Sin Undone

“Good,” Shade said. “You know I like you, man. But you have… issues. If you hurt her…” Shade didn’t need to finish his sentence, because the warning in the brothers’ eyes said it all. Con would die. Painfully.

Lore moved forward, and Con stiffened. “You’ve been taking care of her. Thank you. But you should know that if you’re looking for anything other than sex from her, you’re not going to get it.” For some bizarre reason, that struck a nerve. Sin was more than a hole to drill, and though Con got what Lore was trying to say, it still shifted his temper into overdrive as his own shame over how he’d once treated her heated his cheeks.

“Yeah?” he spat. “And why is that? Maybe it’s because you abandoned her when she needed you the most, and now she thinks everyone will do the same?”

The temperature in the room dropped to subarctic levels, and a range of emotions, from guilt to fury, crossed Lore’s face. “You don’t know what the fuck happened.” Con got right up in Lore’s grille, his anger mounting as everything Sin had told him roared back. Instinct made him want to defend her, avenge her, and prove that Lore was wrong about getting nothing but sex from her.

Even though Lore had to be right. “I know that people owned her, tortured her. I know she cradles her dagger like a stuffed animal when she sleeps because she doesn’t feel safe. I know you left her like a coward and then sat on your ass feeling sorry for yourself while she was fighting just to survive—”

Lore’s gloved fist slammed into Con’s jaw. Con lurched backward, caught himself, and returned fire with a jab to the gut and an uppercut to the chin. He ducked another of Lore’s punches, but took a boot in the chest hard enough to make him suck air.

“Stop it!” Sin rammed Lore into the wall and turned on Con, shoving him against the opposite wall. “What’s this about?”

“Just a little alpha posturing.” Lore shot Con a glare, and Con nearly went at him again. Sin narrowed her eyes at both of them, then settled on Con. “Just keep in mind that Lore is not a warg. Winning a fight does not give you special privileges.”

Con blinked and then grinned as the impish twitch of Sin’s mouth brought dawning realization— she remembered the battles followed by sex in the warg village.

Lore dabbed blood from his mouth with the back of his bare hand. “What the hell are you smiling about?” “Trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then, in front of everyone, he grabbed Sin and kissed her, not caring—actually, taking a perverse pleasure in the fact—that her brothers were tense as nocked arrows. “You,” he said against her lips, “are wicked.”

And he was so screwed.

Sin Undone





Seventeen


“Go to hell, Valeriu. And take the Sigil with you.” Kynan slammed the satellite phone down so hard that a piece of plastic snapped off it and pinged off the stone wall of Shade’s Central American cave. Cursing, he checked to make sure the phone still worked. It did, but damn, he was pissed. Beyond pissed. And he hoped to hell Serena hadn’t heard him telling her father to bend over for Satan’s big stiffie.

But fuck if he was going to take orders from the R-XR again. Picking up the phone, he sank down on the leather couch that ran the length of the cave’s living room wall. He started to dial Tay’s cell phone number… and froze at the hair-raising rumble of a growl.

The women had heard the intruder before Kynan did. It wasn’t that he wasn’t alert; it was just that Serena was a vampire with uber-sharp senses, and Runa was a werewolf with ultra-sensitive hearing even when she was in human form.

Which she wasn’t right now. Runa, thanks to military experimentation immediately after she was bitten by a warg—Luc—had been altered. She still shifted into a raging beast on the three nights of the full moon, but she could also shift at will. The way she just had.

Her snarls echoed off the smooth rock walls of the cave. Kynan, drawing his Sig, darted to the kitchen, where Runa was standing on two strong, toffee-furred legs, teeth bared. Behind her, Serena, fangs bared, blocked the doorway to the bedroom, where Runa and Shade’s triplets, and Serena and Wraith’s son, were sleeping.

The narrow entryway filled as someone stepped inside. Kynan held his breath, letting his finger ease from the trigger guard to the trigger. He damn near sighed with relief when Runa’s brother and Kynan’s old Army buddy Arik stepped out of the shadows. Arik wore a standard-issue beige T-shirt with his cammie BDU pants, an M-9 Beretta at his hip, but his hands were empty, and when he held them up, Ky lowered the weapon.