Page 14 of Her Vicious Beasts: The Beginning (Her Vicious Beasts)

Aurelia

T he next morning, I wake up with the most heavenly afterglow still clinging to me like golden morning dew. I smile as I stretch out luxuriously on my bed and find the mess I’d made of my sheets. My underwear is on the floor and I chuckle as I bend to pick it up.

That was a bloody great dream and I’m so keen to do it all over again tonight. If I have that experience to come home to every day, perhaps… just perhaps, it will be enough to get me through the rest of my life without my mates.

I haven’t slept so well in ages and my little fantasy even has me humming as I strip my bed of my sheets and shove them joyfully into my thousand-year-old washing machine. From my old laptop, I put some music on, bopping my head as I shower and get ready to head back to Halfeather’s mansion.

The buzz I have is more than a post orgasm afterglow; my skin is practically luminescent with my power coursing through me in strong waves.

I could very well get heaps of progress with my prisoner-patient today and be done with Halfeather’s lecherous gaze sooner than planned.

I flex my fingers and feel my power thrumming through me. Hell, I might even be done today.

As a dark pang shakes my heart, I tell myself that this will be good.

Because then I can leave those males behind and move on with my life.

The more time I spend with them, the harder the separation is going to be.

My anima is writhing rebelliously within me today, hissing and flapping with excitement to see them again.

I muzzle that sensation as quickly as possible.

So it’s with great determination that I rock up to Halfeather’s mansion with Maisy sparkly clean after a quick wash this morning.

“You’re in a good mood,” Beak says as he opens my door. Then he drops his voice in what I think is jealousy. “Some beast treating you well?”

“Why does it have to be some guy, huh?” I say, playfully poking him in his oversized bicep. Yeah, at least I got to touch someone before I left this place. “Maybe it’s all just me.”

He grins and I smirk at the way his tawny eyes gleam, checking me out.

If I can’t have my mates, I could in theory, choose a human to spend my life with.

A beast would figure out what I am as soon as I had intimate contact with them and that information would then be valuable and very sell-able. No, humans are my safest bet.

But as soon as that thought enters my mind, my stomach churns and I have to press my fingers over my mouth to stop the urge to vomit.

I sigh at my anima growling angrily at the prospect of being with a beast other than one of my mates.

I sour immediately as I follow Beak inside.

Unexpectedly, he turns around to glance at me, his eyes swooping down my body.

All of a sudden, I’m cognisant of how I’ve dressed myself while my mind was busy re-living my dream this morning.

I’m in a dress . One of two that I own. It’s maroon, tight, plunges a little low, and I remember putting lipstick on.

I had been buzzing with power and lust and I’d had no fucking idea that I was preening myself like a bird in heat.

I’m in way over my head and I realise I’ve not even packed a jacket.

My anima is aware that my mates are down there and everything inside of me has been waiting and ready to see their faces again.

It’s a blatant attempt for male attention considering how I’ve been dressing the other days.

It’s practically a giant, sexy, green flag that announces, “Woohoo, female ready and available!”

I’m not available! I’m the least available anima in the universe right now.

A panic attack is building up in me by the time we get down to the dungeon. I don’t know how I’m going to hide this from Savage. He’s going to know something is different right away. He’s too observant of me. Too interested in me.

As a mate should be.

I’m fighting embarrassed tears as Beak opens the last steel door for me and gives me a hot look that turns into confusion.

I force a smile on my face and the movement calms me a little. If I’m going to keep these males safe from my father, I need to keep up appearances. That is the most important thing right now, emotions be damned.

So I plaster on an even wider smile on my face and all but strut past Beak and Scuff down into the dungeon corridor as if it’s my personal runway.

My step falters, but I pretend I’m an actress on set, putting on the show of a lifetime.

No one can know. No one can know. I’m just a regular, horny animalia. No mates here.

But the deeper I get into the gloom of cold stone, I can feel that something is different.

It’s deathly quiet today. And something heavy vibrates between the cells. A whisper of something powerful.

I avoid looking at Scythe and stride right past his cell, though I can see the gleam of his eyes on me. Savage is standing by his bars as usual, and as I walk up to my patient’s steel door, my shields are back up at full capacity so I can’t see his mating mark.

“Morning,” I say briskly. But I stand there for a moment, trying to figure out what’s changed in my wolf.

Savage has a grin that could light up the whole world at midnight, and it takes my breath away.

His hazel eyes gleam as he says in a low voice, “Hello, princess.” Both of his large, tattooed hands grip the bars so tightly it looks like he wants to rip them apart. My eyes are drawn to something new on his left wrist.

He’s wearing a black hair tie.

Time stops.

Horror winds its cruel way up my chest into my throat.

I breathe, “ No .”

Male arrogance drips off him like oil. “I had a fun time last night, princess. We all did.”

My hand flies to my chest as abject terror spins through me. “Oh gods, I can’t breathe.”

Xander scoffs behind me as Savage gives a deranged cackle. “Yeah, I know, I know.”

I glare at him. “W-What the hell is going on?”

“I believe,” Savage says with vicious mirth, “I astrally finger fucked your sweet pussy and you came all over my hand.”

My knees go weak and I have to crouch down to make sure the floor is under me. This is a bad dream. This has to be a nightmare. None of this can be real. This can’t be happening to me. No one could be this unlucky.

I can’t look at him and his arrogant, beautiful face, so I cradle my head in my hands and squeeze my eyes shut. I can still feel his fingers in me as I think about my own body. My pussy does feel like it’s been stretched by fingers bigger than my own.

It had been real. I’d actually called them all in with a mating siren song. Do they know I’m their mate, then?

I take a deep breath and look up to see Savage watching me obsessively as he normally does, just with an arrogant, very-happy-with-himself smirk.

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Weak stomach, hatchling?” drawls Xander. “Might want to check you didn’t catch a canine virus or something.”

My stomach is churning now, but not in disgust, in sheer, unadulterated embarrassment. They’d all been there—even glowering Scythe—and had seen me naked and lusty, spreading my legs for?—

Dear Wild Mother, get a grip, Lia. You’re a woman, they’re your mates. You have nothing to be ashamed about. Nothing at all because it’s normal and natural. They’re the ones who should be embarrassed.

I collect my blabbering mind together with this thought and promptly stand up, crossing my arms and level both Savage and Xander a glare. “I hope you enjoyed the show”—I raise my voice to make sure Scythe can hear— “even if the others were too cowardly to come forward.”

They’d all been there. Five shadows. Shit. Now they all knew what I looked like.

Xander is still hidden in the dark of his cell, still, as if he’s imagining me from last night. I stand there and let him look at me in my dress, bare legs and all.

He flexes his wrists, and the chains around them rattle. “You’re an arrogant little thing, aren’t you? What’s your anima and why can’t we scent it?”

Panic makes my mind work at a thousand miles an hour.

“I don’t answer to you, dragon,” I shoot back, aggressively.

But then Scythe speaks from his cell behind me—a rasping voice that sounds like someone has sliced open his throat from the inside and let it scar over. “Why can’t we see your mating mark today? What are you hiding?”

His voice, and the dark meaning behind his words is terrifying enough to give me goosebumps. But shit. They must’ve seen my mark last night.

I scoff to hide my rising terror and call back, “You’re the ones in a dungeon, and you’re asking me what I’m hiding? A bit rich, isn’t it?”

This is bad. The three of them know. If they ever get out of here, they’ll come for me. They won’t be able to deny their own primitive instinct. My anima is calling out to their three animus’ in a shrill mating call and I stomp on that immediately.

“I don’t like you,” says Xander.

Well, that is a good thing. I snap, “Yeah? Well, you’re an asshole Xander, because I…”

I snap my mouth shut.

Savage remained quietly attentive while I snapped at the other two, but he presses me now. “Because what?”

Because there is something in my dress pocket that I made this morning when I’d been happy and clearly insane—I’d brought Xander a USB with new music on it, alright?

But I can’t very well say that out loud, can I?

I inhale a calming breath, trying to ease my frazzled nerves.

Then I create a shield-ball around the USB in my pocket, levitate it, invisible, through the cell bars and smack Xander on the head with it.

He flinches, but before it falls to the floor, I sweep it upwards and plug it into the device on his hip.

“Bunch of assholes, the lot of you,” I scowl. “Now be good boys and stay quiet so I can concentrate on my patient.”

My heart is pounding as I sit down on the floor and all I know is that I have to get out of here and never come back. For some reason, the three beasts do remain quiet, but I hear Savage sit down and can practically feel him poking my side with his stare.

Whether it’s my anger at the three of them, or the actual power boost from one of my mates giving me an orgasm last night, I finish healing my patient within the hour. I prise the jaws of the shadow snake’s teeth one by one from around the nape of his neck.

The entire thing dissolves in a mist of black magic.