GERALT
Ileana, Ileana, Ileana…
There was no name sweeter.
No taste finer.
No mate brighter…
Mine.
Nay. Ours.
I would end this world for her. Start the apocalypse this moment, eons ahead of prophesized doom and destruction—just to make her smile. Slit throats and tear out spines and crack knees and flay foes just to make her laugh. All this and more I would do for her and only her, now until the end of our days, our fates entwined, our connection eternal.
Did she feel it, too?
Could she sense the bond in the air, the twist of her soul’s path down the trail less trodden, dark and prickly and dangerous—yet the danger would never, ever touch her.
Or I’d set it alight and dance in its ashes.
For now, I focused on swallowing the unmitigated rage at some gaggle of human males daring to tell us how long we had with our mate. This stint in prison had been such a bore, full of hibernation in our cell and quarrels with the rest of the legion, counting down the days until they walked us back to the hellmouth and pitched us headlong into the fire, this invasion a wash and plans for another already underway.
All that changed with her.
Our magpie.
Ileana.
Couldn’t go back now.
Couldn’t abandon her here.
Never, never, never.
Yet she had much to learn about leviathans and demons, let alone a blend of the two such as her mates were. Our collective anger had startled her, the allotted ten measly minutes nothing, a blink in how my brothers and I preferred our lovemaking. Fucking. To Aedan and Cato, it was always fucking. I’d turned my nose up at the term before, my respect for femalekind enduring and deeply ingrained.
With her, here and now, I realized that was all it was before. Fucking. Mindless rutting, something to pass the time before we found our mate—on Earth of all places, a poor magpie stuck in a cage.
A cage she… volunteered for.
The news still shocked me, but that was a discussion for another time, another place. A better place.
For now, I reined in my wrath—for I never craved her fear. Let her see us, love us, ride into the doom of this world with us, exactly as we are. Embrace us for what we are, every part of it, for we would do the same with her. This mating was nothing; I suspected none of my brothers would even properly bite her here. To do so felt… cheap. I knew nothing about her, but all that would change once they opened the door. Golden cuffs be damned, we would take our mate from this miserable place and never look back.
Her delectable cunt, smeared with her climax, swollen and tender from my attentions—it lifted from my face. Ash-grey hands maneuvered her, Cato with his shadow crown and his focused expression arranging her down my body, settling her at the helm of my aching cock. Urgency slashed the air. No one said a word, but the sentiment echoed between we three bonded brothers, the tension tugging at my navel and twining around my heart like thorns.
We needed to mate her now—or we might lose her to another.
None of us had expected a human-supernatural alliance on Ether Island.
We had expected to flood the coast and spread our darkness to the nearest continent.
And we ended up here.
For all our centuries of experience, mankind found a way to surprise us.
“Gently, brother,” Cato warned, our eyes briefly meeting, his so very blue in the dim lighting, the black of his inner demon slicing across those irises like a bleak horizon. “Be slow.”