Rampant, Volume 2 by Amy Lane

Author:Amy Lane [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy
ISBN: 978-1-63477-182-5
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Bracken: Wants and Needs

ANDRES WAS the last man I’d kissed on the mouth.

Before my bonding with Cory—which I wouldn’t take back, even if I could—I had, in Cory’s words, slept with anything that moved. Male, female, or anything in-between.

I’d enjoyed men in my bed, and Andres had been a particularly aggressive lover—a thing most people wouldn’t know lurked underneath his urbane exterior.

It was a thing Cory knew.

One blood exchange, one frenzied kiss, and Cory and I had been left hanging with that chapter of our lives unexplored. Judging by the expression on her face, she was not nearly as excited as I was to have that book reopened.

“So,” she said, her forehead wrinkled and an unexpectedly wounded look in her murky eyes, “why are you here? Did, uhm—” She swallowed. “—did Green send for you?”

Orson’s eyes widened—he was obviously surprised. “No, little Goddess—this was, in fact, Rafael’s idea. He… he seemed to feel as though a neutral party here to enforce your ruling would make it easier for people to obey.”

“In other words, he thought Andres’s presence might stop an all-out war,” I said thoughtfully. Cory’s eyebrows went up.

“Dammit, that’s not fair! One guy. One gnarly pedophile—that’s all we want. Does this really have to be an international incident?” The pleasant, happy glow that had brightened her pretty-plain features when we’d been alone together dimmed abruptly. Her freckled forehead seemed to have developed a permanent scrunch, and her full lips were pulled in and pursed.

It hit me then, how much pressure she had put on herself—and how uncertain she was that our actions the night before had been the right ones.

“We couldn’t have let them live,” I said quietly. If anything, her expression hardened to galvanized steel.

“I know that,” she replied. “I know it.”

Orson was the alpha of the San Francisco area because he was known for being ruthless in the boardroom—a shark of a businessman, yes, but not a gladiator who shed actual blood. So he was almost titillated when he said, “Okay, I give, who’d you kill?”

“Rafael’s enforcer,” she grumbled. “And the—” Her face worked, and she turned and spat, having no words for this particular person. “—who attacked Green.”

“Puta,” Katy said from behind us. “Sometimes it just sounds nastier when you say it in Spanish.”

Cory turned around and grinned at her friend over her shoulder. I had heard the three of them chattering as they’d knit and I’d napped. It had been comforting, like the constant sounds of people in and out at home. It was too quiet here—beyond the occasional ocean sound of the distant cars on the causeway, there wasn’t even any breeze to stir the pine trees overhead. Even the boats out on the water had a void, echoing, alien sound.

Her look at Katy was almost nostalgic for the familial comfort of home, and my heart ached—all of that quiet, and there was still something weighing terribly on her. Even in this godless heat, I could see the waves of tension that had begun their slow burn from her body as Orson pulled up.

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