Two hours earlier
I gripped Xerxes’ leash tight as the music pulsed and flashing red lights cast ominous shadows across flailing bodies.
The shifters thought they were dangerous and exciting, with their ghastly leather clothes and whips.
Just another realm obsessed with sex.
But I’d already played this game in the fae realm.
It was nothing new.
Shifters pawed at us, mindless in their euphoria. The mob mentality of sex, a dark drug, as nulls and betas desperately tried to lose themselves in something more exhilarating than the mundane reality they existed in.
Tried to forget they were nothing more than sheep.
In a realm that didn’t respect them.
If I were alone, maybe I would have lit a cigarette and touched them back.
Lost myself in the mind-numbing haze of sex and violence that was a little too easy to pretend to enjoy.
But I wasn’t alone.
The red shadows and desperate faces took on a sinister light as I tugged Xerxes forward, cognizant with every step of the small woman in a sheer white dress that trailed behind us.
From the set of Xerxes’s jaws, the way he looked over his shoulder constantly, he felt the same way I did.
She shouldn’t be here.
I watched her in my peripheral vision.
Sadie’s ruby eyes were wide, her lush lips parted on a silent gasp as she took in the frenzied people performing all manners of sex acts across the maze of stairs. She curled in on herself, shoulders hunched as hands grabbed and toys slapped against flesh.
But she forged forward, not looking back or missing a step as we pushed our way through.
My kitten had no idea.
She didn’t see the man that grabbed at the back of her dress.
Didn’t see Ascher gouge out the offender’s eye with his fingernails in an efficient maneuver that left the man with a gaping cavity on his face.
Someone grabbed a strand of her snow-white hair with his fingers, and Jax quickly broke his arm in three different places before Sadie could even feel the tug.
Ascher’s and Jax’s eyes glowed brightly, bodies strumming with tension.
You could see in the way the bodies shifted that people were drawn to Sadie’s stunning golden skin and shockingly unique features, but it was the edge of violence that radiated off her that made them claw at her desperately.
An ignorant fool might have said she was different and others recognized it.
But the truth was more complicated.
Sadie was out-of-place while simultaneously right at home in the dark club. If she were given enough time, she’d become the wickedest of them all.
I led us further into the frenzy.
The shifters crawled on hands and knees as we walked past, desperate to touch Sadie and to taste Xerxes.
An omega and a female alpha: two rare jewels in a cruel realm.
They were mine.
The golden string in my chest, the bond that connected me to my packmates, strummed with warning as Xerxes noticed an alpha charging behind Jax and Ascher, his eyes wide as he stared at Sadie.
The alpha’s nostrils flared as he followed.
He’d smelled cranberry wine.
The string between us panged with warning as he lunged forward with a sharp knife, intent on fighting us for her. He could smell that she wasn’t our packmate, and he thought she was up for grabs.
His mistake.
I yanked Xerxes’s leash, giving my kitten a show. Distracting her.
Sadie might fight like a warrior and bathe in the blood of her enemies, but there was something so innocent about her violence.
The void beckoned me closer, and I schooled my expression at the terror that always gripped me when I thought of my kitten.
It was why I hadn’t fucked her yet, the reason I held myself back from ravaging her.
The world was already too cruel, and I refused to be the one to break her.
Knife in his hand, the alpha made his fatal mistake as he tried to swipe at Ascher and grab Sadie from our protection.
Shadows danced.
I tugged Xerxes’s handsome face closer and dragged my tongue across it, making sure Sadie’s attention stayed fully on us.
Jax shifted to shield the violence happening behind her.
Ascher dislocated the alpha’s shoulder and took his knife. In a flash of steel, he slit the man’s throat, then kicked the body off the stairs.
Leather bodies gyrated and fucked, desensitized to violence.
It all happened in a split second.
The gold thread that had been screaming with tension between us instantly quieted with relief.
We eliminated the threat.
I pulled Xerxes’s leash forward, both of us relieved that Sadie hadn’t seen her attacker, as I led us further up the stairs into the masses.
The gold platform spun slowly high above, a beacon and a curse, taunting me with what we were here to do.
With each step toward it, the void screamed at me, bellowed at me to stop.
We couldn’t do this to Sadie.
I sent images of love and support to my shadow snake that lived on her flesh—the favorite part of myself.
In my peripheral vision, the corners of Kitten’s lips turned upward, and she sent me love back. My knees wobbled because she knew what she was doing. Knew that I was there and who she was technically talking to.
To me, no woman had ever been so perfect, so sweet, and so fucking vicious.
I straightened my shoulders and led us onward.
We would pass this third trial because my kitten’s life depended on it.
Failure wasn’t an option.
The void screamed.
Gold thread no longer offered the warmth and support they usually did; we all were out of our minds with stress over what we were having to do.
Fuck.
I almost stopped and demanded we go back, tell Sadie we weren’t fucking doing this.
That we’d find another way.
We hadn’t fucked her yet because we were afraid the intensity would scare her away. Terrified of hurting her, of dimming the spark in her red eyes.
And now we were going to do just that, in the worst way possible.
In public.
In front of thousands of depraved shifters.
I yanked harder on Xerxes’s leash and kicked at shifters who got in my way.
Ahead, two alphas stood in the melee, staring at Sadie, waiting for her.
The bond screamed with warning as we recognized the two alphas who had hit on her after they’d fought her in the second trial.
I licked my lips with anticipation.
Oh, how I longed to hurt them for daring to smile at her after they’d marred her flesh.
As a child, I’d been horrified by my snake’s bloodlust, by the wild temperament I’d housed inside myself. I didn’t want to be a monster.
But you didn’t get to be what you wanted to be in life.
You got to be what you were.
After years of torture, I’d stopped trying to pretend I was anything other than fucked up. A dark void of violence that yearned to exact retribution.
That loved to hurt others.
Except for the select few that were mine. Those I would protect until my dying breath.
It was the only code I lived by.
Sadie pushed forward. Xerxes and I hadn’t been expecting it, so we didn’t stop her when she walked up to the alphas.
She tilted her head back and curled her white hair around her finger coyly.
I read her lips. She was asking about how to get into the private club. Her stature wasn’t her normal haughty stance. She was acting, playing the part like I was.
The gold string burned.
Erections strained the leather pants of the two alphas who stared at her with undisguised longing, sniffing her skin and shuddering when she wasn’t looking at them.
My hands shook with the need to maim.
To kill.
A low hiss rattled from my chest. The sound grew stronger the closer she stood, the longer she talked to them.
My vision flickered, and the world plunged into darkness and glowing orange heat signatures.
The alphas raised their eyebrows at her expectantly.
Kitten’s shoulders slumped slightly, and she rose on her tiptoes, leaning away from their hands as she aimed for their cheeks.
Gold thread exploded, and the void snapped.
With impossible speed, I flung myself forward and tangled my fist in her silky locks.
I dragged her head back before cranberry lips could touch alpha skin and kissed her as hard as I could.
Before I could do something I regretted—like gut the men with my bare hands and fuck Sadie atop their corpses to stake my claim—I flung her back into Jax’s and Ascher’s hands.
The gold thread calmed but didn’t stop burning.
We were all pissed.
I taunted the fuckers who dared get too close to her, mollified by the way Jax and Ascher kissed her all over and covered her with our scent.
If she were our packmate, she would reek of us and we wouldn’t need to threaten others.
But she wasn’t, and it was driving us all mad.
The void still screamed at me.
My leathers were too tight as blood rushed to my dick, the urge to claim Sadie a constant ache I’d come to live with.
Yanking Xerxes, I marched forward to the platform.
Visions of Kitten’s lips almost touching the cheeks of the other men replayed in my head like a nightmare.
The void was all I knew.
Instead of running from it, I fell into it. Allowed it to help gird me for what was inevitable. What we were all going to do.
What happened next was a hazy blur.
I snapped a beta’s femur when he got in my way.
I told the announcer who we were, what we were, and watched the man’s eyes light up with excitement at a show.
Kitten glared at me, legs wide on a spinning platform, as her sheer dress did nothing to conceal her cranberry-red nipples and sweet little cunt.
Lights flickered above her, making her gold skin glow like the little goddess she was.
“You think you can kiss other men, Kitten?” I taunted her, reminding her of what had plunged me into the void.
Reminding her of the hard truth she was too afraid to accept.
She was mine.
Kitten rolled her eyes.
My dick became painfully hard at her defiance. She was such a little brat. The predator inside me always reared up with excitement when she gave me sass.
The men told her the error of her ways, all of us enjoying the way she spat fire and was completely unrepentant.
Kitten didn’t kowtow for any man.
I taunted her, loving the way sparks leaped in her eyes.
Xerxes lay down on the spinning platform.
I cracked the whip.
Slammed the leather across his flesh, watching with satisfaction as the crowd roared and the omega’s eyes glazed with pleasure. The whole time, watching Sadie’s face. Loving the way she gnawed on her lower lip and pressed her thighs together.
The crowd screamed as thousands stared at my kitten’s perfect little body.
Her unique golden skin glowed like a beacon.
It was a nightmare.
She was mine, yet I pulled out Xerxes’s cock and nodded to the men to bring her over like we’d planned.
I cracked the whip and roared, but sent images of love and warmth to my snake on her skin.
Begged her to know what she meant to me, that this wasn’t at all how it seemed. Begged her to see the truth.
I touched her. Pleasured her.
Drowned in sweet cranberry wine as I screamed to the crowd and cracked the whip, still loath to do this to my kitten in front of all these people.
We’d waited so long to take her, wanting to make it special.
Do right by her.
This wasn’t right.
Her eyes gleamed with something, and the void bellowed at me to stop. That she was being pushed too far, that she was breaking before my eyes.
But it wasn’t tears.
Suddenly, Sadie spat on me.
Images of love and support flooded through my shadow snake.
She winked, “Do it. You won’t.” She mouthed as her lips curled in a devious smile, and her saliva dripped down my face.
Relief like nothing I’d ever felt flooded through me and continued down the golden string. Fucking sun god, she was so perfect. So fucking pure. So fucking rabid.
It wasn’t a nightmare.
This was a dream.
