Page 5 of Ensnared by the Pack: The Complete Series (Destined Realms #3)
AUDREY
“Okay,” I said again, unable to come up with another word, unable to think past the knowledge that I was about to seal a mating bond with someone let alone my fated mate.
My heart pounded as Royce slipped his hand behind my back, tugged me close against his naked body, and captured my lips in a scorching kiss. It was strong and powerful and overwhelming.
I gasped at the ferocity of his passion and he slipped his tongue into my mouth, teasing me, adding to the fiery mating call within me that was about to explode once again into an inferno of desire.
I tangled my fingers in his hair, clinging to him, gasping for breath, dizzy against his onslaught. His cock, trapped between our bodies, hardened, proof of his desire for me, fueling my need and my certainty that this was right.
“God, Audrey,” he growled against my lips. “Say your vow so I can say mine and we can be together.”
“Blessed be the moon and her children,” I said.
He nipped at my lips and reached under the skirt of my dress, sliding his hands up my thighs to cup my bare ass — since I hadn’t wanted to destroy one of my few pairs of underwear shifting — and pressed his length against me.
“And blessed be this sacred vow,” I continued, my voice getting breathier by the second.
He rolled his hips, rubbing himself against me through my dress and ratcheting up my need.
The fated mating call rang again, louder this time than before. It vibrated through me, a powerful, deep, resounding gong filled with certainty that drowned out everything else. Royce was my mate. We belong together. We would always be together. We?—
“I answer the call—” Royce prompted, reminding me that I needed to finish the vow and awaken the binding magic that joined two shifters’ souls together so Royce could say his vow and we could seal our bond.
“I answer the call and join my soul with you, my mate,” I finished. “My fated mate,” I corrected myself.
The call rang again, and the need and heat that had awakened with the fated mating call ignited every cell in my body. I was going to change a part of my essence, bind it to my mate in a way only two shifters could bind themselves together, and that meant calling on a primal magic that affected the very core of my being.
“Perfect,” Royce purred, his tone suddenly cold and dark, making my thoughts trip.
That wasn’t what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to?—
He grabbed my ponytail and jerked my head back, holding it at a painful angle.
“Royce, that hurts.” I squirmed in his grip, but he held tight and glared down at me, his face a mask of dark satisfaction and malice. The love and hope and fear that Merrick would deny our mating was completely gone. There was no indication that he’d heard the call, that he wanted to take the sacred vows with me and seal our bond. “Royce?—”
“About time,” Sterling said, jerking my attention from Royce’s cold eyes to him. He sauntered naked from the shadows on the other side of the grove, directly in my line of sight as if he didn’t want me to miss seeing him, his lips curled back in a wicked smile. “Did you have to play with her first?”
Royce spat on the ground by our feet and wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand. “She needed to believe the call was real so she’d say the vow.”
“The call wasn’t real?” How could a fated mating call not be real? It was fate, two perfectly aligned souls finding each other. It couldn’t be faked.
“Of course it wasn’t, mutt,” Sterling said. “Pay a witch enough and you can get a spell to do anything.”
But it had to be real. It felt real.
Royce had protected me from Sterling, publicly defied him. He wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t my fated mate. I needed him. Everything in my soul said we belonged together. “You’re lying. It’s real. You feel it.” I turned to Royce. “You have to feel it. We’re fated mates. We?—”
Royce jerked my head back farther, sending sharp pain slicing through my scalp. “You honestly think my fated mate would be a wolf who can’t even shift?”
“But I felt it.” I clawed at his hand, desperate to break his hold. His words cut into my soul and the power of the incomplete mating bond heaved inside me, urging me to seal it.
Be with him. He’s our mate. It’s real. Real!
I didn’t know how I’d gone from one minute determined to leave the pack the second my wolf woke — or didn’t wake this evening — to desperately needing Royce. It didn’t make sense. But the desire to seal my bond with him was overwhelming. It consumed me, thrumming and burning, begging for completion. It had to be real.
“I heard the call,” I gasped. “It was real.”
“Fuck she’s stupid, isn’t she?” Sterling spat as he uncovered a vial with a red glowing liquid from his pile of clothes.
“And pathetic,” Royce snarled, wrenching me up by my hair until my toes skimmed the ground, his greater shifter strength more than enough to lift my weight with one hand. “You’re a shame to this pack and I can’t believe Merrick let you live after your first solstice when you didn’t shift. We’d never be mates.”
I clung to his wrist, trying to hold myself up, my bare feet skittering over the moss, trying to find enough footing to support my weight. My thoughts whirled and stuttered, the compulsion from the newly formed bond tearing into me as horrible realization hit me. The incomplete vow was why I suddenly couldn’t live without someone I barely knew, why I couldn’t let him go when only minutes ago I’d been perfectly fine without him. I’d started the magic to seal our bond and it was now compelling me to finish.
I had to fight it, refute it now before it completely took over. Sure, if Royce didn’t complete his half of the bond, it would eventually fade, but that could take months, possibly years, and I was not going to spend any time pining over someone who didn’t love me.
“Why?” I gasped, straining to focus past the clawing need threatening to tear me apart.
I needed him.
No. I was strong enough without him.
But you can’t shift. You’re not a wolf. You’re nothing but prey.
“You’re sick,” I forced out. And I love you.
No. I. Don’t.
“How could you manipulate the calling like that?”
Come on. Concentrate. Refute it.
“Because I needed someone with an incomplete mating bond,” Sterling said with a sneer before striding to the center of the grove. “I’m going to make our pack powerful again, but I needed a sacrifice.” And from the look in his eyes, that sacrifice involved something horrible and he was more than happy to sacrifice me.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
I heaved and clawed against Royce’s grip. “Let me go.”
“It’s like you were made to be our pack’s sacrifice,” Sterling continued as Royce wrenched me toward the center of the grove, his steps even, unaffected by my flailing. “No one will miss you and you don’t even have a wolf. You’re not really a member of this pack.”
“Mila will miss me,” I said.
Come on. Refute the bond and break the magic. He’d said he needed an incomplete mating bond so if I severed the magic empowering it, he wouldn’t be able to sacrifice me.
But I couldn’t get my thoughts to focus to work up enough willpower to break the magic. I needed Royce. I didn’t want to die. How the fuck had no one noticed Sterling was insane?
“Mila is too busy with her fated mate,” Royce chuckled, his tone for fated mocking, twisting my need for him tighter which only deepened my disgust at myself. How could I have been so stupid? No one would be a fated mate to a shifter who couldn’t shift. I should have known something wasn’t right from the very beginning.
“It’s a shame the guy we picked for her turned out to be half decent,” Sterling replied, turning my aching desire and screaming frustration into a sudden, fearful cold.
They’d manipulated Mila just like they’d manipulated me? Her guy wasn’t her fated mate? For all I knew she didn’t have a fated mate, either. I had to warn her that her mate was manipulating her. Except he’d happily taken his vows with her and completed their bond, and I hadn’t sensed that he didn’t love her… of course I hadn’t sensed that Royce was deceiving me, either.
“Yeah, well, we couldn’t risk bringing someone else in on our plan,” Royce said. “He had to be just as oblivious as the bitches.”
They laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world to mess with someone’s emotions while Sterling poured the glowing red contents in his vial on the ground and hissed a few sharp words I didn’t recognize.
Magic exploded around us. It slammed into me, stealing my breath, and roared into a wild black whirling mist that shot up from the ground and poured into the sky turning into thick black clouds that blotted out the moon.
“All right, god of power,” Sterling yelled. “Accept our sacrifice and show yourself.”