Camille unfolded herself gracefully from her kneeling position. Cupping the nape of her neck, Viktor dragged her mouth to his. Their tongues tangled in a wet glide — tasting of him, of her, ofthem.
My favorite taste in the entire godsdamned world.
Without breaking the kiss, he turned them around to face the desk. He bent her backwards until she lay on the glass surface, her legs sprawled around his hips and her soft, needy moans melting with the muffled sounds of the city. Every sound passed from between swollen, flushed lips, reminding him of how damn pretty she was when she sucked his cock.
Lifting his head, he dragged his hands down to her bunched skirt and commanded,“Nowyou can swallow.”
Camille’s elegant throat worked with her deliberate swallow. A look of hazy-eyed bliss crossed her face, but it didn’t stop her from teasing, “Is itmyturn now, bossy alpha?”
“Fuck yes it is,” he answered, yanking her thong out of the way with a deep disregard for its continued usefulness. “You made me thirsty, sweetheart. It’smyturn to drink.”
ChapterForty
The pack wasall activity for two weeks following their lunch with the Batacans. Organizing everything was a logistical nightmare — and exactly the sort of thing Camille was best at. Years of co-managing a huge vineyard and all its operations, from staffing to production to shipping and sales, gave her the perfect toolkit to take on the task.
Viktor, for all that he was a wonderful alpha who knew how to keep his people centered and safe, was absolutelyterribleat detailed work.
“I’m good with numbers and coyotes, not organizing shit,” he complained after one particularly difficult afternoon spent attempting to arrange for all the modular homes to be shipped to Prairie. Getting anything shipped across territory lines was difficult, but a whole pack’s worth of homes and possessions was a Herculean task.
“That’s why you have me,” she assured him, tapping her claws against the kitchen table as she stared at the phone resting by her elbow. She had been on hold for over an hour, but she wasn’t worried. They wouldn’t scare her away. Once she had someone with authority on the line, she would get things in order.
Very, very few people would dare say no to a Solbourne, and she intended to leverage the entirety of her family’s name against the infuriating bureaucracy that made moving so very difficult.
In the end, it took nearly a full week to make every plan — and contingency plan, for all worst case scenarios — and required she make trips to every home to make sure everyone knew what was going on and where they needed to be. By the time the big moving day came, Camille was intimately familiar with every packmate’s needs, their belongings, and their concerns.
She relished the challenge of getting all the pieces of the puzzle in the right order, and there was something deeply satisfying about being immediately useful to the pack. They were grateful for her deft handling of such a complicated series of arrangements. Even those few packmates who were wary of her quickly came around. When they thanked her, she assured them all that even if she disliked the work, Camille would have done it without question.
Finding her place within the pack was what mattered. If she had to work her ass off for two weeks to make that happen, then she would do so without a complaint.
Even so, she was helped enormously by her brother, who returned from his trip through France’s countryside just in time to assist in the operation. Like her, he’d spent most of his life running the vineyard. He knew the ins and outs of getting things across territory lines even better than she did, and his consort, Rufus, was a skilled urban planner who helped them parcel the land with expert attention to every family’s needs.
Between the three of them and the rest of the pack, who came with more than their fair share of skills, the move managed to go relatively smoothly. In what felt like a blink, they were ready to leave Lake Merced behind.
Benny escorted half the pack, including most of the younger families and elders who would require more time to settle in, while Viktor and Camille planned to escort the rest. While their homes had been packed up and shipped off to Prairie, they all stayed in the Solbourne apartment building downtown, graciously provided for their use by the sovereign himself.
The night before their flight out, Camille caught Viktor standing by the window overlooking the street. His upper body was bare and limned with the neon lights below. Her bite was a beautiful white scar on the thickest part of his shoulder.
She normally loved the sight of it, ofhim,but in that moment, her normally sunny consort wore an air of grief that cut her to the quick.
He’d been like that off and onever since they got off the phone with Lana. They had finished negotiating the terms of her packmate’s punishment just that morning. The discovery of Juan Andreas’s murder had shed more light on the cruelty and manipulation Damon must have lived under. While neither wouldeverforgive him, Camille and Viktor were in agreement that executing him wasn’t the right choice.
There had been plenty of death, and too many cubs had been robbed of their parents. They didn’t need to perpetuate the cycle of violence and loss.
Besides, he’d already lost an eye, three fingers, and suffered severe nerve damage in one leg that would take years of regular healer visits to fix. That and the Aucilla pack’s hefty tribute payment for the damage done seemed like enough punishment.
He would be shipped back to his pack, worse for wear butalive,for them to deal with as they saw fit.It was more than he deserved, perhaps, but they stood by their choice even when Theodore snarled about it. They were building a better future. What better place to start than their own lives?
What better tenet to stand by thanmercy?
But it wasn’t the thought of Damon that troubled her consort. The melancholy settled over him after he checked in with Lana about how she was handling her father’s death. Camille had quietly left him to it, knowing that it was a private thing between the two of them, and returned half an hour later to find Viktor quiet.
Sidling up behind him, she pressed her cheek to his bite and asked, “My love, why do you look so sad? This is the night before your big triumph. Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”
Viktor pulled her around to tuck her into his side. His skin was hot, several degrees warmer than her own, and littered with the tiny scars of a life lived to the fullest. She had only just begun to memorize their constellations. Camille couldn’t wait for the day when she could close her eyes and map them unerringly with her fingertips.
Viktor tilted his head to press a kiss to her temple. “I am happy. I’m just— I’m also sad to say goodbye to this place. More than I thought I’d be.”
“We’ll be back.”
