Beta (17 page)

Pierce’s eyes glimmered. “We aren’t?”

Stark and Vidya returned. They’d only been gone for moments, but Stark was grimmer than when he’d left. “We need to leave, Beta. Fast.”

But she didn’t get a chance to stand.

A new man approached the circle of couches. Pierce stood at his approach, extending a hand to shake. The unseelie sidhe was suddenly much more respectful. Maybe even fearful.

“Melchior,” Pierce greeted.

“Hardwick,” the newcomer replied, shaking his hand.

Stark’s upper lip peeled back. “
Melchior
.”

“Rocky!” Deirdre added dramatically.

Everyone looked at her. Everyone except Stark, who rubbed his palm over his face as though he were suddenly very, very tired.

Let him be embarrassed. He was the one who’d thought it would be a good idea to dose Deirdre with lethe, dress her up like a doll, and throw her at the unseelie.

Melchior didn’t look to be one of the Winter Court, though. He didn’t have that glow.

Deirdre seriously doubted that he was even mortal.

Her gaze climbed from Melchior’s feet to his face. He wore boots buckled over leather pants and no shirt, exposing muscles that rivaled Stark’s. He looked like the kind of guy who might spend his weekend throwing cabers for fun.

Tattoos of scales glittered on his arms, rendered in such detail that they seemed to shimmer in the dim lights of Original Sin. Deirdre was tempted to touch them to make sure they weren’t really scales after all. They looked convincing.

“This is Melchior, the queen’s consort,” Pierce said. “I didn’t expect him to be here tonight.” He said that very pointedly, as though demanding that the consort tell him exactly what was going on.

Melchior ignored the unspoken question. “It’s been a long time, Stark. Not nearly long enough, but long nevertheless.”

Stark glowered, speaking through his clenched teeth. “This is starting to look like a trap.”

“I don’t intend any harm for you tonight. If I did, you’d have already come to it.”

Deirdre stood, putting herself between Stark and Melchior. “You better check yourself, Shirtless Guy. If there’s any pain going around in Stark’s vicinity, he’s the one delivering it.”

His eyes swept down Deirdre’s body and fixed on her cleavage. That told her everything she needed to know about Melchior.

Stark had wanted her dressed like this for people like him.

If her sexuality was meant to be a weapon, then she’d wield it. Deirdre planted her hands on her hips and thrust out her ribcage to display her body more clearly.

“What are you?” she asked.

He ignored her question. “And how surprising to find our old teammate with you as well. I thought you would have wised up and picked a winning team by now, Vidya.”

“I have,” Vidya said.

Melchior smiled thinly. “You’ve always got the most beautiful women at your side, Stark. And you’ve always liked to show off.”

He tugged Deirdre against his chest, and she had to catch his arms to keep herself from falling. When her fingers curled around his biceps, she was startled to feel that they were bumpy and hard—not tattooed at all.

The man really did have scales.

She pushed him away. “First of all: don’t touch me. Second of all: I asked you what you are.”

“I’m the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden,” he said.

“And I’m Kali, the eight-armed goddess of death,” Deirdre said.

Mirth sparked in his eyes. “I believe you.”

“He’s a shifter,” Stark said. “Just like the rest of us.”

“Not
just
like the rest of you. I’m not a dog.” Melchior spit at Stark’s feet.

Deirdre sucked in a breath, braced for violence.

But Stark didn’t attack. He glared at the other man, letting the hatred fill his eyes, but he didn’t attack. “Melchior is a dragon,” Stark said. “One of the few.”

A dragon?

She looked over Melchior with fresh respect. He had scales on his arms because they were real scales. The heat of his skin was because fire burned in his soul. And he was a confident asshole because he had good reason to think a lot of himself.

“He thinks it makes him better than other shifters.” Pierce wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation. He was watching the seelie women dance downstairs. Jaycee had joined the revelry on the dance floor, and she shone among the others like a diamond. “To be fair, a dragon shifter’s closer to sidhe than human, so it probably does make him better.”

Stark bristled. His growl vibrated through Deirdre even more powerfully than the thrum of bass.

Vidya cleared her throat. “Stark?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“Don’t hold them back,” Melchior said, spreading his arms wide as an invitation. “Give me a fun report to take back to the queen. Please. I would enjoy every moment of what follows from that.” He grinned, baring teeth that looked far too sharp to belong in a human skull.

“How did
you
end up in bed with the unseelie queen?” Stark asked.

“If only I could tell you. I would love to see your expression. It would be so very sweet. But my queen has ordered me to keep my silence on the matter, for the time being.”

“She also ordered you to stay home,” Pierce said, hiding a yawn behind one hand.

“I couldn’t resist the urge to see what my old friend was doing.” Melchior turned when he spoke to Pierce, and Deirdre glimpsed a tattoo on his shoulder blade. It was the seal of the Marines. Stark had the same tattoo on his shoulder.

“And I’m glad I came,” the dragon continued. “Obviously Stark must have prepared this feast for me.” He curved his hands over Deirdre’s arms, sliding them down her waist, cupping her ass firmly. “You smell like fire. You call to my body.”

“I’m pretty sure I told you not to touch me,” Deirdre said.

His hands squeezed on her posterior. “I’ve heard of you, female. I know what you are. Omega. Unable to shapeshift.”

Deirdre wasn’t going to waste her time telling him not to touch her again.

She pushed forward on one foot, propelling herself hard enough to slam her forehead into his face.

Melchior wasn’t expecting it. He stumbled, back hitting the couch behind him.

Before he could recover, she jabbed her knee between his legs—into the parts that were doing the talking for him.

Even a dragon’s junk wasn’t armored.

Melchior’s breath rushed out of him in a groan as he doubled over. Deirdre fisted his hair, jerking his head down to her level. “I don’t like repeating myself,” she hissed into his ear.

A gun pressed into her belly, digging up into her ribs.

“You’ll regret this,” Melchior growled.

Her gaze dropped to his weapon. It was some kind of revolver, though it had three barrels. The metal was gold in color and looked heavy enough to kill someone by bludgeoning them with it.

Deirdre didn’t smell silver, but she had no doubt that it would kill her if he fired it directly into her gut.

“Step back,” Stark said. He had appeared at Melchior’s side, and he had a gun pressed into the dragon’s temple.

It was the worst kind of standoff for Deirdre to be caught in. The kind where everybody had a firearm aimed at someone else except her.

She didn’t show her fear. She’d gotten good at that.

“You keep dangling females in front of me and wondering why I take them, Everton Stark,” Melchior said without moving an inch. “What will you do when I’ve ripped this one from your life? Will you mourn another decade? Will you declare random wars on meaningless, fragile Alpha girls in her memory?” He drove the gun harder into Deirdre’s ribs. “Or is this one just meant to show me you don’t care about what I did to the last one?”

Deirdre’s eyes flicked to Stark without moving her head. She didn’t dare startle Melchior’s finger into twitching.

“What are you talking about?” Deirdre asked.

“Shut up, Tombs,” Stark said.

“Your Beta deserves to know, don’t you think?” Melchior leaned into her, digging the gun into her ribs so hard that she flushed with the healing fever. “I took Stark’s wife long before Genesis swept over the world. He flaunted Rhiannon Stark, just as he flaunted you, and I made her mine. And his daughters, too.” Wicked fire smoldered in Melchior’s eyes. “Guess whose name they screamed when Genesis killed us all.”

Stark’s whole body shivered. Claws thrust from the tips of his fingers, squealing against the metal of the pistol.

He was about to shapeshift inches from Deirdre.

She was either going to get shot, or she’d be caught in a battle between dragon and whatever the hell Stark was.

“You smell surprised,” Melchior whispered to Deirdre. He was so close that his breath heated her lips. “Didn’t Stark tell you his vendetta has always been for Rhiannon?”

Deirdre wasn’t surprised. The loving inscription on his watch had suggested that someone had once cared about Stark.

Her mind whirled with possibilities, none of which had anything to do with Stark’s romantic history.

“Step back,” Stark growled to Melchior. His hand was covered in shaggy fur now, too. He was shifting.

There were a hundred ways for her to try to get out of this, but at least ninety of them involved a high risk of getting killed. The possibilities were sickening. If she hadn’t still been a little bit high, it might have paralyzed her.

Thank the gods for lethe
.

Deirdre still had a grip on Melchior’s hair. She turned his head an inch and kissed him.

His lips were hot and dry, but smooth. Deirdre imagined that it was rather like what it would have been like to brush her lips against a snake’s body.

Deirdre relaxed against him. It took conscious effort to unknot her muscles one by one—her corset muscles, her biceps, her thighs, even her tensed neck—when all she wanted to do was run away from Melchior’s triple-barreled revolver.

Pressing into Melchior meant pressing herself into the gun, too. It buried into her abs with bruising strength.

But he didn’t shoot.

His hand tangled in her hair, pinning her head in place as he deepened the kiss, doubling down on the challenge she’d offered. His teeth were sharp against her tongue. And
his
tongue—it felt too long, too slender, too agile to be human, and the way it invaded her mouth made her skin crawl.

He inhaled her breath and exhaled flames into her body.

The heat built between them, a blacksmith’s furnace stoked by the bellows. Melchior’s grip hurt. The tugging on the roots of her hair shot fire down her body.

Deirdre didn’t think she was imagining the burn on her skin anymore. It wasn’t a hormonal reaction, and it was the furthest thing from lust she could imagine.

Original Sin was actually getting hotter. She smelled smoke.

Someone shrieked.

Still, Melchior didn’t release her, kissing harder until he was biting at her lips, attacking her with his mouth.

She returned it as fiercely, refusing to yield. Deirdre sank her fingernails into the meat of his back. Her other hand slipped down his chest and stomach, feeling his abs clench. Her thumb traced the line of his belt.

His tongue flicked at her teeth—and she bit down. Hard.

Melchior reared back with a shout, and she grabbed his gun hand at the same time, twisting his arm so quickly that she heard something snap.

The golden revolver came free in her hand.

Deirdre laughed, Melchior’s blood staining her bottom lip.

Vidya wrenched Deirdre away from the dragon. Good thing that she did, too—Deirdre couldn’t stop laughing now that she’d started, and she was too giddy with the insanity of what she’d done to think about moving herself.

She’d deliberately pissed off a dragon shifter and stolen his gun.

Gage would have been proud.

“Fire!”

People were still screaming. And it was far from the only noise. The piercing shriek of a smoke alarm vibrated Deirdre’s skull.

The couch that Pierce Hardwick had been sitting on had caught fire.

It stood between Deirdre and Melchior now, the leaping flames forming a smoldering barrier that reeked of artificial polymers. It poured black smoke into the air.

“What happened?” Deirdre asked once she could breathe well enough to speak.

“
You
happened, Beta,” Stark said.

On the other side of the burning couch, Melchior’s scales glittered like rubies drenched in blood. And his hands—they were glowing with actual live flame that licked along his fingers, curved around his knuckles, and flickered from wrists to elbows.

So that’s what happens when you kiss a dragon
.
You burn everything down
.

She hoped Original Sin had good insurance.

The people in the club hadn’t stopped partying, but they had gone to the far end of the dance floor, giving plenty of room to the angry dragon. One woman broke away from the others and sashayed across the club with an exaggerated eye roll.

“I can’t leave you people alone for five minutes to enjoy myself,” said Jaycee Hardwick.

She leaned over the railing and touched the couch.

Ice rushed across the cushion, extinguishing the fire instantly. It also left an inch-thick crust on the furniture. When Vidya took a quick step back from the sofas, her jeans were stiff with frost.

The smoke detectors stopped screeching immediately. The music resumed. Bodies moved back over the floor.

Fire lit by a dragon and quenched by an unseelie sidhe.

Just another night at Original Sin.

Deirdre licked Melchior’s blood off of her lip slowly, savoring the metallic tang. It was disgusting. She wanted to throw up. But she made it look like she enjoyed it, and she hoped that it would haunt the people in the club. “I think I’m going to keep this gun,” she said loudly.

Melchior took a step toward her. She lifted the revolver to her shoulder and arched an eyebrow, as if to say,
Are you going to try to take it from me?

He rounded the couch and stopped inches away. She kept her spine straight, gazing at him levelly.

The dragon smiled suddenly, startling Deirdre. He was attractive when he smiled. Almost brutally handsome. He was the kind of man who was threatening in every sense of the word—threatening to her safety, her body, and with a smile like that, maybe even a woman’s heart.