Jonas nodded slowly. “I’d already decided that when she arrived tonight claiming to be your mate.”
The timing was perfect. At the moment, the three strongest Breed males were not at that party. They were distracted, and Mercury was in full feral displacement. He could feel it. Under any other circumstances blood might have flowed.
But the animal was more experienced now, more mature, more intelligent. And the man knew freedom. A freedom the animal hungered for.
“Secured?” Alaiya growled. “I will not be secured. I came here for you, Mercury. You went insane when you thought you had lost me. How can you say I don’t matter?”
He turned back to her, his eyes going over the perfect figure dressed in the perfect clothes, and she didn’t hold a candle to Ria.
“How do you know what happened in those labs?” he asked her softly. “It’s top-level information, Alaiya. You couldn’t have gotten it unless you had a contact within those labs.”
The battle to stay sane now was one he was going to lose soon if he didn’t leave her. If he didn’t get to his mate.
He swallowed, his knees nearly weakening with the taste of the mating hormone. It reminded him of Ria, tasted as though it were infused with her scent, with the sweet desire he’d licked from her body more than once.
The thought of sharing it with her, of watching her burn with him, was making his cock thicker, harder than it had ever been.
As he spoke, a Breed unit stepped into the corridor. Four silent Breeds, their eyes on Alaiya, knowledge of their orders in their eyes. They would make certain she was held until she could be questioned.
He moved to pass Alaiya, nothing more imperative than getting to Ria.
Damn her, she had dared to walk away from him. To leave her mate with another woman. He’d show her the error of that quickly.
But even as that thought passed through his mind, still his heart melted for her. She had loved him enough to let him go without recriminations when she thought his mate had returned. When she thought the mating heat Dane had smelled on him was for another woman.
She was stronger than he. He would have never let her go.
“Mercury.” Alaiya’s hand gripped his arm, over the material of the jacket he wore. “I never forgot you. Never.”
He stared down at her, and for once he saw the truth in her eyes. For all her weaknesses, there had been parts of Alaiya that had been funny, intense, that had once given him hope that she would be a worthy mate to walk by his side. But he had found a woman that called to both the animal as well as the man. Ria had saved the most elemental part of him. She had called it forth. And she controlled the beast.
He pulled his arm from Alaiya’s grip. “Don’t let me catch you in the presence of my mate, ever again,” he warned her. “The pain you dealt her tonight, deliberately, was uncalled for. You touched what you knew, what the animal inside you warned you was not yours to touch. Do it again, Alaiya, harm my mate in such a way, ever again, and what I did in those labs the day when they told me, in exacting detail, how you supposedly died, will look like fun and games. Do we understand each other?”
She paled, staring back at him with eyes that flickered with fear now.
“You were part of my pride,” he reminded her. “And admittedly, the woman I would have taken as my lover once you matured. Whatever mating hormone was showing up must have an error. Or some anomaly. You are not my mate.”
“How can you say that?” she whispered.
Mercury could feel the animal clawing harder, screaming out in rage in his head. The hormone was pumping into his tongue, making it hard to think past the haze of lust consuming him now.
This had to be dealt with. No matter the distaste that filled him.
“I say it very easily,” he growled. “I was pride leader then. In those labs, you were my responsibility. You were my woman, just as the other female was mine as well. I was an animal there. The animal ruled me and it guided me, and the animal needed to mate. It was that simple.” He turned and stared back at Callan, recognizing the animal there. Powerful. Honorable. The animal inside Callan blended perfectly with the man, in accord, strong and enduring. And Callan ruled.
As powerful as Mercury knew himself to be now, knew his animal to be, he had no desire for the responsibilities that came with the pride leader position.
“You’re Callan’s responsibility now. Perhaps he can deal with you.”
“I won’t let that bitch take you.”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the animal struck. His hand was around her neck, not bruising, but definitely threatening.
She gasped, fear finally contorting her expression as Mercury leaned close to her and inhaled. “The smell of the men you’ve lain with permeate your pores. The scent of your jealousy and your greed, the maliciousness of who and what you are, sicken me. Your calculation to steal what you know belongs to another enrages me. Come near my mate again, and I’ll not be able to help myself, Alaiya. I will kill you. No one, neither man nor woman, threatens what’s mine. Do you comprehend me?”
Her eyes locked with his, the need to challenge his power flickering within her gaze as his hand tightened around her throat and he growled in warning.
“Yes.” Her eyes lowered, went to his shoulder. Acknowledgment of his strength filled her scent now, as did her submission to it. The animal inside her, that part of her genetics, the strength he knew she held, the qualities that had made her survive, he respected. The woman, he would never trust.
He jerked his hand back from her and turned back to Callan and Jonas. The two men he followed into battle, respected and fought for.
“We’ll talk later,” he growled back at them. It wasn’t a request. As much as he respected them, as much as he owed them, his mate came above them.
Callan nodded as Jonas glanced at the vial of blood in his hand.
“Run the fucking tests,” Mercury snarled. “Perhaps we all need to see exactly what we’re dealing with now.”
He knew what they were dealing with. Pure animal genetics. Inside and out. Mercury was indeed a lion walking on two legs, and that blood would prove it.
“Blade,” he told the Wolf enforcer at the head of the unit. “Inform them outside to have my Harley brought around.”
“It’s snowing, Merc,” the Breed Enforcer informed him carefully. “Hard.”
The Harley would go through a blizzard. Mercury had made damned certain of it.
“Tell them now.” He turned back to Alaiya.
She stood against the wall, watching him carefully, calculation filling her eyes before she jerked them away from his gaze.
“Fuck with me, Alaiya, and it will be the last mistake you make.”
He walked away from them all then and allowed the animal driving him freedom. It had been confined, so deeply hidden within him that even he hadn’t known it still lived.
It wasn’t confined any longer, and it was going for its mate.
As he stepped outside the mansion and moved for the Harley, he inhaled deeply.
He could smell them now. Knew where they were. Each living, four-legged lion that wandered the grounds, protecting its two-legged cousins, following them.
He roared out into the night, the animal and the man announcing their presence, their strength. And the calls came back to him. A symphony of animal screams, roars that filled the mountain, the acknowledgment from the animals that all moved to be near him, in triumph.
He was aware of the Breeds guarding outside, watching him warily now. The sounds of the lions called back to him, roaring out their greeting, their challenge, the echo of the fury they heard inside him.