Reborn (Alpha's Claim Book 3) Read online

  His grim honesty continued. “I desired very intensely to alleviate the pain displayed in your photograph. I was even impressed with how unfailingly brave you were to do such a thing, though I abhorred it.”

  Claire’s attention went to her plate; she felt like weeping and didn’t know why.

  Her lack of words did not alter the undeniable tone in the thread. The connection was normalizing, vibrating, and creeping deeper. Before there might be anymore courtship rituals, before there might be a greater consequence, Claire stacked their cleared plates, ready to get her duty over with.

  “Did you enjoy our meal?”

  She nodded, even thanked him politely, hearing his instant purr when Shepherd’s eyes flashed at her praise. The feel of his hand on her arm, the long stroke of light fingers, stopped her movement. She watched, stunned, as the man lifted her hand to his lips and tenderly kissed it.

  Slightly hoarse, Claire admitted, “I am not entirely sure where I should begin.”

  He held her gaze, lightly flicked his tongue against her sensitive palm. “You could touch me.”

  The worst calamities that befall an army arise from hesitation. -Sun Tzu

  Her entire strategy centered on action, on pushing boundaries between them, on growing stronger as she sought out his weaknesses. There could be no room for hesitation if she wanted to gain ground.

  Resting a hip on the table, Claire did as he suggested. He wanted to be touched, so that’s what she did. She traced his jaw and nose, ran her fingertips over his lips as he had done so often to her. Next, she stroked down the back of his neck, kneading the flesh he’d once claimed caused him pain.

  Shepherd turned his head up to her, his mercurial eyes watching with such intensity Claire found her gaze rested far more comfortably on the Alpha’s broad shoulders.

  Keeping her mind separate from how familiar his body had become, Claire tried to approach it clinically, unsure if she was doing well. When a large hand came to rest on her hip, she took his touch as encouragement to continue. Her palms flowed over his arms from shoulder to wrist and back again, forming to the contours of honed muscle and absolute strength. She reached around his back to lightly scratch her nails over the broad expanse of flesh.

  He liked that. His breath hitched, and Shepherd made little grunts and groans as she traced his spine.

  When his purr grew husky, she rose from her perch and took his hand so he could stand from the chair and she could continue. With his great height, there was a shift in power, Shepherd suddenly so much taller.

  Her uncertainty returned.

  Timid, Claire’s hands went to his belt.

  Shepherd took her lowered chin, brought her face up so she might see the contented expression on his. “You are doing well.”

  His voice was gently encouraging, those expressive silver eyes liquid. Claire assumed he wanted her to continue, and licked her lips, trying to seek out the fastening of his pants. Fumbling, she pulled down his zipper and eased the fabric from his hips. Shepherd stepped out of his remaining clothes and stood naked under her touch.

  When the Alpha made no move, Claire understood she was expected to continue.

  Her hands found a path from his thighs, near his groin, and across the hard planes of his stomach. She nosed his chest, and pulled in his scent exactly as she once imagined she would do with the husband she’d hoped for all her life. Holding on to the comfort of that fantasy, she put the conjured image in Shepherd’s place, and pressed closer, breathing in the smell of his excitement.

  The fabricated man in her mind loved her, he honored her; he believed she was more than just an Omega.

  It was so much easier to stroke and hum as her imagination unraveled, Claire didn’t even hesitate to tease. Pretending he was hers, the mate she had dreamed of, she let it all go. Biting his chest, she playfully scratched near enough his groin that his cock twitched in expectation of attention—attention she denied, to instead reach around and caress his buttocks, relishing his groan of pleasured frustration.

  By the time she closed her fist around his cock, touching it for the first time only to please him, Shepherd was already dripping, pulsing in her hand, and arching into her grip.

  He wanted more, hands settling on her shoulders, he began to press her to her knees.

  Claire knew he wanted her to take him in her mouth, a thing she’d only ever done in the heat of estrous. At first she resisted, a hiccup in her uncertain seduction. Eyes closed tight, hesitant, Claire counted to five before she could make herself obey.

  Drawing in a deep breath, she acquiesced, kneeling to suck Shepherd’s swollen crown between her lips.

  The Alpha answered with a deep, rumbling groan.

  Claire’s hooded eyes dilated further at one taste, a dreamy hum expressing pleasure when more moisture dripped onto her tongue. Tangling his hands in her hair, gathering it from her face so he might watch, Shepherd relished her hollowed cheeks and the beauty of her pursed lips stretched beautifully around his cock.

  Directing her movements, guiding her skull, with each bob of Claire’s head, the male knew bliss.

  She seemed so absolutely willing that he grew exceedingly excited, thrusting deeper between her lips, pulling her hair when that wicked little tongue swirled. Almost as soon as it began, he was on the brink of spilling into her pretty mouth.

  His thrusts growing forceful, Claire gagged when he pressed too far, but did not fight back... she let him use her. When the Alpha reached down to cup his tightening sack, when he roared, Claire obediently swallowed around his girth and sucked harder for her prize.

  Watching her little hands wrap around the forming knot to squeeze so it might feel like he was inside her, Shepherd spurt the first gush of semen down her throat, the male careful not to choke her on the copious fluid.

  Claire gulped as much as she could, one stunned Alpha watching her effort, mesmerized by a stream of his seed oozing from the corners of her mouth.

  Lost in the mating high, in her fantasy, Claire licked him clean, nuzzling into the broad palm settled on her cheek.

  Shepherd’s great thumb wiped up the spilled trickle running down her chin and pressed it back between her lips, the man groaning in approval when she eagerly lapped every last drop. “Look at me.”

  Claire, eyes black, hardly a trace of green surrounding the pupils, obeyed. She was so far gone, never had he seen her give in so completely. Seizing the opportunity, he pulled her to a stand, Shepherd taking her lips, kissing her and tasting himself in her mouth.

  Even consumed as she was, Claire did not return the pressure.

  Growling in frustration, he kissed her harder... but was penalized by the loss of her touch on his body.

  Panting, aroused by the challenge and annoyed she continued to deny him her kiss, Shepherd changed tactics. The straps of her dress were flicked from her shoulders and the fabric tugged down. Breathing in her sweetness, biting and licking the valley between her breasts, Shepherd growled and offered in a voice rich with need, “Will you spread your legs for my mouth?”

  Lost on another plane, Claire breathed, “Yes.”

  The Alpha reared and stalked forward, backing the little Omega towards the bed. “Do you desire my tongue?”

  “I do.”

  He lightly shoved her down and fell upon his prey, his mouth everywhere but where she was wet and eager. Claire arched and writhed, exasperated to receive, but no touch came to ease the growing throb between her legs. Shepherd made her wait until he had marked her in featherlike bites, tasted every inch, until she was dripping slick from her enjoyment of his lips—the Alpha never having growled to call forth such a sweet scent.

  Lifting her flushed body in the exact position to perfectly display her cunt, he pinned her. Her pussy was pink and throbbing, her hips wriggling against his hold, all the while her little hole twitching like a tiny sucking mouth.

  Slick trickled out to tempt him, Shepherd flicking his tongue in the river of fluid, lost at only one taste. Wh
ile he lapped up every drop, Claire moaned like a whore, rolling her hips to each flick of his tongue, grinding against his face when he burrowed that writhing muscle deep in her pussy.

  With her mind still in that place she’d always imagined for herself, with her body in the hands of an expert Alpha she pretended might be the husband she once longed for, the feeling of a powerful climax swelled—something mindlessly perfect almost in her grasp.

  Then Shepherd stopped, he stopped at the pivotal moment, and held her spread to watch her pink little pussy flutter as she tried to buck up to the mouth hovering warm above her. When she whined, his tongue stretched out and gave the lightest of licks, taunting her.

  Fighting to move, to find relief from the coil of need he engorged with each darted swipe of his tongue, Claire’s agitation turned to anger.

  She had given him pleasure, and now her mate was contorting the vision, denying her the perfection of the dream by toying with her. Looking down between her spread thighs to glare at her tormentor, Claire aggressively growled.

  The mass of muscle, the thing that was supposed to be fucking her with his tongue, prowled possessively over her body, negating her hips’ movement each time Claire tried to rub against him for relief.

  Brushing his wet lips over hers, Shepherd purred deeply. “Kiss me, little one, and I will give you great pleasure in any and every way you wish.”

  Wound up tight, instant wrath drove away all reason. Eager to punish for his attempt to claim something that was not his, to discipline for destroying the perfection of her dream, Claire pulled her lips back from her teeth. Nails scraped the hardness of sinew, her mouth attacking the bulging muscles between his shoulder and neck. In a rush, she pressed her teeth to his flesh and bit down with all the strength of her jaw, heard him catch his breath in surprise, and sunk her bite even deeper.

  She wounded Shepherd with all the power of her indignation, all of the rage building up since she’d first looked at the behemoth, and the unfulfilled lust he had taught her body to crave and thought to use against her.

  She didn’t even want to fuck anymore; she just wanted him to bleed.

  When the head of his cock skimmed between her folds, she dug in her claws and refused to let go. Shepherd penetrated her anyway, his warm lips at her ear where she could hear every gasped groan as he invaded her sopping cunt in erratic, desperate thrusts of his hips.

  Shepherd began to speak, she refused to listen. He moaned out his name for her, she only growled like a rabid animal. He hit the place where her nerves were raw and need was everything, and that horribly powerful internal itch grew again, blossomed and divided her—blasting her into a sideways place where she had no name or purpose but to fuck and be fucked by her mate.

  It was all there inside her, the raging storm that took away reason, it crashed and tore, and finally blissful expansion arrived.

  Her teeth left the flesh she had deeply punctured, she swallowed the pooling blood in her mouth, and came as wildly as she’d grown feral. One more hard thrust, and the size of Shepherd’s building knot grew impressive. It elongated her climax and tied the twitching thing to him where he could keep her still while his cock pumped her full of spurting streams, bathing her womb with soothing liquid heat.

  The taste of blood was thick in her mouth, the red stuff under her fingernails, all ignored as her mind flew away in the intensity of her orgasm. Time seemed irrelevant, an endless field of grey... until a face distorted her vision. The beast whose heartbeat hammered against her red stained breasts asserted himself. Iron shaded eyes full of history and greatness, the silver of deceit and lust... those gunmetal disks looked at her with the devil’s version of tenderness.

  Full lips panted words, a rich musical voice undistorted by the rasp his scarred lips imposed, distracting her between kisses over her cheeks. “Little one, that was very pleasing. I am very, very pleased.”

  His mouth brushed her blood smeared lips, Shepherd looked deeply into hers, as if waiting for some act the female was supposed to offer. Claire lay there with his blood pooling on her chest and vague realization began to dawn. In horror, she grasped the consequences of her self-indulgent lack of control.

  The depth of the bite... the placement...

  In her fervor she had ripped claiming marks deeply into Shepherd’s flesh, almost as savagely as he’d marked her.

  The purring brute’s forefinger traced over the blood on her lips, the trail that had leaked from the corner of her mouth, sniffing and panting and still deeply knotted. The warm heat of his tongue began to lick her clean of the red, bathing her mouth and neck, tending to a thing half in shock. The second his knot began to abate the smooth plunge of his cock began again, Shepherd knowing to fuck her immediately before her pupils contracted and his unexpected victory became her sorrow.

  Making love to her until the Omega’s exhaustion pulled her past consciousness, Shepherd did not allow her a moment of regret—not when everything was so perfect. Not when she was finally responding as the Gods intended.

  Corday’s head was in his hands, every last testament of violence he’d found stirring up a more horrible thirst than his worn out, simple desire for revenge. What he longed for in that moment, what he craved, were the whims of a violent psychopath.

  He wanted to see Shepherd suffer. He wanted to watch him bleed.

  Corday wanted to torment his rival himself until the sounds of the monster’s screams might drown out the noise of the madness knocking about in his skull.

  It was hard to swallow, even harder to admit there was no way to balance what he was with what a darker corner of his mind tempted him to become.

  It was the room. It was the broken furniture. It was the blood.

  The safe house where the Omegas recovered from the drug pushers’ brothel, the place they had been promised, protection was ransacked. The two Beta enforcers set to watch the women lay dead on the ground, wracked with bullet wounds.

  Nailed to the wall, his hand raised in a wave, drooped a headless body hung like a sick banner. The clothes Corday recognized, the stature, the smell not quite ruined by the stink of carnage.

  Senator Kantor.

  The leader of the resistance had been taken, tortured, and murdered, and it had been done right under their noses.

  Shepherd was toying with all of them–laughing at them.

  There was no sign of the few Omegas who’d called this place home. Though before they had been stolen, based on the stink of terror in the air, Corday imagined they had been forced to watch whatever had been done to a man he looked up to like a father.

  “Are you going to say nothing?” Leslie stood at his side, staring forward, her lips bloodless, her expression dazed.

  The safe house had failed the women it was set up to protect. The few remaining Enforcers, the stunted resistance, was failing the city they’d sworn to save. The one man unifying the flagging population had been butchered.

  What was there to say?

  Corday was crumbling no matter the stern look he kept locked on his face. There was nothing left.

  Staring at the stump of mutilated neck, at the blood, and the open cavity of the man’s torso, stepping over the entrails piled and stinking on the floor, Corday could find no worthy words for the corpse’s niece. “We should take him down.”

  Leslie shook her head as if she couldn’t bring herself to touch the abomination. “What do you suppose they’ve done with his head?”

  He had no intention of answering a question they both, deep down, must know the answer to. Instead, he turned his attention to prying the body as gently as he could from the wall.

  When it was done, what could be gathered was collected into the only receptacle they might find–garbage bags. Corday stood covered in his mentor’s blood. “I am very sorry, Leslie, for agreeing to bring you here. He told me to keep you hidden, had I listened, I might have spared you this.”

  “You needed help carrying supplies. I needed to do something useful, for once. The
months of my seclusion have shown us one truth, over and over. My uncle was wrong... I was wrong. My access to Shepherd’s communications did nothing to further the resistance’s cause.” Leslie let the Beta see her need for vengeance. “The proof is on the wall before you.”

  Corday’s response was automatic. “You have interpreted messages that have saved the lives of many of our brothers and sisters.”

  “How did they find him? How did no one know he was missing until this morning?” Face pinched, she whispered, “What if Shepherd... what if he only let us think we operated out of his influence?”

  An ironic, painful chuckle escaped the Beta.

  Rubbing her skull as if it ached, Leslie sighed. “Your visitor, that Maryanne woman, may have been right. If they found Senator Kantor, they know where the resistance gathers. Shepherd knows where you live. He knows about me and my access to this commutations network.”

  Exactly Corday’s unspoken point; the resistance was in ruins.

  Leslie had more to say. “What if your Omega Claire had made a deal with her mate? He may have been watching us this whole time.” A question wracked with doubt trailed off, “How else could this...?”

  He didn’t want to hear it; Corday didn’t even want to think it. “We must get back to headquarters. Brigadier Dane needs to be told what was done here.”

  Leslie Kantor grew vehement. “This has to end.”

  The word left him in a breath, he was at a loss. “How?”

  “I have been to your meetings. I’ve spoken with my uncle! Brigadier Dane, Senator Kantor, refused to engage Shepherd’s army. All they did, all she will do, is police the population and bribe potential recruits with food and false hope, while our enemy grows more powerful.”

  Everything Leslie was saying was true. Corday agreed with her, but the resistance was too undermanned. Weaponry was scarce, bullet stores diminishing by the day. Had they attacked months ago as Claire had suggested, a rebellion might have stood a chance. Now... the only prayer they had was to find the contagion and wait for the city to implode.