Page 174 of Jagged Souls

“Is it? Every living creature feels pain. A baby doesn’t even know to fear death. So what is it about them? Their potential? Our own hope that they can be better than us?” I demand as I’m assaulted by the memory of my three pups.

They lie curled up in their placenta, their bodies bloody and ripped apart. I think about the life I could have had with them. The yipping laughter, the little tongue kisses that all pups do. Siome and I would’ve taught them how to hunt, to chase, to fuckinglive. Oh, yes, they had potential.

But so did Siome.

And I’m tired of defending why her loss hurts more.

She was my everything. My past, my present, my future. My reason for living. My reason for dying when the time comes. She is my everything, and she isgone, and that hole she’s left behind, filled only with the phantom chill of her loss, is all I have to remember her by.

So many lost moments. Lost dreams. Lost laughter and love and light, all made more bitter by the experience of once having had them.

I never had kids.

The ones with my last name aren’t mine. I was never able to bring myself to touch Mary – the wolf I took years after Siome died. Only taken once I believed Sau dead and her line gone. But Mary and I had only entered a pact for the good of the pack. She fucked who she wanted, and when she got pregnant, I gave her kids my name to uphold the illusion of solidarity to keep the witches and vampires from thinking us weak.

Because I lost the chance for kids when I lost Siome.

My throat closing, I shake my head. My thoughts always run too much when I smell fucking V.

I stare into Micha’s eye sockets, feeling as empty as them in my soul. Her whore of a mother-in-law carved out all I was, all I promised Siome to be, and she filled it withpoison, turning me into someone I don’t even recognize, someone Siome would be ashamed to see.

“So you ask me how I could eat your baby,” I say, needing to get out the fucking words, needing to get through to this bitch in my arms so I can ween her off her addiction for my own fucking sanity – the memories she’s dragging into the light too fucking bright. “It’s because your family made me eat my wife.”

June 29 1907, St. Augustine, Florida – Antonio

Siome jumps to her feet and kicks me in the chest. Her claws rake across my skin, and I stagger back so they don’t cut too deep. As my back slams into the door, she lunges for me, her arms outstretched. I catch her on muscle memory – as I’ve done so many times before.

Her knees thud into the wood behind me, cracking it and splintering the frame. For the slightest of seconds, with my hands on her ass and her legs around my waist and her face so close to mine, I feel like my love’s come home. My cock is swollen from the scent of her being in heat, and the feel of her body against mine is making it hard to think clearly.

But then the door swings open from the impact. It throws me off balance, and I lurch forward to stay upright, holding her tighter to keep her from falling off me.

Her teeth sink into my shoulder. Not a love nip. A full-on bite that tears through muscle and has her teeth nicking bone.

My head whips to the side, and I snap at the air around her elongated ear as I straighten. She growls low, and so do I. I know she can smell it. The pheromones I’m giving off – those of an alpha even if I’ll never take the title.

And I know she can feel it. The urge to obey even in her anger. Her need to mate with the strongest wolf around.

The smell of her arousal increases.

There is a second of hesitation

Of resistance.

And then we’re exploding into action, our bodies a slave to our needs. Her teeth release me. Her hands grab my cock. She licks her way up my neck, and my hands squeeze her ass. I try to reach between us to see if she’s wet enough, but she lifts her hips up and spears herself on me before I can.

I stumble forward on a growl, aiming for the sofa.

I collapse onto it with her beneath me, my knees weak, my cock aching.

She feels so fuckinggood, and I want to take her like the animals we are, but I don’t want to hurt her.

She snarls her frustration when I refuse to move, my body trembling as I struggle for control. She snaps her teeth in the air around my face. Shoves at my chest. Pulls at my hips. Even pokes me in the bite wound she gave me.

I bare my teeth, letting her know she’s gone too far, and she whimpers low before she starts to lick me. Her tongue is rough, not as pleasant as she thinks it is, but I don’t care. Because I saw it for a moment – that old her. My stubborn little helfire.

“Ugh! You are such aMymecia pyiformis!” She pushes down on my wrists as I grip her hips, keeping her from sinking down onto my cock. It’s the first time she’s gone into heat, and she’s too desperate to think clearly. I’d be lost too if it wasn’t for the stud of Artemis’ silver I’ve pierced my ear with, an attempt to use the pain to clear the fog in my brain.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I growl, my voice raspy, my whole body tense, feeling like it’s going to explode at any moment. My muscles shake as the head of my cock pushes into her virgin pussy. Holy fuck, I have died and gone to Elysium – the paradise of the Underworld.