She’d thought to wait, suspected they’d free her ankles before they tried to rape her. She’d wondered if she could enthrall the men and then command them with her voice, guessed it was part of a vampire’s arsenal. But the wolf’s solution was simple. Efficient. Brutal.
Adrenaline surged through her. The same wild rush that preceded the change and yet the energy raced to her face, tingling, burning, the wolf prepared to claim only a part of her.
She’d never changed partially, never believed she could or been tempted to try it. But she felt the wolf’s determination. Its resolve. None but its mate would claim the body it lived in.
Dakotah licked her lips, watched as the man’s face went slack. As his tongue duplicated her movement, wetting his own. The stench of his arousal burning her nose. Adding to the pressure, the sense of impending change, the elongation into a snout, a muzzle full of deadly teeth.
The wolf drew itself into a crouch. Its focus entirely on their enemy as his face lowered. As his throat got close enough for an attack. When it sprang, Dakotah ceded control, her face burning first with the fury of the change and then from the hot rush of blood that poured over her.
It was over within seconds. Leaving her ribs and chest and abdomen sore from where his fists and knees had landed. Leaving her coated with blood and covered by death. The body heavy where it lay on top of her.
Leaving her alone. Still bound. But alone. The sight of the attack and the blood ridding the fearful man of his lust and sending him running.
Dakotah wriggled out from underneath the dead man and turned on her side to relieve the pressure on her shoulders. For a brief instant she contemplated changing. But the wolf’s body wasn’t flexible enough to endure the position she was bound in, and the pain would be excruciating unless the duct tape gave with the wolf’s struggles. Instead she wriggled and squirmed, moved along the body next to her and smiled with feral pleasure when she explored his jacket, using her nose and cheek and finding the outline of a knife. Using her teeth to work it upward until it dropped to the blood-soaked ground.
Savage victory filled her at the sight of the black-handled knife. At the sight of one of her knives.
She rolled over, working herself into position. The movements slow and painful, awkward. The effort to grasp the knife, to open it, to cut the tape, excruciating.
But she succeeded.
Dakotah stood and lifted her face to the sky. To the moon. The wolf inside howling. The woman reveling in the moment, in the fierce satisfaction of surviving.
When the wild emotion settled, she turned her attention to the corpse at her feet and went through the dead man’s pockets. Finding her second knife along with her cell phone. The sight of it bringing the question, What now?
The wolf’s answer was simple. Return to their mate.
Dakotah hesitated for only a second before agreeing. Before calling Cable, knowing as she did that it would be Domino who came.
It humbled Domino that she’d called. Sent an uncomfortable, unstable mix of emotions cascading through him. Instinct and alien heritage demanded that he assert his dominance and punish her for leaving the safety of the house when she knew he didn’t want her to go. And yet his heart demanded that he hold back. That he recognize the progress he’d made with her. She didn’t yet need him, not as he needed her, but she’d called Cable anyway, knowing that Cable would turn the information over to him.
He didn’t know what her life had been like before arriving at the carnival, but his grandmother’s words offered a clue. They rang through his mind and made his heart ache.
Her life has been one of famine and drought instead of abundance. Of harsh choices and betrayal.
That Dakotah had sought refuge in the carnival told him much. That she’d survived the last attack as well as this one, by her own courage and intelligence, told him more.
Resolve stiffened his spine. Anticipation stiffened his cock. She would no longer fight her battles alone. She was his. And he would let nothing threaten or harm her.
Dakotah stepped out of the trees when Domino entered the clearing. The wolf whined and quivered inside her, wanting to race to him. To rub against him. To lick at his lips in greeting. The woman stood her ground despite the tightening of her body, the slick swell of her vulva.
Domino’s nostrils flared. His fangs elongated.
She was covered in blood. The clearing reeked of it. And yet it wasn’t The Hunger that compelled him to close the distance between them, it was The Heat.
A hundred hearts could have thundered around them, but it was only hers that could hold his interest. He wanted to drive his fangs into her. To feed, not to sate a hunger of the body, but to sate one of the soul. He wanted to take her to the edge of human death and then fill her with his own blood, his own existence.
He’d never imagined how desperately he could want it, crave it, need it. “Never again, Dakotah,” he growled. “Never again will you be unguarded, unprotected.”
She licked her lips and he leaned in, duplicating her action, tracing the path her tongue had taken. Taking her scent and taste and leaving his own.
Dakotah shivered. The men she’d been forced to service, the ones she’d known even before then, the life she’d led—none of them had prepared her for Domino.
There were parts of her that argued against trusting him, against believing what he offered was real and not an illusion. But the wolf was stronger and the hum of the blood they shared too loud to ignore.
She licked her lips again, tasting him as she’d done on other occasions. Her heart expanding in her chest, the secret places inside spilling out, flooding her with a happiness she couldn’t deal with.
She stepped back, put some distance between them. Buried her hands in her pockets and took comfort in the cool feel of the knives.
His nostrils flared slightly, as though he could smell the steel, as if her retreat bothered him.
She tensed and met his eyes, knowing what she was risking and yet offering a challenge all the same. He surprised her by smiling. A flash of lethal fangs. “Do you think I want a mate with no mind of her own? No courage of her own?”
Dakotah rubbed her thumb over the handle of one blade, remembering how she’d woken up in the clearing alone after they’d run together as wolves. “Did you want a mate at all?”
“No. But now that I have one, I find that I want to keep her.” He took a step forward, his eyes daring her to retreat as he once again closed the distance between the two of them. “Now that I have one, I find I’m consumed with thoughts of her, with the need to know she’s safe.” His voice was low and husky, seductive. “I crave her in ways I never imagined possible.” His eyes flashed with amusement. “She’s The Empress to my Emperor. My World if the tarot cards are to be believed.”
Dakotah laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “You really did let Helki read for you.”
“I came back when I learned you were being hunted by the Believers and found you’d left the carnival. She’s a stubborn old woman. She wouldn’t tell me where you’d gone until I submitted to a reading.”
“You could have hypnotized her.”
“I could have. But to do so in that circumstance would have been a breach of trust and a great show of disrespect.” He leaned down, brushed a feather-soft kiss across Dakotah’s lips. “Another time, in a different situation, I wouldn’t have hesitated despite my ties to her. My…nature demands certain things of me.”
“So there are no promises?”
“What promises would you have?”
Dakotah turned away from him. Feeling lost. Confused.
Her thoughts went to those moments when she’d been braced against the chair. When she’d watched Fane and Cable with Kiziah, when she’d seen pleasure that was an expression of love, passion that sprung from the heart. When she’d hungered like a beggar at the edge of a feast. Felt starved as though she’d lived through a lifetime of famine.