Kinked

TWO

Now in March, two months after the party, her own words mocked her. Her triumph at the party had been all-too short lived.

The bitter winds matched her mood. The slicing chill of the wintry air cooled her overheated blood as frustration clawed at her. She let the tumultuous currents buffet and toss her about.

She might have all the time in the world with which to hunt Caeravorn. She just didn’t have all the patience in the world. Not when he was a daily fact of her existence. It was one thing to have him constantly in the forefront of her mind as a subject of investigation. Now she never knew when she might run into him at the Tower.

She knew she would run into him whenever Dragos called for a sentinel conference. She started to avoid those whenever she could get away with it, until Dragos stomped on that little maneuver by ordering her to attend every meeting.

Caeravorn was a smooth operator. Everywhere he went, women trotted after him like hypnotized puppies. He was even tempered and charming with everybody—everybody, that is, except Aryal.

They were not just driving each other insane. Collectively they were driving everyone else insane too. Echoes of their feud began to ripple through the other sentinels. Tempers flared until one day even Alexander, who was easily the most mild natured of them all, snapped at both of them. Then Grym and Constantine went at it, verbally ripping into each other like a pair of fighting dogs.

It was certainly no secret that Aryal loved a good fight. Conflict was like mother’s milk to her, but this went deeper—it had all the makings of a true schism, and that had to stop.

As she realized that, she thought of something else. Now there was the baby to consider too, because Pia cared for and trusted her friend Caeravorn. She might have had a problem with letting Aryal around her son, but she would have no problem letting him have free access … and that, to Aryal’s eyes, made him even more dangerous than ever.

So as soon as she figured out how to do it, she would kill him.

The decision was a relief. It gave her frustration a viable outlet, and the results would be better for everybody, instead of taking the long course as Dragos had decided on doing. Taking the long course meant giving Caeravorn access to sensitive knowledge and allowing him the chance to do major damage before he could be brought down.

The long flight had finally cleared her mind. She angled her wings to take her out of the wind current and spiraled down to the sprawling city below. A cloudy night covered the city’s vast array of lights in a moody cloak. The temperature was barely any warmer closer to the ground. The air felt wet and cold, and icy sleet coated the trees, roads and rooftops.

She had no intention of changing until she could get inside quickly, since she would feel the cold more in her human form. Instead, she cloaked her presence and flew along the corridors created by the streets and tall buildings, until she came to Elfie’s, Caeravorn’s bar. At almost four A.M., the bar was closed and the entire ground floor dark.

A sliver of light shone from a window on the top floor, which was the third story in the brick building. She drifted closer, her outspread wings holding her course steady. Caeravorn owned the building and lived in an apartment over the bar. As a sentinel, he now had an apartment at the Tower but he rarely stayed there.

All of the windows on the building were covered with slender, black metal security bars, even the windows on the upper floors. She grinned. Caeravorn didn’t trust his safety to the open sky. What a shame.

She flew to the lighted window, grabbed hold of the bars and flapped her wings until she had the tips of the deadly talons on her feet hooked into the side of the building. Her talons were sharp enough to slice through steel. Digging them into the mortar between the bricks was relatively easy.

She tugged experimentally at the bars as she checked out the bolts that fastened them to the wall, but they were anchored solidly in place. All of her weight rested on a half an inch at the tip of her talons, and the bars at the window were coated in a sheet of ice. The perch was uncomfortable and precarious, but she could hold it for now.

The window was cracked open, the curtains not quite pulled closed. Heat and illumination poured out of the gap, and a wordless, tribal music that carried a hypnotic rhythm. It slipped into her bloodstream and pounded at her throat and temples. She peered inside.

The sight slammed her.

Caeravorn and a naked woman were in the room. He wore a pair of midnight blue silk pants that rode low on lean hipbones. His torso was bare. The woman sat on the edge of a bed. She wasn’t the lioness. She was a pretty, young-looking brunette, with firm, small breasts and dark, erect nipples.

After one glance at her, Aryal’s gaze fastened on Caeravorn. She couldn’t look away. His body was simply fantastic. His powerful shoulders and chest were broader than they seemed normally. His height must fool the eye when he was clothed. He looked stern, almost remote, the smooth proud lines of his face closed to scrutiny.

This was not a lovemaking scene, then.

He twisted and reached for something on a nearby dresser, the pale golden skin of his back rippling with muscles.

Compulsively Aryal followed the curved line of his back to his lean buttocks. Her hands were starting to burn from the pain of holding on to the slippery, ice-covered bars, but the warmth of her grip was melting the ice and she ignored it as best she could.

He turned back to the woman, a short piece of leather in his hand. He held the length to the woman’s mouth. “Bite it.”

Her gaze lifted to his, the woman opened her mouth and accepted the strip of leather. He told her, “Get on the bed. On your knees.”

The woman obeyed. That was when Aryal realized the brunette wore silk-lined wrist cuffs with a short length that ran behind her back, along with black stiletto-heeled pumps. The woman climbed onto the bed, facing away from Caeravorn.

Caeravorn yanked down his silk pants. His large, erect penis jutted out over a smooth, tight sac. Aryal couldn’t look away as he palmed himself. Her breath grew tight and short, and her entire body felt like it was on fire.

Then she looked up at his closed expression. He looked bored, totally alone.

He told the woman, “Bend over.”

The woman did, laying her upper torso on the bed with her knees spread so that her ass pushed up in the air.

Aryal hissed as the pain in her hands grew to be too much. As Caeravorn moved up to position himself behind the brunette, she had to let go finally and let gravity pull her away. As she fell she twisted, wings outspread to buffer her descent. She dug into the air with all of her strength to climb upward into the frigid, cloudy darkness, wild to fly anywhere as long as it was far away.

After Quentin took the woman, he slipped on his silk pants and called a taxi while she cleaned up. Then he paid her and escorted her down the side stairs to the ground floor. It was all perfectly cordial.

That was when she made her mistake. She wheedled.

“We had a great time together, didn’t we, baby?” she said as she sidled closer.

She probably called everybody baby, Quentin thought. Just like that John Cougar Mellencamp song. It was a lot easier to remember than names. He stepped around her and looked out the glass door for any sign of the taxi. The street was empty of traffic.

The woman came at him again and put her hands on his chest. “When can we see each other again, baby? Let’s make it soon. How about the weekend?”

There it was again. Baby. He lifted her hands away. He could have said, I almost fell asleep but then I came, but he managed to hold that one back.

Instead, he told her, “I don’t know why you worked so hard to pretend you climaxed. We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend. We’re never going to see each other again.”

Her lower lip stuck out. Holy gods, he would rather stick his head in the oven than deal with another sex kitten pouter right now. “I thought you liked the special things I could do for you, baby. Don’t you want me to do them for you again?”

Invisible claws ran down a mental chalkboard inside his head. He said, “You didn’t do anything special. You did what you were told.” For God’s sake, he hadn’t even spanked her. Hot damn, there was the taxi, creeping carefully down the ice-covered street. He opened the door and a welcome blast of bitter air slapped him in the face. “ Good-bye. Don’t come back to Elfie’s.”

Finally offense rippled across her face. “I wouldn’t come back here if you paid me to,” she hissed.

Yes, she would.

“Yeah, we’re done with that too.” He had intended to pay for her taxi trip on top of her fee and the generous tip he had already given her, but she irritated him so much, he closed and locked the door firmly as soon as she stepped through it.

“Fuck you, big bad sentinel,” the woman shouted.

He braced one hand on the doorpost and angled his head to look out the door. She walked backward to the taxi, giving him the finger with both hands.

Hadn’t even spanked her. Hell, the handcuffs hadn’t been real. They were sex toys, the kind that broke open if someone tugged hard enough. It had been a vanilla version of BDSM—they hadn’t even needed to set a safe word. He really had almost fallen asleep.

The special things she had done for him.

He hung his head and laughed. It sounded as humorless as he felt.

Those invisible fingers down a chalkboard had left behind a headache, which grew as he climbed the stairs back to his apartment. Elfie’s took the entire ground floor of the building. He used the second story for storage for the bar.

His apartment took up the third floor. It was an open-concept design, with a kitchen, dining area and living room all in one huge space, mellow golden oak floors throughout and filled with the clean, spare lines of midcentury modern furniture. Two large, more traditional rooms were set up as bedrooms, each with their own baths.

He had always planned to create a rooftop garden, but an architect had once told him that the entire roof would need to be reinforced first. The project would involve so much upheaval he hadn’t yet found the time. Now that he had become a sentinel, he doubted he ever would.

He walked into his bedroom. The album had finished playing and the room was silent. He sat on the end of the king-sized bed and put his aching head in his hands.

Oh, baby.

Aryal’s soft, in-your-face words from two months ago swam out of the pain.

Nobody’s perfect. That means you have fucked up somehow, somewhere. That’s what I know. I have all the time in the world to find it, all the time, and do you know what that means? That means I’ve already got you.

Those words had a nasty habit of smacking him around ever since she’d uttered them at the sentinels’ party. He was being haunted by somebody who wasn’t even dead, and he loathed admitting, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, that she was right.

He’d fucked up, all right. He’d fucked up so badly last spring, he had hurt someone he cared about very much. He had nearly gotten Pia killed.

Last May, when Pia had stolen from Dragos and gone on the run, Caeravorn had maneuvered and manipulated behind the scenes, comfortably anchored in his own self-righteous dislike of the arrogant, mighty Lord of the Wyr.

Dragos had broken treaties and entered the Elven demesne in his pursuit of Pia, and using the 800 number that Quentin had given her, Pia had called the Elves for help. Led by Ferion, the man who had since then become the new Elven High Lord and who was related to Quentin by marriage, a group of Elves had confronted Dragos just outside of Charleston. They shot him with a poisoned, magical arrow that had melted into his bloodstream, limiting his Power and his ability to shapeshift. Then they gave him twelve hours to leave their demesne.

The encounter had happened at Quentin’s beach house, so Ferion had called him afterward to let him know what had transpired.

To Quentin, it had seemed like such a simple solution to contact one of Dragos’s most Powerful enemies. Perhaps even elegant. He had offered the information to Urien, the Dark Fae King, in return for Urien’s promise to let Pia go. Urien would go after Dragos—and maybe Urien could kill the Wyr lord, and maybe he couldn’t—but the important thing was, it would give Pia the chance to get away.

In the meantime, Pia had been mating with Dragos. She had gotten pregnant. And by Pia’s own account, Urien hadn’t let her go at all. Instead, his agents had beaten her, forcing her to escape with Dragos until they confronted Urien and his army on a plain in an Other land, where Dragos had killed everybody but Urien and a few of his winged riders. It turned out that the only thing elegant about Quentin’s idea had been in his imagination.

So not only had Quentin nearly gotten Pia killed, but in all likelihood he had almost killed her unborn son. Realizing what he had done—what he had almost caused—had been a watershed moment. It had propelled him on a journey from the man he had been to who he was right now.

Or at least to the man he was trying to become, whoever the hell that was, as he constantly wrestled to tame what lived inside him.

His bedroom was far too hot. It smelled like sex and the woman’s perfume, which he hadn’t enjoyed to begin with and now seemed sickeningly cloying. Why did women have to stink themselves up with cosmetics and perfumes? Couldn’t they appreciate their own faces and bodies the way nature had intended them?

He couldn’t stand it a moment longer. He was going to have to air out the place or sleep in the guest room. He strode over to the window, yanked the curtains wide and opened it as far as the pane would go. Then he leaned both hands on the windowsill and stuck his head in the sharp, chill air.

With his first, deep breath, he smelled the harpy’s scent.

What. The.

Astonishment held him frozen. He bared his teeth, sucked in another deep breath and scented Aryal quite unmistakably.

FUCK.

Rage surged in on a tidal wave. Incredulously, he shouldered further out the window and stuck his head between the gap in the security bars. He looked down, even though he knew what he would see. Then he twisted around and looked up.

There was no ledge below. There was nothing above but the gutter at the edge of the roof, which wouldn’t support the weight of anything larger than a squirrel. For Aryal to leave her scent, she had to have touched something. Blood pounded violently through his body as he studied the outside wall more closely.

The city street was well lit at night. Even so, if he hadn’t been scouring the wall so thoroughly with his inhumanly sharp sight for any kind of anomaly, he would have missed the sets of shadowed holes gouged into the mortar roughly a yard below the windowsill.

He turned his attention to the security bars on the window. They were covered with a uniform coating of ice—all except for two areas on the bars where there wasn’t any ice at all. He put his hands over the areas and gripped the bars. His palms were bigger than the melted spaces, but they were just about the right size for Aryal’s hands.

He shoved hard at the bars, and they held, but then he knew they would. When he’d had them installed, he made sure that they were bolted securely. He lifted one damp hand and sniffed it. It smelled, ever so faintly, of Aryal. When the sun rose in a few hours, it would melt the ice completely and wash away every trace of her.

She had been here, very recently, after the sleet storm that had only tapered off about an hour ago.

Had she watched him having sex with the hooker? While he fucked a woman he didn’t care about and wasn’t interested in, with his eyes closed as his mind wandered and he barely maintained his erection, and he wondered what the hell he was doing with his life?

His chest heaved. He couldn’t take in enough air.

She had used her talons to balance at the window. That meant she had been in her Wyr form. As a human woman, she was a constant shock to the system, tall and lean and strong, and completely, rampantly uncompromising. She carried the kind of energy that all ancient, immortal Wyr carried. It shimmered in the air around her, like a jolt of raw electricity. In her Wyr form, she was a gorgeous nightmare, angular features upswept, accentuated, with massive wings colored from gray to black.

How could he have not noticed her presence?

As he thought of Aryal outside in the dark, watching him with those piercing gray eyes of hers, his cock started to stiffen.

Oh, no. He jerked away from that mental image like a scalded cat. Oh, hell no. The impulse to violence sparked along all of his synapses, until it became a cascade too powerful to ignore.

Almost two years ago, he had been traveling through his life, complacent with his abilities and his activities, content with the success of both his legitimate and illegitimate businesses, when gradually he became aware that he was under investigation. He did a little digging of his own and discovered who was investigating him.

Aryal had a reputation for being a relentless, inventive investigator, but he hadn’t been worried. He knew precisely how he had come to the harpy sentinel’s attention—by word of mouth and association. She wasn’t going to find anything concrete, because he had always covered his tracks too well. He was talented at doing that.

But then last May happened, he almost got his friend killed and had his change of heart, of sorts. He changed direction in his life and went legit.

Of sorts.

He decided he wanted to have a say in what happened in the Wyr demesne, to invest time and energy into the place where he lived. When the opportunity came available to sign up for the Sentinel Games, he went for it.

If he thought Aryal had been relentless before, it was nothing compared to how she dug into his life after that point. Somehow she was always present. She stopped in at Elfie’s a couple of times a week, talked to his employees, issued a warrant for his business books and went over them with a fine-toothed comb, and interviewed his neighbors. He caught hints of her scent several times in the alley behind the bar.

He laughed at her. Ignored her. Pretended to ignore her. Stopped pretending.

Pretended not to lose his temper. Stopped pretending.

Started to push back. Pushed back harder.

Meanwhile, she never, ever stopped.

I have all the time in the world.

All the time.

Had he ever really thought things might change once he became a sentinel? If he had, he couldn’t remember it. She had ground that to dust. Of course she had.

Dragos knew exactly how to best use Aryal’s talents and personality when he put her in charge of investigations. As the two new sentinels, Quentin and Alexander, worked to settle into their positions, there had been some question of movement of duties among the seven, as they all assessed who might be best for what role—all except for Aryal. She was perfect right where she was. She was a harpy, for God’s sake.

They say the skies tore the day the harpies screamed into existence.

This time—THIS TIME—she had gone too goddamn far.

This time he wasn’t going to just throttle her. Swear to gods, this time he was going to kill her.

He showered in painfully hot water and scrubbed all traces of the woman’s scent from his body. Then he yanked on fresh clothes, jeans, boots and a T-shirt. Sentinel clothes, the sturdy kind that had some chance of holding up in a fight and were easy to throw away afterward. Because he’d earned the right to go armed in the Tower now, he strapped on weapons too, a knife in a thigh sheath and a Glock in a shoulder holster.

The sheet of ice on the roads forced him to take the drive to the Tower slowly. The sedate trip did nothing to calm his seething temper, which settled into cold, predatory intent. By the time he strode into the Tower, traffic had begun to pick up as dawn lightened the sky and the city awakened.

A study of affluence in every detail, Cuelebre Tower was eighty stories tall. Nobody in their right mind took the stairs. He wasn’t in his right mind. He didn’t want to have to talk to anybody.

He took the stairs at a steady, relentless pace that did nothing to calm him down either. It did limber up his body, until he felt warm, loose and ready for a confrontation.

Except then he couldn’t find her.

One of the first things he had learned about the Tower was where Aryal slept at night, so he went to her apartment and pounded on her door. Nobody answered, and he could hear no sound of movement from within.

He whirled and stalked to the cafeteria. It had just opened to serve breakfast, and people were beginning to trickle in. No harpy. People took note of his rigid face and swift, angry movements and gave him plenty of room. Next stop on his hunt was the massive gym and training area. He circled through, and even went so far as to check the locker rooms.

Goddammit, no.

He was going to have to pause to think about this. He didn’t want to. His hands remembered how it felt to latch around her neck, and they wanted to do it again. Flexing his long fingers, he exited the gym—

Just as down the hall, the doors to one of the elevators opened, and Aryal and Grym walked out.

The sight of her was the same shock to the system as it always was, a raw live jolt of electricity that juddered over his nerve endings. Fueled by a surge of adrenaline, his mind leaped to a higher, faster level. This must be what it felt like for humans to jack on amphetamines.

He lunged down the hall toward her, noting every detail about her as he gained speed. As usual, she wore fighting leathers and her thick, black shoulder-length hair was tangled. Even though he knew that meant she had recently been airborne, she looked as rumpled as if she had just gotten out of bed. Her normally pale skin was flush all over with a clear, high color.

She looked as if she was glowing from an internal flame. Even though her face was uncharacteristically drawn with tiredness, she was still more alive than anyone he had ever met, ten times more vibrant than any other woman he had ever seen.

She was … glorious.

A stiletto of bitterness lanced him. Gods, if he could ever meet a woman like that whom he didn’t loathe as completely as he loathed her, he might lose this whip of restlessness that drove him. He could live the rest of his life and do nothing, be nothing but completely content. It was hideously unfair that he would look at this harpy and realize that about himself.

She saw him coming. Even though his intent was unmistakable, her face lit up, because she was just bent that way. As she turned toward him, she swept one of her arms backward, hard, and knocked Grym in the chest so that he staggered back into the elevator. Then she strode forward to engage.

She didn’t even pause to say anything or ask Quentin why. They both knew there were so many reasons.

He leaped at her, and she dove low so that he overshot, but he thrust out one hand and grabbed a magnificent handful of that tangled black hair and yanked her with him.

They tumbled together, growling, arms and limbs entwined. He caught her scent, and she smelled like healthy woman, clean cold air and arousal.

So the rumors about her and Grym must be true. He liked Grym and found the thought of their pairing so offensive that his growling deepened and grew edged.

She flipped him onto his back. Heaving hard, he flipped them over again and covered her straining body with his. As he pinned her long, taut torso, their hips came into alignment. There was rough friction at his groin, along with her wild scent.

It was so goddamn primal.

His cock stiffened again. Bloody hell.

Her eyes flashed furiously through her tangled hair. Fire bloomed down the length of his back as she raked him with her talons. Quicker than thought, breathing heavily, he punched her in the face. For one split second he thought she looked surprised and thoughtful. Then she twisted underneath him to knee him in the groin. More fire bloomed in an infernal garden.

He still had one fist clenched in her hair. Snarling, he yanked her head back and struck down, intending to fasten his teeth on her bared throat.

He never connected.

One moment they were locked together in a vicious, intimate embrace. The next moment he was several yards away, sprawled in a tangle against the wall in a complete disconnect with reality. He felt as if he had been kicked by a mountain.

Which in a way, he realized, he had been. His mind caught up with what had happened. Broken ribs protesting, he struggled to roll over onto his hands and knees, and he looked back in the direction of the elevators.

Dragos stood where they had been fighting, the harpy prone at his feet. Grym stood quietly in the open doorway of the elevator that Aryal had knocked him into, hands lax, all of his attention fixed on the Lord of the Wyr.

More details sank in. Dragos was dressed in jeans and a thin silk sweater, and he had one boot planted in the middle of Aryal’s back. He looked utterly furious, his roughhewn expression set in lines of brutality.

He also held his sleeping son cradled against his shoulder. Quentin had thought that baby was small before—just six pounds when he had been born, Pia had told him. Held against the tremendous musculature of his father’s chest, he looked as tiny as a small child’s doll.

Quentin’s mind flatlined.

He had thought he didn’t hold any illusions about Dragos. He knew that the only thing that could possibly take the dragon down was a dedicated army with inspired leadership and experienced magic users. But if he had ever held a secret daydream of someone besting Dragos in his human form in single, unarmed combat, that daydream had just been shattered forever.

Not only had Dragos just taken down two of the best, nastiest Wyr fighters in the world, he had done it by moving faster than Quentin could comprehend.

And he did it all without ever jostling the baby enough to wake him.

Dragos glared around the hall at the spectators who had been drawn by the violence.

“Go away,” he whispered. People vanished. He kicked Aryal over so that she lay on her back, staring up at him. Still speaking so gently that the baby never stirred, he told her, “I have given you more free rein than I have given almost anybody else, and you have just used the last of that up.”

The dragon’s incandescent gold gaze turned to Quentin. “And you haven’t earned any free rein. I am going upstairs to tuck my son into his crib. You will both go to my office right now and wait for me there. You will not speak to anyone else. You will not speak to or fight each other.” He glanced at Grym. “If either one of them disobeys me by so much as uttering a single word, shoot them.”

Grym drew his gun and said, “Yes, my lord.”