Predator's Salvation (10 page)

Yeah, she had, but he hadn’t thought she’d literally meant to do it. Why he hadn’t believed her was a mystery to him when LaMia presented herself from the beginning as someone who said what she meant and meant what she said…always.

And this worried him as he wondered what her idea of ‘punishment’ entailed.

What more did she have planned for him?

“You will see when I return.”

He gawked. “Return? From where?”

“I am going out to…gather my thoughts and decide how best to discipline you.”

“Haven’t you done enough to me already?”

“Not nearly enough, Mateo. You must learn what your boundaries are with me.”

“This is crap and you know it!” He pulled against his shackles, of course to no avail.

“You would do well to save your strength.” She waved a hand in front of her from head to toe and was suddenly clad in fire-engine red leather pants, matching bustier and boots.

“You can’t leave me here like this.”

“I can and I will and you will like it.”

“LaMia…” He uselessly pulled against his cuffs again and then thought about what she’d said, that he needed to save his strength. Maybe he did need to and should, but…damn it! “Let me out of these shackles!” he shouted.

LaMia wielded that fist again and a strip of duct tape appeared over his mouth.

Mateo roared behind it.

“I would leave it off since, as I told you, there is no one around to hear your cries.

However, you will not protect yourself, so I must do it for you before you ravage your voice and make yourself hoarse.”

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Gee, thanks.

“You are welcome.”

I know you’re listening to me, LaMia, listen to this: don’t leave me here alone like
this...Please.

It pained him to say that last word, as if he had completely capitulated, but since demands and logic hadn’t worked, perhaps a little apology would. She didn’t need to know he didn’t mean it. He would never mean it, would never beg…

“I am sorry, Mateo. I... have no choice.”

She actually sounded contrite and this would have made him feel better, except that his arms and legs felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets.

LaMia went back to him, got up on her tiptoes to tenderly kiss each cheek in turn then cupped his face and pulled him forward so that she could plant a soft kiss on his forehead.

He watched as she took several steps back, thought he was braced for anything—an electrical jolt from the collar, a blindfold, the rack—but what she did next was far worse than any of these.

She disappeared in a flash and whirl of glowing green light.

Left alone, bound and gagged and totally helpless.

Oh, God, I am well and truly fucked.

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LaMia made it downstairs to the ground floor and outside the warehouse with one thought dogging her every step: Mateo hated her.

She knew and accepted this fact for she could not prevent it, just as she could not prevent this insidious feeling of tenderness and munificence pervading her soul and…

Goddess! She did not want to think it since it was a travesty of all that she held holy and dear to her heart but…She loved him.

Impossible! Completely insane and not within an Inanna’s realm, but the facts were there, staring her in the face. She could try to deny it as much as she wanted, but denying would not change her feelings or make them go away.

Had she loved Manny and Julian Diaz, too?

She’d had tender feelings for each man, but certainly nothing like the overwhelming affection and sexual attraction she had for Mateo.

He was her slave who had taken the supreme liberty to call her Mia. And rather than his impudence filling her with righteous indignation, it filled her with a warm feeling of desire.

No one had called her Mia since her grandmother had. Hearing the moniker flow from Mateo’s sensuous lips in that deep, sexy baritone as if he had been calling her by it all his life, tightened her heart in her chest as only the news of her parents’ death had done so far, decades and decades ago.

Oh, he was dangerous, far more dangerous than any Sebitu she had faced on the battlefield, his allure veiled by earnest eroticism, sinister in its very purity and unaffectedness.

At least in battle she knew what she was up against. She was a trained soldier, trained to fight and kill the enemy. How could she kill a concept, or a feeling? Did she really want to kill this feeling if it meant distancing herself from Mateo?

Yes,
datma,
yes! She had to keep her distance. This had been her main reason for keeping him bound while they had mated. She knew if she had given him his freedom, if he had held her, 49

Gracie C. McKeever

touched her as he wanted to—when she had been at her most vulnerable, the most vulnerable state in which any Inanna could find herself—she would have shattered.

She knew this without a doubt, for during those brief moments when he had grasped her hips with his powerful hands, his elegant long fingers holding her in place against his pelvis, she had been so close to weeping, it had frightened her.

These were human emotions, human reactions! She should not be feeling these emotions, this
sympathy
and tenderness. These feelings were transgressions against all that she held dear, against a belief system under which she had been functioning since before she had reached Inanna maturity.

LaMia could almost see now how Genesis had fallen under the spell of the
cambion
Alex Ryan. If he was anything like the human male, Mateo Diaz, so tempting and ripe, then LaMia understood her Sister’s obsession with the humans and preservation.

At least Alex was half-Inanna, an abomination granted, but he did have the blood of superior beings running through his veins.

And Mateo? He was just a simple human who had managed to weave himself into the very fabric of all that she was in less than twenty-four hours. He had bewitched and seduced her with his intellect and inner strength until she did not know how she had survived for so long without him in her life, until she did not know where she began and he ended.

Was it just the spirit-boost that attracted her and made her weak for him? Or was it more, something deep in his heart and soul that called to her heart and soul?

She knew of Inanna who searched the Great Above looking for that special
one
, that bond mate to complete them, much as humans searched for their soul mates.

Her parents had firmly believed in the concept of soul and bond mates, said they had not felt complete until they had found each other.

She used to wonder at the myths, wonder whether there was someone in the Universe that the Goddess had made especially for her.

LaMia knew the answer to this already; she was just still in denial. She had left her someone back at her loft bound and gagged and enraged with his captor for making him come so hard and in such an unaccustomed and unorthodox manner that his psyche was teetering on the sheerest thread between acceptance and refusal even now.

Shasta!
Why could he not be Inanna? Why in all of
An
would the Goddess send her a human, one of the lowest of life forms in the Universe, with whom to fall in love?

Did she truly believe this anymore, that he was one of the lowest of life forms? Did she believe it about any of his species? How could she when faced with all the many intoxicating and unpredictable facets that made up Mateo Diaz? How could she believe a species that could produce such an exciting, fascinating and truly unique individual could be anything close to the lowest of anything?

Mateo was brave, intelligent, resilient and strong. He was everything she could ever ask for in a bond mate, a perfect complement to her warrior’s soul. He was everything she had been unconsciously looking for in her life, all the hopes and dreams to which she had never wanted to give a name, a dream come to sleek, tall and handsome life.

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Predator’s Salvation

He was also brazen, rebellious, stubborn and willful beyond belief, and she knew that these last four were what made him the most attractive to her.

The situation was intolerable and going over it again and again was getting her nowhere, taking her in the same circles with which she had been walking around the neighborhood where she had made her home for the last year.

The walk was supposed to have cleared her head, but LaMia was more confused now than she had been when she had left her loft. She was more confused than when she had left her sl…no, she could not think of Mateo as a slave any longer. He had long since ceased to be anything so mundane and subservient. Even bound and gagged he wielded more power over her than any Inanna assembly member lowering the gavel on her exile sentence, or any Sebitu interrogator assigned to torture essential Inanna battle strategies out of her.

She was in no shape to discipline him and she knew it, but discipline him she must, discipline him she would. She could not let him get away with disrespecting her, would not have been a good Mistress if she did. She would not have been a good Inanna.

LaMia stopped suddenly and glanced up at the nearest street sign. She barely recognized the street name as one located in SoHo, not far from where her loft in TriBeCa was located, an area dominated by quaint, narrow cobblestone streets and converted lofts.

This early on a Saturday, there were not too many pedestrians on the street, which served LaMia’s purposes just fine as she did not want to waste another minute mulling over what she wanted to do. She needed to take action and just do it before she lost her nerve.

Imagine her, clever huntress, relentless soldier, and proud royal driven to nervousness by a mere human being…a human being named Mateo Diaz, of course.

She knew she was taking a chance using her power in public, deserted streets or not. She did not want to telegraph her actions to any stray Inanna in the vicinity, but she needed to get back to Mateo as soon as possible. She had something unpleasant to do and she wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. She was sure that Mateo would concur and be grateful for her return.

LaMia glanced both ways before stepping into the recess of an abandoned warehouse.

She quickly energized her spirit light with a wave of both hands in front of her until she was surrounded in its luminous green vortex and flashed from the street.

* * * *

This information had only been gained through the most gargantuan effort of reading what little residual psychic energy LaMia had left behind during her partial shapeshift. Had Mara been Inanna, she would have attuned naturally to the woman’s signal, could have tracked the Inanna, much easier, if not necessarily more accurately.

As the situation stood now, Mara had suffered a substantial power drain in her efforts to find LaMia and LaMia’s prey. In addition, she had been so obsessed with her hunt that she had not stopped to feed in a couple of days.

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She needed sustenance and soon so that she would be at optimal fighting condition if she were to have a chance against the Inanna, but first—

Mara watched her nemesis now with great curiosity as LaMia stepped into an alcove and used her spirit light to teleport out of the area.

No!

Mara stepped out of the shadows and ran across the street as the last of LaMia’s emerald-green backwash evaporated around her.

She inhaled the sickening spicy-sweet scent of what was left behind by the Inanna and slammed her fist into the sandstone wall of the alcove, leaving a fist-sized dent as sandlike quartz grain and lime showered down onto her black leather-booted feet.

Goddess, LaMia was growing careless in her mature years to use her powers in broad daylight the way she had just done. True, the streets were nigh on uninhabited, but it was still a foolish mistake for the Inanna to flash out of sight like that.

Which led Mara to a couple of very important conclusions: either the effects of her exile had turned LaMia Enlil feeble-minded, or the Inanna had fallen and fallen hard for the human male. Mara was inclined to believe the latter. There was no other explanation for such sloppy behavior unless reckless emotions were involved.

She had nothing against emotions as a rule, just thought that there was a time and a place for all of them. Her time and place for emotions other than anger and hate had passed. Her bond mate had been taken away from her. It did not mean, however, that she did not recognize the signs of blind infatuation and bond mating in another.

Ishara! What gave LaMia the right to find her bond mate and be happy when Mara was bereft of hers? What gave LaMia the right to be content? Whether it be with a human or Inanna, Mara did not care. She just knew that a bond between LaMia and the male she had abducted the evening before could not stand. She would not allow it.

Mara had missed her chance to intercept the Inanna just now, but did not doubt that she would get another chance and soon. She had found LaMia once; she would find her again.

* * * *

Alex flung the door open to see his great-grandmother in a passionate embrace with Tenebrion of Gaiam.

He was not surprised. All of Emsharra and Gaiam knew about the love affair, one that had simmered unquenched for centuries before the Alliance and New Regime had allowed Emsharra’s Highest and Gaiam’s Supreme to come together as potential bond mates.

Alex was looking forward to the handfasting announcement like everyone else, but until then he had other pressing matters to talk about with Nahemah.

He bowed at the waist, did not miss the protective way Tenebrion held one of her hands with one of his and massaged her shoulder with his other. “Apologies Highest Nahemah, but I have to speak with you. It’s of an urgent nature.”