Page 5 of Born to Be Legends (Soulbound Universe)

In the past, Patrick might have taken the risk to fight his way out of the situation at hand alone and hope for the best. These days—with no agency badge to stand behind, no gods-given dagger, and his hypervigilance long since treated and mostly put to rest—Patrick was willing to bide his time.

Sage would be proud of him.

The artifact Aaron held—an idol of some sort carved out of what looked like bone—reeked of blood magic, leaving a metallic tang in the back of Patrick’s throat when he breathed.

The legal team hadn’t moved a centimeter since his arrival, bound by the magic crawling through their veins, magic which Aaron had tried to apply to Patrick and failed.

The spell on the artifact hadn’t taken root because of Patrick’s personal shields and literal lifetime of knowing how to deflect that kind of magic.

“Listen, I’m worth more to you as a voice than sitting frozen in a seat,” Patrick had calmly stated, making no move to attack. “I have a direct line to the people who can get you what you want, whatever that is.”

Aaron had glared at him, ten years Patrick’s junior and full of a bravado that stemmed from desperation, because only the desperate were this stupid. Patrick should know. He’d done enough stupid things in his past that had contributed to Jono’s collection of gray hairs.

“I want my wife,” Aaron had growled.

“Okay. So let’s talk.”

Calling up Casale had been the first order of business, and the city’s police commissioner had been about as thrilled as usual to take a call from Patrick in the midst of trouble.

The conversation had gone as well as expected, with Aaron spouting off his demands and Patrick offering up his own observations as discreetly as he could.

He knew Casale would pick up on what was and wasn’t being said but that Aaron wouldn’t.

Still, if there was anything Patrick had learned during his time fighting to save the world, it was how to stall.

“How did you meet her?” Patrick asked, still not having moved from the seat he’d been directed to, hands pressed flat to the table at Aaron’s order.

“Who?” Aaron muttered, pacing the length of the conference room.

“Your wife.” Patrick’s gaze slipped past the sorcerer, catching on the flutter of a blind moving in a window on the high-rise across the street.

He doubted Aaron knew the police or SOA had stationed a sniper out there.

He hoped Casale would heed his warning about the artifact.

He didn’t know what would happen to the others at the table if he ripped the artifact from Aaron’s hands but hoped whoever they sent in could deal with it.

In what sometimes felt like another life, Patrick had been trained to fight against such magic, to hunt demons and the magic users who summoned them.

He’d left the Mage Corps for the SOA before finally putting down his weapons after the Battle of Samhain, but that didn’t mean he was going down without a fight.

Patience was something he’d learned, but he’d learned it.

This was what his therapist called growth. It had only taken Patrick, oh, three and a half decades or so to learn it .

“Don’t you know how I met her? Aren’t you one of the people trying to put my family away?” Aaron snapped.

Patrick resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “I’m not actually a lawyer. I was hired as an expert witness.”

Aaron paused in his pacing, glancing at Patrick as he turned the idol over in his hands. The magic in it pulsed briefly, a sickening beat of power that grated over Patrick’s shields. “You don’t look like much of an expert.”

Patrick glanced down at the clothes he wore, knowing he definitely didn’t look like he worked in the corporate sphere. “Everyone always says that.”

He flexed his fingers against the tabletop, letting his hand lift up a fraction of an inch, allowing just enough space to form a hollow between his palm and the table. He didn’t call up his magic just yet, keeping his attention on Aaron, who had his back to the sniper, focused on Patrick.

“What kind of expert are you?”

Patrick arched an eyebrow. “Someone who knows a lot about magic. Your coven has a reputation.”

“My coven is being targeted by the government with false charges. Any expert worth their degree would know that,” Aaron spat out, back to pacing the length of the conference room.

Patrick carefully pressed his fingers together, made it so no light could seep through his skin when he conjured up a mageglobe. “I never went to college, just the school of hard knocks.”

He was momentarily distracted by the tug on the soulbond, his sense of Jono putting the other man closer than earlier. Patrick closed his eyes, centering himself, letting his awareness spread down the soulbond to pinpoint Jono’s exact location.

Ten floors down and moving up.

“You’re helping them put my wife away. What makes you think I shouldn’t kill you now?”

Patrick opened his eyes, trying to hide his disdain as he stared at Aaron. “Then you really aren’t leaving New York if you try.”

Aaron brandished the artifact in his direction, magic slithering around the carved bone. The pulse of it was mirrored in the veins of everyone around the table. “I’ll be leaving with my wife.”

“You’re making the situation worse for both of you.”

Aaron scoffed. “Are you married?”

Patrick blinked at him. “No.”

“Then I don’t think you can understand the love I have for my wife. I’d do anything for her.”

Aaron had, if the details of the case were anything to go by.

That was the whole reason the coven was in jail and Aaron was out here, trying to bargain for his wife’s escape.

Patrick would never make the choices Aaron and his coven had made—he’d made others, equally as questionable in some ways—but Patrick had never done so with the intent to harm innocent people.

He and Jono had talked about marriage on occasion over the years, quiet musings in bed and after breakfast in the mornings, on drives around town.

Nothing had ever come of those conversations.

They had a soulbond that tied them together forever.

A wedding ring seemed so inconsequential after everything they’d gone through and survived.

Patrick knew where he stood in Jono’s heart, and Jono knew where he stood with Patrick.

But he could see how others viewed the idea of marriage as something to desire and cherish, a form of binding in its most ancient traditions. To declare your love for someone so deeply that you would tie yourself to them forever more.

Patrick had done that before he even loved Jono. The love had come later, built brick by brick through hardship and learning what it meant to care for someone else. Patrick had Jono to thank for a life that wasn’t lonely and buried in the bottom of a bottle.

Love could be a terrible, all-consuming thing, and it seemed to have swallowed Aaron whole, along with his ability to do the right thing. Love made people crazy, and it didn’t even take a potion to make that happen.

“You think I haven’t?” Patrick asked mildly, internally tracking Jono’s ascent through the SOA building.

“You’re sitting there helping put people in jail for life. ”

“I didn’t always have a career as an expert.”

“What were you? Former police? Former SOA? You seem to have those kinds of connections.”

“SOA, among other things.”

“So just another asshole who thinks you can tell covens what to do.”

At that, Patrick did roll his eyes. “I never had a coven.”

He had a pack. People might argue there was no difference between the two, but Patrick would.

His pack didn’t worship a god, after all, and never would.

It didn’t matter that Jono used to be the mouthpiece for Fenrir.

Their pack eschewed any sort of religion, but that didn’t mean they were against others finding guidance in prayer.

Patrick was just violently allergic to asking the gods for anything.

“No coven, and you’re not married. You must live a lonely life,” Aaron sneered.

The disdain in Aaron’s voice might have been annoying if what he’d said was even remotely true.

Patrick kept an eye on the other man even as he conjured up a tiny mageglobe hidden against the table beneath his cupped hand.

He didn’t need to tap a ley line through the soulbond for this, just his own damaged soul.

With Jono on his way, Patrick focused the spell to deal with the artifact rather than Aaron.

If he disrupted the artifact’s magic, it might give him enough time to save the people sitting at the table.

They’d most likely still need medical intervention from a healer.

Hopefully, they’d all stay alive long enough to get it.

“You’re sure interested in knowing about my personal life when you haven’t even asked for my name yet,” Patrick said, the pull on the soulbond feeling like it did at home, when Jono was close enough to yell for.

Not that he needed to yell. Supernatural hearing meant Jono could hear a whisper from one floor away.

“I’m kind of disappointed you don’t recognize me. ”

“Should I?” Aaron asked, coming to a stop in his attempt to wear a hole in the carpet. He eyed Patrick suspiciously, and Patrick only smiled at him.

“You should ask for my name. ”

Aaron turned, lifting the artifact, the end of it pointing in Patrick’s direction. “What is it?”

“Patrick Collins.”

Aaron’s eyes went comically wide, his hand jerking up higher.

His mouth opened, but whatever he was going to say never escaped his lips as Jono crashed through the door to the conference room with a snarling howl.

He was massive, all dark fur and blazing bright blue eyes of a god pack alpha werewolf going in for the kill.

Patrick surged to his feet, knocking the chair over, and swung his arm up to fling his mageglobe at the artifact. “Keep him alive!”

“Ugh, you’ve gone soft,” Wade complained as he darted into the room.

The artifact left Aaron’s hand when Jono cleared the conference table in a single leap and slammed him to the ground.

Patrick’s mageglobe slammed into it, expanding to contain it as red filaments of magic snapped away from the carved bone, fighting against the disrupting spell.

Patrick’s magic pulsed pale blue around the artifact, the mageglobe hovering in midair above the table.

With a flick of his hand, he sent it streaking over to Wade.

“Take it into the hall and burn it,” Patrick said, mindful of their audience in the room and the sniper in the other building staring through their scope. None of them needed to know what Wade was.

Wade’s hand passed easily through Patrick’s mageglobe to grip the artifact. He made a face as his fingers connected with the bone. “Ew.”

“You’re not eating it, so don’t complain.”

Wade rolled his eyes before leaving the conference room with a touch of supernatural speed.

The sound of him belching fire came a few seconds later.

The fiery red lines that traced the veins of everyone seated at the table abruptly disappeared.

Every last one of them slumped in their seats, a few sliding right off, groaning in pain.

Patrick went to the closest person, doing what triage he could. No one seemed to be seizing, so hopefully they wouldn’t have to worry about aneurysms, but they’d need to be cleared by someone better skilled in healing magic than him.

“Hey.” A warm hand caught him by the elbow as Patrick stood after making one of the attorney generals comfortable on the floor. “Are you all right?”

Patrick turned to look at Jono, his lover having lost his clothes somewhere between the street and now. Patrick was intimately familiar with all that skin and muscle, but he didn’t want anyone else to be.

“There’s a sniper in the building across the street. You’re probably giving them a show,” Patrick said, trying not to sound jealous.

Jono raised an eyebrow, a smile quirking at his lips. Like every other werecreature in Patrick’s life, Jono didn’t care about nudity. “Suppose I should have Wade get my clothes.”

“Where’d you leave them?”

“In the lift.”

At least he’d had time to take them off so he wouldn’t have to walk around Manhattan naked. Not that it would be the strangest thing New Yorkers would have seen. “Wade, go get Jono’s clothes.”

A confirming shout from the hallway told him Wade had heard the order.

Moments later, Wade was back, clothes in hand and smelling like smoke and fire.

The artifact was nowhere to be seen. The SOA would probably be mad about that, but Patrick figured they’d be more grateful their people were alive than not.

“Here you go. Get dressed before Patrick murders someone for looking at your dick,” Wade said, very decisively keeping his eyes on Jono’s face.

“I wouldn’t murder anyone with witnesses around,” Patrick muttered.

Jono laughed as he pulled on his pants and did up the zipper. “You know I only love you.”

“Yeah.” Patrick stared at him, listening to the sound of feet thundering through the office in the distance.

Reinforcements would arrive in a few moments, and all Patrick could think about was how Aaron had threatened the lives of people he didn’t know, all because he loved his wife.

Patrick had done far worse over Jono if he were honest. “We should get married.”

Jono paused in pulling on his shirt, gaze snapping to Patrick’s face while Wade sounded like he was choking on something. “Was that you asking?”

“I’ve asked before.”

Jono finished pulling his shirt at the same time the door crashed open, letting SOA agents and police inside. “You didn’t really mean it before.”

“I meant it!”

“I thought you were happy with how things were?”

“Of course I’m happy. I’m just saying we could get married.”

“And be happier than we are now?”

Patrick opened his mouth to argue before he realized the glint in Jono’s wolf-bright blue eyes and the faint twitch of his lips meant the other man was teasing him. “You asshole. Just say yes.”

“I’m an arsehole, love. Get it right.” Patrick grabbed Jono by the T-shirt and hauled him close, ignoring the questions thrown their way by the new arrivals. “In what world would I ever say no?”

“I’m still not hearing yes, you absolute?—”

Patrick’s complaint was interrupted by a kiss that stole the breath from his lungs, not that he was complaining. Jono’s hand on his face was warm and familiar, a heady presence against his body and in his soul that Patrick never wanted to let go of.

“Yes,” Jono finally muttered when he pulled away, the word ghosting across Patrick’s lips, the promise of it something he felt in his bones. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

“That was the lamest proposal ever ,” Wade groaned, phone pointed at them while he recorded. “I’m sending it to everyone.”

Patrick flipped him off before stealing another kiss from Jono.