A few minutes earlier…
Still in the alpha quarters, I closed my eyes and threw my head back, desperately trying to forget the feel of the two betas touching me.
For some reason, the memory of the slut gagging on my dick and the finger in my ass disgusted me.
I should have just come in her mouth and been done with it. It should have been a fucking easy task.
It hadn’t.
The fire crackled loudly, and the voices yelled something at me. As usual, it was in a language I couldn’t understand, so I tried to ignore it, but the tone was atypically angry.
It was like the fire was mad at me. I thanked the sun god that Jax had interrupted when he did. I’d needed to get away from the sluts before I hurt them.
Hurting sluts was not something I did. That was my father.
For some reason, I was losing my mind.
Not only was the fire fucking distracting, but the delicate alpha scent of sweet cranberries wafted through the air.
My mouth watered.
The princess’s scent lingered in the room and had made me irrationally mad at the betas beneath me.
It wasn’t their fault that I was obsessed with the little princess. However, it was their fault that they’d been touching me when I belonged to her.
What the actual fuck? I fought the urge to snarl in frustration as I raked my hands over my face. I didn’t belong to the princess. I’d never even fucking kissed her.
So why were her lush lips and long white hair all I could focus on?
The beta sluts had whined and moaned like they’d been putting on a performance, and it had made me ill.
The voices in the flames screamed at me in frustration.
Like the fire, my beast screamed within me. The scent of cranberries grew stronger until all I wanted to do was hunt down the sluts and strangle them because they’d touched me and I wasn’t fucking theirs to touch.
The room spun around me as the fire shrieked.
The flames were pissed as fuck, and I didn’t know why. They screamed louder than ever before, and my ears burned.
As the world spun around me, for a moment, I allowed myself to pretend the princess was in the room.
That it had been her sucking my dick and on her knees before me. Her silky white hair fisted in my tattooed hands as she looked up at me with her startling ruby eyes.
The depraved thoughts that flitted through my mind made me simultaneously turned on and disgusted with myself.
If the princess knew the depth of depravity I felt toward her, she would run screaming into the cold mountains.
Abruptly, the voices in the flames changed.
The language was still undecipherable, but they were softer, like they were imploring me to do something.
“I don’t fucking know what you’re saying or why you’re yelling at me.”
The flames continued to whisper. I’d had enough. I slammed the door shut as I left the room, cutting off the maddening scent of sweet cranberries.
I stalked through the compound and didn’t bother to get food in the alpha dining hall. I just threw myself into a chair beside Jax and Cobra and slammed my head down against the table.
The other alphas raised their eyebrows, but kept eating their steaks. They were used to my meltdowns and finding me with sluts.
For a second, a potent scent of cranberries reached my nose, and my heart jumped with excitement.
The princess was in the room.
I looked up and whipped my head around, trying to find her, then groaned with frustration when I saw Cobra had fucking cranberry sauce on his plate.
This had to be an all-time low. I’d just gotten aroused over a fucking side dish.
I had lost my mind.
“Can you not eat fucking cranberry sauce?” I snapped at Cobra irrationally as I dragged my hands over my face in frustration.
Because Cobra was a right bastard, he lifted a spoonful of cranberries into his mouth and licked the spoon wantonly. The smirk on his face told me he knew exactly what he was doing.
“Mature.” I tried counting to ten in my head.
Miss Mabel, the cook at my father’s palace, had helped me learn techniques to control my anger. Counting had always been her go-to advice. She was more of a mother to me than my own had ever been.
Miss Mabel was caring and nurturing, while my mother was a slut that wanted to appear sexually available to the syndicate members, and a kid had gotten in the way of it.
“Certain alpha on your mind?” Cobra licked his lips dramatically and smeared the sauce across them.
My blue balls must have really been getting to me, because I found myself fixating on the way his pink tongue ran along his plush red lips.
I usually wasn’t into men. Usually being the key word.
Adjusting myself in my pants, I didn’t even try to hide my lust.
Images of Jax pinning Cobra against the wall and ramming into him had my dick throbbing.
Truthfully, Cobra was the handsomest bastard I had ever seen in my life.
He was physically perfect, like a marble sculpture covered in diamonds and emeralds. There was also something about the darkness that swirled in his green eyes that drove a person crazy, and he knew it.
“Really? You’re both gonna sit here and fantasize about her after we literally just killed her in the gym this morning? Am I the only one concerned about her performance?” Jax glared at both of us.
The big man was usually easygoing and controlled, but lately he seemed stressed as hell. Not to mention the fact that he had started growling like a wild bear. He had never done that before the princess arrived.
Fucking concerning.
“She was pathetic.” Cobra bit into his steak like he didn’t give a single fuck about the princess. I would have believed him if I hadn’t lived with him for the last year.
Cobra’s back was ramrod straight, and his upper lip curled like he was thinking about strangling the princess for being inept at running. Never mind the fact that he had fucking cuddled her all night like Prince Charming.
He was as obsessed as the rest of us.
“She’s going to get herself killed if she can’t run fifteen miles without keeling over like she’s dying,” I said with disgust. “Also, why the fuck did she wear that ridiculous sweatshirt?”
“She’s a prude.” Cobra shrugged like he didn’t care, but stabbed his fork into his meat so hard that one of the tongs broke off.
“And she lied to the media about how she injured her voice,” Jax said with a heavy sigh.
“Why the fuck is it so….?” I struggled for the correct word.
“Raspy,” I said at the same time Cobra said, “Dirty.” I chuckled because that was exactly what I had been thinking.
Cobra smirked, and I couldn’t help but picture the princess writhing between us, whispering dirty words. He lifted his dark eyebrow as I stared at him.
Suddenly, I was envisioning Cobra underneath me as he took the princess. He licked his lips again, like he knew exactly what I was imagining.
“Ow!” I said. Jax had leaned forward and slapped Cobra and me behind our heads. His hands were fucking massive, and I swore he’d given me a slight concussion.
“Harder,” Cobra moaned dramatically.
Jax glared at us both like we were the biggest idiots.
“And her nightmares,” Jax said, determined to have a normal conversation about the princess.
I slumped back into my chair and thought about everything. The truth was, I was also concerned.
“How can someone go from a fighting machine to not being able to run without gasping like they are dying? It just doesn’t make sense.” I thought about the day she had caught Jax fucking Cobra.
In the hall, the prettiest blush had stained her cheeks, but then something had happened and she had become cold as ice.
She’d fucking walked past us like we were nothing to her, like we were beneath her.
Her dual nature was hot as hell.
I pictured Auntie naked to stop myself from getting hard again.
“She’s hiding something, probably a spy.” Cobra shrugged like it didn’t bother him one bit that we could be sharing a bedroom with a traitor.
I stilled at his words, then willed myself to relax.
“She seems too volatile to be a spy. A spy would be more consistent with their performance. The little alpha is all over the place.” Jax shook his head and sighed heavily.
I thought back to the run today. She really had been pathetic.
Poor little princess looked like she’d been literally dying, not running laps around an indoor track.
Another thought struck me. “Why the fuck is she all over that blue-haired beta, Aran, literally all the fucking time?”
I became irrationally angry thinking about how much the princess smiled at the beta. He was lean and practically feminine, with his baby face and ridiculously colored hair. Compared to his small form, we were fucking men. What could she even see in him?
“I don’t know. She probably just wants a friend.” Jax rubbed his palms into his eyes, but the soft growl that rattled his chest said otherwise.
“She’s an alpha. It’s inappropriate.” Cobra tightened his hand around his knife like he was imagining stabbing the beta.
“Why? Ascher fucks beta women. What’s the difference?” Jax asked.
“It just is,” Cobra said with a growl.
On this, we were in complete agreement.
“We should tell him off.” I nodded as I thought about it.
She was the female alpha, which meant she was better than the betas. If she wanted fucking friendship, she could have it with us. If she wanted more than friendship, then she could suck my dick, not his.
A part of me recognized I was acting like an archaic ass, but a larger part of me was so obsessed with wringing the beta’s neck that I didn’t care.
“We’re not intimidating one of our own soldiers because we’re jealous he gets to spend time with our little alpha,” Jax said with exasperation as he glared at me.
The big guy was always worried about doing the right thing and making sure everyone at the compound felt supported. Still, he’d called her “our little alpha.”
I would bet all my money Jax’s possessive instincts just needed to be prodded one more time and he would go full psycho on her ass.
“No, we won’t intimidate him,” Cobra said calmly as he ate, and I glared over at the bastard. I’d thought we were on the same page. “We’ll simply break both his legs so he can’t spend time with her during training.”
“I’m in.” I pushed my seat in and stood up, ready to hunt down the beta and hurt him.
Realistically, he deserved it. I had seen Aran catch her when she’d tripped today during the run.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. He had fucking touched my princess. It would be wrong not to punish him.
“Sit down!” Jax alpha-barked, and instinctively, I sat down in my chair.
Jax might be the nicest and most rational of the three of us, but his beast was also the most dominant. You didn’t want to piss it off.
“We need to do something about the beta,” I snarled back at him with frustration.
“He needs to bleed.” Cobra smiled like Aran’s death was already imminent.
“I have five sisters. I know how women work. If we hurt who she views as her only friend, she’ll hate us forever, and that gets us nowhere. We need to focus on working to find out her secrets to make sure that we’re safe, and then we need to concentrate on beating the damn fae.”
“Fine,” I huffed back at Jax and imagined beating the shit out of the blue-haired beta. Even if it was in my mind, it made me feel better. The red haze that covered my vision receded slightly.
“Hmm.” Cobra chewed slowly, like he was thinking deeply. “Perhaps, but if he touches the girl sexually, I will kill him.”
“Fine,” Jax growled back and glared down at Cobra. From the way they snarled at each other, I couldn’t tell if they wanted to fuck or fight.
The fact that Jax had agreed with him told me the big bastard also wanted to kill the beta. He might not know it, but all three of us were on the exact same page when it came to the princess.
Cobra scooped up a big spoonful of cranberry sauce and shoved it past his lips.
The sweet red juice ran wantonly down the side of his wicked mouth, leaving a red trail against his pale skin.
Cobra’s sharp cheekbones stood out starkly in the flickering firelight, and his eyes hooded as dragged his tongue across his sinful lips. Cranberries and frost filled the air.
Jax’s gray eyes glowed.
In slow motion, Jax leaned forward and licked the trail of cranberry sauce off Cobra’s Adam’s apple, up his face, all the way to his mouth.
A servant who stood holding drinks behind Jax stared openmouthed at the alphas. A glass broke. Neither gave a fuck.
Cobra looked over at me and smirked as Jax slowly licked the cranberry sauce off of his red mouth.
Adjusting my swollen cock in my pants, I couldn’t help but imagine that Jax was licking the princess’s juices off Cobra’s mouth.
Groaning, I ran my hand over my face and sighed heavily. We were acting like horny teenagers over fucking cranberry sauce.
We were fucked, and it was all the princess’s fault.
