No one wanted him, this puppy with the ruined mug.
No one but me.
“You should get a dog, Nick. They’d probably make you seem more like a normal dude and less like the absolute douchebag you are.” I tease him as I pull myself back to reality, buttoning up his shirt as a smirk forms on my lips. “Hell, you might be able to convince a nice girl to have sex with you if you had a dog.” My smirk turns into a full-blown drunk belly laugh.
He waves a hand at me. “Aw, shut up about it already, won’t ya?” He quickly grabs my Aperol spritz off the bar and downs it.
At the last wheeze of my laugh, I move to whack him on the shoulder, but I realize I can’t. I’m frozen in place, and a static charge is running through my muscles. I can’t even breathe; everything in my body is held in some suspended state.
Nick has the cocktail glass to his lips, head thrown back, but the orange liquid no longer flows into his mouth. It spills down his cheeks. The Aperol stains his white linen shirt as it trails down his neck and onto his chest. The gold cross looks slick.
Everything inside my mind is screaming that this is wrong. I’m trying to shake my frozen arm, to flail my limbs. My body remains like a marble statue, frozen in time.
The music plays on, some saccharine pop blasting over the speakers. As the melodic voice of a teenage girl sweeps through the bar, the dread and the lack of air make my chest burn.
I feel as though I’m about to pass out, that I can’t go without a breath. My chest frozen on some forever exhale.
A white light flashes through the room, brighter than any camera flash I’ve ever seen. It’s so blinding that my eyes sting and I can actually feel my retina begin to burn. I want to cover my hands with my eyes, to snap my eyelids shut, but the pain continues.
Then, just as quickly as the light filled the bar, everything returns to normal, and I take a breath. The air hits me hard as my body moves again.
My grunt rumbles through the pop star’s lyrics, and I nearly punch myself as my hands spring to my face and I barely dodge them.
I’m gasping for air, trying to understand what the fuck is happening when I barely feel the prick at my thigh before my knees buckle. I reach for where my skin was pinched. I drop quickly as soon as I move my arm, like a cartoon character hit with a tranquilizer dart.
My head slams onto the floor and a purple dripping claw brings what looks like an ear-piercing gun to my temple.
“What the fuck?!” I yell as I try to push it away from my head. My nails hit my attacker’s flesh, and it’s slick with slime. The light has blown out my vision. The world is overexposed and I can’t make out my attacker.
There’s a sharp pain above my temple, and the stinging winds its way behind my ear and deep into my skull. I can barely scream before the world falls to black.
1 Asoldatoorsoldieris the first official level of the Italian-American Mafia
CHAPTER2
?SOCIAL PARASITES?
?RAF’ERE
The elegant fi’lenfemales sitting in the parlor of my bedroom ooze pure sex. I know their every move is deliberate, an attempt to snag Sontafrul 6’s most eligible royal bachelor—me.
Not because I’m good-looking or charming…but because of the title I hold.
His Grace Duke Raf’ere of the Liin’gan Reefs.
It’s amazing how insufferable Kir’ron and her lackey Tri'ot are now. Their personalities and lack of any sense are something that annoys me to no end now that I can’t bring myself to bed them any longer. It’s been over for me since my discovery on the Deenz ship.
That’s when I saw her.
That tiny, weak-looking human, asleep in her cryopod.
It felt like I was dying. The pain in my chest was so intense. I thought that maybe one of my hearts was finally giving out after a night of smoking too much nebula leaf. Two hearts, instead of most modern fi’len’s one, is a biological quirk from my mother’s line. The people of the Liin’gan Reefs have remained aquatic much longer than others and still have a fully formed gill heart to prove it.
But no, it wasn’t partying that made my hearts ache. It was the f’teeing mating bond.
Just seeing her frozen face was enough to trigger my body’s biological purpose, to activate some deep instinct in my DNA.
I thought I would feel some overwhelming euphoria when I found my fated mate—not this nagging and painful need in my chest. The bond pleaded with me to cradle that small human up in my arms that day. To feed her, woo her, and drive my cock deep into her until she’s moaning my name.
