil with the appearance of defying gravity, its three tiers jutting out from the craggy rock, its weathered wood and rock exterior making it seem a natural part of the native Southern California landscape.

He watched and waited, his crimson-tipped wings tucked close to his back to avoid catching drag in the wind. He admired the vampress’s bravado, even as he acknowledged the futility of it. She couldn’t take on even one of his Sentinels; three was impossible.

Crouching, she slunk across his wide deck with a slender blade in her hand. When she pounced, he appreciated her grace and agility, which nearly matched Damien’s when he turned at the last possible moment and caught the business end of her blade in his hand, proving he’d sensed her coming.

One might have thought that would be the end of it, but she surprised them al by using the Sentinel’s grip to support her weight as she kicked out spread-eagled and knocked the two Sentinels flanking Damien into the table like fal ing chess pieces, sending papers flying.

Adrian leaped from his perch, his wings extending to their ful thirty-foot span to catch an updraft. He soared, then dove, spiraling downward, relishing the rush of air through his hair and over his feathers. He skimmed the wide deck, the tips of his wings touching the planks, before he darted upward again, using the pul of gravity to slow his momentum and pul him back to the earth.

Lowering with effortless strength, he settled into place beside his mischievous mate, landing on the bal s of his feet without a sound.

She caught his wrist and squeezed, opening her mind so that her thoughts became his. Watching you fly makes me so hot.

“Watching you hunt is similarly affecting.” His face and tone of voice revealed nothing of his feelings for her, out of deference for his men, but the way her fingertips slid across his palm told him she knew.

Malachai and Geoffrey straightened from their ignoble sprawls.

“That’s cheating,” Malachai said, stretching and flexing wings that were the color of sunset—pale yel ow that darkened into deep orange tips.

Lindsay’s smile was bril iant. “One-on-one I get my ass kicked, but I think I might be able to work with a group. Using one to distract the others.”

“That’s insane,” Geoffrey scoffed, looking disgruntled. He’d recently likened Lindsay to a troublesome cat, one who crouched under couches and swiped at anyone hapless enough to walk by. But in truth, he appreciated her ceaseless efforts to hone herself so that she wasn’t as much of a liability. While Lindsay was an expert marksman and bladesman and was working hard on her hand-to-hand combat skil s, she was stil a fledgling vampire newly Changed. She hadn’t yet achieved the power and resilience that would eventual y come with age. In the interim, she was unbearably vulnerable and easily broken.

Damien sighed. “No, that’s Lindsay. It’s our fault we weren’t ready for her.”

The lieutenant was wary of Lindsay’s impact on Adrian and the Sentinels’ mission, but he admired her as a warrior. While Adrian’s original second and beloved friend, Phineas, had been a strategist and Phineas’s replacement, Jason, had been good for morale, Damien’s strengths were found in battle and those were the same strengths he most appreciated in others.

Lindsay slid her blade into the sheath strapped to her thigh. “I touched base with al the international packs overnight. The communication blackout is working—you stil have one hundred percent containment of the overseas lycan outposts. They have no idea the North American packs revolted.”

“Thank the Creator for smal favors,” Malachai muttered.

“But we can’t risk using those lycans to contain their rogue brethren,” Geoffrey said. “Even though some of them wil do so wil ingly.”

Adrian’s gaze lifted to the building set a half mile away—the lycan barracks. Once home to his pack and now home to a mere dozen lycans who’d straggled in over the last week and a half since the outposts had begun fal ing like a chain of dominos. More lycans returned to him every day, and when he touched their minds, as he did Lindsay’s, he felt their fear and confusion—and their loyalty, which humbled him.

The crumbling of the order he’d worked so hard for was part of his punishment for loving Lindsay, he knew—the loss of the lycans, the guilt of knowing others were paying for his mistakes, the strain of holding on to the tenuous balance between vampires and mortals by his fingernails.

Although he’d committed the same offense as the Fal en, his penalty was different; he suspected that was because he was too useful to throw away. But he was paying in other ways, every day of his endless life. He’d paid for centuries watching Shadoe die over and over again, and he would continue to pay mental y and emotional y for an indefinite time to come. “We need to reinforce the Sentinels stil holding on to their outposts, which leaves us with only a handful here in the States to pul everything back together.”

They were outnumbered by a fatalistic margin. He had a firm hold on the Jasper and Juarez outposts, but the others were lost. He looked at the beautiful vampress beside him, once the vessel that carried Shadoe’s soul and now the woman who carried his heart in her hands. Her vampirism offered her a better chance of survival than she’d had as a mere mortal, but she was stil weak and in need of frequent feeding. And Adrian’s powerful Sentinel blood was al she would drink, which afforded her the ability to withstand sunlight but also meant he couldn’t be separated from her for too long. As fragile as she yet was, that made her a terrible disadvantage for him.

His hands fisted against the need to touch her, a display of affection she wouldn’t welcome, not in front of his Sentinels. She was ever careful to keep from flaunting the love that consumed them both, knowing the risks he’d taken to claim her as his own. Angels weren’t supposed to crave or need another to complete them. They were meant to be above the failings of mortals, but he wasn’t so perfect. He hungered and ached for Lindsay with a ferocity he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t regret his trespass because it would belittle what he felt for her. He couldn’t profess his love for Lindsay in one breath, then beg forgiveness for it with the other without rendering both pledges worthless. And he couldn’t walk away or turn his back to her. She was the very air he breathed, his reason for waking and fighting and persisting against the odds.

Inhaling deeply, he looked to the sky for answers and found none. “We don’t have the resources to hunt both lycans and vampires. We have to choose. We know what we’re dealing with on the latter front. The lycans, however, are a mystery.”