“Are you certain you want to do this?”
The alley behind the Blood Rose felt different this time. Cleaner and less empty. Like the moon overhead was watching over them, casting her pale glow onto the darkened streets of downtown Billings and making a cityscape with her beautiful gaze. The sounds of a nearby western bar, a tourist trap that sat along the main drag and always thumped with the latest western music, played in the distance. Billings wasn’t Nashville, but sometimes it tried to be if travelers threw enough money at it. Trixie lifted her head a little, basking in the moonlight’s glow like she was the shifter instead of the massive alpha male beside her.
But witches had their own relationship with the full moon and her magic. She let herself enjoy it for a minute, let it charge her up for the night’s events to come.
“Like I said before, it’s my fight, too,” she answered Malcolm finally. Lowering her head, she reached out and gripped his hand with a reassuring squeeze. “I was a part of this the moment he drew Dani into it.”
Malcolm nodded like he understood. He knew her secret now. Not all her secrets—there were too many for that—but one of them, the most important. Callous and uncaring as she might seem, she’d do anything—even risk her own life—to protect those she loved.
Including him.
He simply didn’t know that detail yet.
She’d thought she could sell him out to Stan no problem, to protect Jackie and his family—and, more importantly, herself—but she couldn’t do it. Not after all the intimate moments they’d shared, after she’d let him see her without her makeup. That’d changed things.
As soon as he’d ducked into that private meeting with the pack’s elite warriors and the Execution Underground, she’d picked up her phone, called Jackie, and warned him to get the hell out of Dodge. Boss’s binding spell hadn’t extended to him technically, so warning him hadn’t been an issue. That little clause had only applied to the Grey Wolves and their pack. She hadn’t done that sooner because she hadn’t wanted to upend her friend’s life that way and also because of the risk it posed for her. But she’d bear any risk if it kept Malcolm out of harm’s way.
Surprisingly, Jackie hadn’t simply understood… Hell, he’d been grateful.
She supposed after all was said and done, she had secured his family’s future by fixing the fight in his favor, and it wasn’t the first time Jackie’d had something to run from. At least this time, she’d given him the monetary means to do it, and comfortably. Apparently, it played into his plans to return back home to South Korea, the country of his birth. The next step for her would be telling Stan. When her time was up, she’d deliver the news. It would be satisfying to tell him to go fuck himself, even if it’d get her killed in the end. Hell, maybe she’d manage to escape and stay on the run at least for a while.
She was good at being slippery.
Not that it’d change things with Malcolm.
If he ever found out what she’d intended, even if she hadn’t gone through with it, he’d never forgive her. No lying: that’d been his one rule, and she’d broken it from the get-go. With a wolf like him, there was no coming back from that.
It made her heart ache.
And wasn’t that a new feeling? She hadn’t felt that way about anyone in a long time, too long. Seven years, thirteen hours, and twenty-eight minutes to be exact. She knew the exact time and day she’d locked up her heart, because she’d been counting the minutes until she was free again ever since. Until her binding agreement with Boss became a part of her past instead of her present. It was a shame she likely wouldn’t get to experience true freedom again.
Trixie cleared her throat. “The pack will offer Dani protection? Help her get away from here?” She’d had terms of her own in order to help them. She would have done it either way, but that didn’t stop a girl from negotiating. She knew a thing or two about verbal contracts.
Magical or otherwise.
“Maverick gave you his word.” There was an unusual hint of admiration in Malcolm’s tone. “The Grey Wolf packmaster is a lot of things, but he’ll keep his word.”
Unlike her.
Trixie tried not to let that thought show on her face.
She schooled her features, adjusting the sticky silicon pads that held the girls in place—her dress required she go braless—before nodding her approval. “And this time you won’t ice me out?” she asked.
“I didn’t trust you before.” The truth in that hurt, cutting through her. “Not fully,” Malcolm admitted. “But I should have.” He looked regretful, apologetic even. It was a new look for him. One that spoke of how their dynamic had changed, deepened. They’d shown each other parts of themselves no one else had seen, both physical and emotional. That meant something.
“I trust you now, Trixie,” he whispered.
She felt the honesty in that, the sweet tang of truth on his lips as she leaned in and kissed him, but with the knowledge of what lay ahead of her, it felt bittersweet, not triumphant as it should be. Lord, she didn’t want to break his heart, but there was no way around it now.
“Good,” she said quickly, pulling back from their kiss. She was ready to move forward. No sense in crying over spilled milk tonight. She’d never been one to wallow. “On my cue then.”
The Blood Rose was empty when she stepped inside. The business card Corbin had slipped her had proved more than useful, and when she stepped in, the smooth-talking vampire anticipated her. He waited in the bar’s back wings. Over the phone, he hadn’t given the reason he was willing to clear his club for her and Cillian’s meeting, nor why he’d volunteered his personal security detail to Cillian and had been willing to send them away at her and the Grey Wolves’ request, selling out the vampire master to the first and highest bidder.
He’d simply said he’d had “enough of the old bastard” ruling Billings and that he was “fond” of Dani. Whatever the hell that meant. It was a dangerous power play.
But she and the Grey Wolves had seized upon it.
The owner of the Blood Rose was a shark, circling for the earliest sniff of blood in the water. His bar was aptly named. Corbin might have looked pretty, but he’d sink his fangs into any enemy as soon as look at them, fellow bloodsucker or otherwise. But thankfully, he had no problem sitting back and allowing Malcolm to make the kill.
As long as it ended with Cillian dead.
“He’s waiting for you,” Corbin said smoothly. His crimson eyes flashed through the dark, a stark contrast to his handsome features. “Make him bleed, little witch,” he whispered affectionately, a little too gleeful at the idea of someone being murdered in his bar for Trixie’s taste, before he disappeared into the club’s kitchens.
Once again, she was left alone. Trixie cursed the damned bourgeois carpeting, all plush and red as she made her debut. Her heels on the Coyote’s hardwood always made for a far more dramatic entrance. Not that her role was all that important. She was simply a decoy. A seductive distraction while the Grey Wolves circled and closed in for the kill like the wolves they were.
She only had to keep Cillian talking.
He was in the same booth where she’d left him and Dani last time. Only this time around, there was no food and Dani was already passed out on the carpeted floor beside him. She looked thinner, gaunter than she’d been even days before, and the usual blushing of pink had drained from her hollowed cheeks, making her look almost as beautifully corpse-like as Cillian.
There was blood on her lips from where he’d fed her, whether his own blood or some supe juice, Trixie couldn’t be certain. A familiar bite mark marred the tender flesh of Dani’s neck. Fresh and swollen. The red looked angry against the pale tones of her skin. A trickle of Dani’s blood had seeped from it, running down her chest like a solitary tear drop.
Normally, the healed-over scabs she sported on her neck at the bar didn’t bother Trixie. In her mind, Dani was a big girl who knew how to make her own choices. It was Dani’s decision on whether she wanted to date a vamp, a risk for any human, but Trixie knew Dani was in over her head with Cillian, stuck in a power dynamic no human could fairly navigate. That power gap was only widened by the way Cillian was glamouring her, and he’d clearly fed Dani enough of whatever he’d been using to get her high so that she was likely addicted to it now. She couldn’t stop even if she wanted to.
She needed someone to save her. A friend who cared enough to pull her out, since she was past the point of being able to help herself.
Cillian glanced at his watch. For him, the hands probably seemed to move at a nonstop pace, ticking by as fast as a vampire could blink. Not that they often did. Time was a frail concept to an immortal as old as Cillian. The passage of years made little difference.
“Fashionably late,” he said with a small grin of approval. His wasn’t a British accent but something far older. Trixie had never been much when it came to school and history. But she knew the ways of men, vampire or otherwise.
“I like to keep an element of mystery.” She smiled coyly.
She didn’t slide into the booth across from him right away, instead letting him take in the full sight of her and admire her curves. The dress she wore was a barely there contraption. Little more than two thin pieces of fabric stitched together. The silk left her skin open to the cold winter air. Difficult to move in or feel comfortable, but it showed every part of her. The curve of her back above the Georgia peach of her ass, a plunging neckline that drove down almost to her navel, and the open swatch of her breasts that highlighted her long, elegant neck. The naked, virgin skin there was the only part Cillian really cared about.
Malcolm had taken one look at her and nearly come out of his skin, dragging her back into the bunkhouse until she had to put the thing back on again.
She smiled to herself, thinking of him and their old game. She’d used her femininity, her sexuality as a weapon to conquer more than one powerful man. If that made her a whore or easy, so be it. She didn’t need society’s approval to own her own power. If you asked her, it was men’s fault for being so easily led about by their dicks.
They made it too damn easy.
All of them but Malcolm. Nothing had been easy about him.
Cillian’s gaze raked over her as he took in his fill. To his credit, he didn’t hide that he was objectifying her. He was open about it. She appreciated honesty in all its forms, even when the truth made her skin crawl. But she’d been admired by villains before.
Their tips were never great.
“Please, sit,” Cillian said, gesturing to the seat across him, clearly having gotten his fill.
For now.
Trixie slipped into the booth across from him, fighting hard not to let her eyes fall toward Dani again, to give herself away or, worse, lunge toward her friend and check to see that she was still breathing. Overdosing on vamp blood caused a person to become a vampire only if they died and then were buried for several days, a slow and arduous process, but when heroin killed a person, they didn’t come back. Ever.
Even if it was mixed into supe juice.
She was still cursing herself for not noticing Stan’s mention of it the night of the bar brawl at the Coyote. It would have saved them all a lot of trouble and prevented her from having to slice open her hand. Belle, the pack’s physician, had ensured she was healing properly. Malcolm had taken good care of her.
Trixie settled into the booth like she had all the time in the world. “I’m sure you’re wondering why I asked you to meet me alone here.”
Cillian tilted his head a little, but his face remained expressionless. A wall of beautiful ice or marble. Stunning to look at, but devoid of feeling. Frozen. “On the contrary, I’m not surprised. Your Boss is rather fond of having you do his dirty work for him, so I hear.”
Boss as in the proper noun with a capital B. Trixie fought not to look as surprised as she felt. Not that Cillian knew she worked for the warlock, but from the way Cillian spoke of him, the two men were acquainted, on a first-name basis. She’d never known Boss to meddle in the affairs of vampires. He’d said the undead made him uneasy. Ask anyone down in the swamps of New Orleans. Warlocks and vamps didn’t mix. Even if the French Quarter was full of them.
“You seem surprised by my mention of him.”
“Not at all,” Trixie lied. A waiter appeared with a glass of merlot for her and she latched onto it immediately, drawing a small, tentative sip. “Everyone knows I work at the Coyote.”
“Not everyone knows you’re bound there against your will.” Cillian said it as if it were an offhand comment, not her darkest kept secret. “Another two years by my estimate, or so I hear.” Down to the exact time.
Now he definitely had her attention.
No one knew about her and Boss’s binding contract. Not even Malcolm. She didn’t make a habit of telling people. She wasn’t an open book about her past or the inevitable details of exactly how she’d ended up both in Boss’s servitude and on his payroll. That was between her, the warlock, and the devil who’d sanctioned the deal as far as she was concerned.
The man upstairs was nowhere to be found for a witch who made dirty deals at the crossroads like she had. Powerful women, witches, were always within the purview of the guy belowstairs, or so the tales went. No one really knew their origin story. Not even the Grey Wolves.
Those of their kind were all so old they could only speculate.
All she knew was she’d been born with her abilities, hadn’t asked for them.
“That’s some dirt you’ve dug up on me there. I’m going to guess Boss himself told you.”
The part she couldn’t wrap her head around was why. Boss used her abilities to his advantage. Most knew she was a witch, but not a veritas witch. Boss kept that part of her to himself typically. For his own benefit.
So why had he spilled her backstory to Cillian? It didn’t make sense.
She took another sip of her drink.
What have you gotten yourself into, old man?
Boss might be ancient, but in the supernatural world, she knew better than to equate age with devaluation. For a vamp, warlock, or witch, age was a sign of power. A life spent surviving. Like shifters, their bodies didn’t age as fast as their minds did. She was a babe compared to Boss and Cillian, only as old as she looked, which wasn’t much.
Cillian didn’t affirm or deny her assumption. Instead he said, “You’re here because you’re hoping for a way out of it.”
That wasn’t at all why she was here, but she’d let him keep talking. Both out of curiosity for how deep Boss’s involvement in this went and also to play her role with the Grey Wolves. She knew better than to think Cillian’s offer, whatever it was, would be in any way appealing to her. She wasn’t about to trade her remaining time from one powerful man to another. Even on his worst days, Boss was still good to her, looking out for her in his own way. He’d saved her after all from her own foolish mistakes.
Hadn’t he?
Not this time, something inside her whispered.
But definitely before.
Naturally, she’d known since he was dealing with Stan, he’d planned to be involved with Triple S and the vamps in some way, but she’d figured he was only a third party—meant to broker the deal and leave like usual. But something about the way Cillian referred to Boss made her think that she’d been wrong.
It made her question exactly how deep Boss’s involvement went.
“I won’t say the warlock’s magic will be easy to get around, but there are ways. If you know the right people, have enough money to pay.”
She’d known that, of course. But she paid her debts honestly. “I don’t have any money.”
“Of course.” Cillian smiled, flashing fang.
Which meant he expected to pay and then she’d pay him with…other means. Favors. Sexual in nature, and in her own blood from the way he was looking at her. Fucking and feeding: vampires often paired the two activities. A witch’s blood was intoxicating to vamps, lending them the temporarily thrill of magic coursing through their undead bodies. Her one-time vamp boy toy had once told her that it made him feel alive again.
It hadn’t made her eager for a repeat.
That was a kind of flirting with danger even she wasn’t into. She prided herself on being up for almost anything once, but she didn’t have a death wish. All it would take was one vamp who was a little too hungry, who lost control, got a bit too thirsty for her, and she’d be a goner. No way in hell.
She’d broken it off with him shortly after that. Boss had ordered Frank, the Coyote’s bouncer, to throw him out on his undead ass when he’d shown up at the bar a time or two after, trying to win her back. It’d spooked her for a time, but Boss was good about keeping her old boyfriends at bay, even if that didn’t always stop the patrons from getting too handsy on Friday and Saturday nights. She’d add another five years or more to her contract with the old warlock before she took her chances with Cillian or any bloodsucker like him.
Shifters were more her thing. A certain growly Grey Wolf executioner in particular.
Cillian was still talking, yammering away without even realizing she wasn’t listening. Undead or not, men like him loved to hear themselves talk. Finally, he ended with, “But I think something can be arranged between you and me.”
He reached across the table, extending a beckoning hand toward her. Not a handshake, but the kind of open-palmed gesture extended to a lover who was about to swept onto the dance floor. She was one hell of a dancer, but not with him.
It took everything in her to reach out and place her cold hand in his, but as his grip tightened around her, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled and she knew without a doubt nothing in her life ever went this easily.
Cillian’s fingers tightened around her, hard enough she had to grit her teeth not to cry out. That’d only make Malcolm go wild, get sloppy, and she was no damsel in distress.
“Silly little witch,” he said. When Corbin said it, it was affectionate, but how it slipped from Cillian’s lips was demeaning, meant to make her feel small, insignificant. “I knew from the moment you waltzed in here you were working with those mutts. You reek of them.”
His grip on her hand tightened. Any more, and the bones there would crush.
Trixie reached down inside herself, summoning her magic forth until she was practically humming with it. Even the strands of her hair stood on end. “Corbin sent your security detail away. It’s all you now. Alone. None of your coven to back you up. Those mutts will end you. Easily.”
Cillian laughed with genuine amusement. “You think I didn’t count on that glorified bartender stabbing me in the back the first chance he got? Corbin may be a vampire but he’s no better than the beasts you bring into your bed.”
Which meant the pack was in for more of a fight tonight than they’d bargained for. She’d need to conserve herself to lend an extra hand. But she had more than enough magic to fuck over Cillian.
“You can tell a lot about a man by how he treats the waitstaff.” She gripped Cillian’s palm back, cupping her free hand over it. Her glass of merlot spilled across the white tablecloth. “And about how little he considers the threat of an angry witch.”
Cillian glanced down at their locked hands, at the flesh-filled fingers that’d transformed into rotted bone. He wrenched back in alarm, staring down at the rapidly disintegrating flesh there.
“I’m the veritas witch,” she hissed. “And the truth of it, Cillian, is that you’re already dead.” She smiled, all ruby-red lips. “Bless your heart, my only job is to show you what’s behind the curtain.”
Trixie opened both her palms, allowing the thrum of her magic to course through her and into Cillian. He stumbled back out of the booth, trying to place distance between him and her, but it was no use. As he did, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, at the decrepit, ghostly face that stared back, all the illusion that he was still living stripped away. Vampires were nothing more than glamour and rotted bone, held together by the force of human lifeblood.
She couldn’t kill Cillian with the truth, but she could scare him. Give him pause.
And it was enough.
The doors to the main room finally flew open, Malcolm and the others obviously having been delayed by Cillian’s anticipation of their arrival. Several of them were naked from having shifted, their clothes lost in the melee, Malcolm included, and they were all already covered in blood, snarling like the wild beasts Cillian had accused them of being.
Trixie loved it.
It all happened so fast. The room exploded in a burst of movement. The Grey Wolf elite warriors singled out Cillian in a matter of seconds. The pack worked as a unit, moving as one so thoroughly that teamwork didn’t seem to be an accurate description.
They were one. All of them, and for a moment, Trixie’s magic slipped due to her awe of it. A second round of Cillian’s men stormed in behind them, prepared to tear into her wolves. She couldn’t allow it. She dug down deep inside herself, all the way from her head to her toes. Trixie released her focus on Cillian, sending out a single pulse of magic, every bit she possessed. It emanated from her like an air wave reverberating through the room, stunning every vamp in her immediate radius. Not that the pack needed it.
Wes and Colt held Cillian down.
Rogue headed them off, throwing a stake into another outstretched hand.
Maverick and Blaze crouched in wait, prepared to fight off the other shifters with fang and claw, while Sierra and Dakota rushed to Trixie’s side, protecting her with bared teeth.
But it was Malcolm, blood-soaked and snarling like a feral beast, who ruthlessly drove the stake Rogue threw him into Cillian’s heart, claiming his revenge.
The ancient vampire exploded in a disgusting spray of blood and guts that caused bile to burn at the back of Trixie’s throat.
Oversize mosquito indeed.
The moments that followed were…strange. A chorus of all of them panting, most of the room’s habitants soaked and bloody, and her in the soiled dress Mae had loaned her that she thought might have been Gucci. Trixie stumbled out of the booth.
Malcolm’s wolf eyes turned toward her, assessing her for any wounds.
She cackled, far more stereotypically Halloween witch than she’d usually allowed herself to be, but the last of her magic was still seeping from her pores, and she was drunk with it. She gestured to the room around them, chuckling like a madwoman. The club was littered with stunned vampire bodies.
A satisfied smile curled her lips, even as she felt her legs wobble beneath her. “Who were you calling a human again?” she snarked, and then she was falling.
As Trixie mentally braced for the impact, she was only vaguely aware that Malcolm had already caught her.