“Don’t give me that load of crap. Your breed of incubus doesn’t turn all evil-demonic until after s’genesis. Well, mostly. Your brothers aren’t exactly stand-up little Sems.”
“Leave her alone, Gem,” he growled softly.
“That’s not going to happen.”
He could feel Gem’s fear and anger as if it were his own. But his anger was darkly possessive and not at all welcome. “Tayla’s mine.”
“Yours?”
“To deal with.” He ground his molars. “Mine to deal with.”
“Very reassuring. But my parents’ lives are at stake. I’m not letting this go, and no offense, but your thoughts seem to be originating from below the belt when it comes to her.”
“Just for a few days. She’s growing weak. She might cooperate if she’s sick and isolated from her human colleagues.”
Gem’s upper lip peeled back as she leveled a look of grave promise at him. Normally, she hid the demon well, but with her emotions ramped up, her human exterior had begun to unravel.
“I’ll give you twenty-four hours. After that, all bets are off. Tayla will be mine. And my way of dealing with her won’t be nearly as pleasant as yours.”
The seductive pull of the full moon had nothing on the lure of a she-warg in her season, and with both mistresses tugging at Luc, the next three nights promised to be both heaven and hell.
He closed the door to the reinforced steel cargo container in his basement and set the timer that would prevent the door from being opened from the inside. Ula, the female he’d won in a bloody battle with five other males, pressed her naked body to his bare back as the clank of the outer metal bar falling into place echoed through the room.
“I still don’t see why we must lock ourselves away,” she murmured against the skin of his neck. “We could have gone to the country. We could run free. We could hunt.”
Hunt. The very word made his blood fire. Luc would love to run wild like Ula, who was a pureblood, whelped by warg parents and more animal than human. As a born warg, she lived by different rules than Luc, belonged to a different social order.
Luc had become a warg—a werewolf, to the ignorant—at the age of twenty-four, the victim of a warg attack in 1918, while fighting as an American soldier in World War I France. Every passing year chipped away at his humanity, but he retained enough to want to live among humans even if he didn’t associate with them. Living with the humans came at a price, however, and to keep from tearing them apart during the most powerful three nights of the moon phase, he imprisoned himself, something he swore to do until the last of his humanity had withered away.
At that point, Wraith had a promise to keep.
“We don’t need to hunt,” he said, turning into her so all six feet of her curvy body molded to his. “We’ll keep busy in other ways.”
Besides, two halves of a cow carcass hung from the ceiling, double his usual monthly order and delivered fresh from the closest slaughterhouse. They wouldn’t starve.
Her hand, already elongating, tipped with claws, closed around his cock, and a low growl escaped him. “This union will produce young. I can feel it.”
He drew a sharp breath. Wargs didn’t take mates unless a female became pregnant, and then the bond would become permanent. He sifted his fingers through Ula’s waist-length, silver-blonde hair. Should his seed take root, she would be his.
One hundred years of loneliness would vanish.
“The Warg Council won’t be happy.” Not that he gave a shit, not when she rolled her hips against him like that.
“Only if the cubs are not born wargs.”
He tangled his fist in her hair and wrenched her head back. “We will not put down any that are born human,” he growled.
The silver flecks in her eyes sparked, but with annoyance or the impending transformation, he wasn’t sure. “But the law—”
“Is meant to be broken.” He released his grip and dropped his hand to her perfect, round ass. “We’ll nip the human cubs, turn them into wargs. No one will ever know they weren’t born that way.”
“And if someone suspects?”
“I’ll take out that someone before he can voice his suspicions.”
She grinned, her canines glistening. “Ruthless. Strong. Protective. That is why I wanted you to win.” She dragged her tongue over the claw marks on his clavicle, where one of his opponents had slashed him. “I haven’t forgotten what you did for my pack.”