Compelled (Shadow Beast Shifters, #5)

by Jaymin Eve

Man, if I could’ve moved at this point, I would’ve been swinging my leg like a prize fucking horse straight into his vampire balls.

It was almost as if he was trying to ferret the information from my mind, his energy seeping inside, but there were some things he just couldn’t have.

“I started to understand the true importance of the bee. You see, Earth could not exist without it, a fundamental creature that performs the most important task: creating new life. I didn’t understand until you were gone and everything suddenly felt empty. So now, it’s Bee for more than one reason.”

He brought his face close to mine. “No one touches you in the shower, Bee.” His irises were darkening, gaze burning into me, and all I could breathe was his scent.

For some messed-up reason, my chest ached at the thought of leaving this world so soon. I’d leave everyone I loved. They’d go on and live their lives and have adventures, and I would be in the afterlife wondering if any of them would ever cross to my side of the veil.

“You have a pack now,” he said in his low hypnotic tone. “This is what we do for each other, no questions asked and no need to thank. We stand together so none of us will ever fall.”

the bottle that was the same color as my dress with a single flower on the front. “That’s one of the vampire’s special elixirs,” he told me, raising his eyebrows as he met my gaze. “It should never have been in Torma.” I swallowed hard. “A vampire wine?” “Yep. They’re quite famous for it, with its hints of cherry blossom and blood.”

Well, slap me on the ass and call me a piñata. It was the same.

As I took another drink, I observed him over the rim of my glass.

Len took the empty crystal from me and turned, hopefully to get another. He was in the running for my favorite date in months, bringing me wine on tap and no horticulture or social media talks.

His hungry gaze stared down at me, and no lie, I kind of wished I still held the heavy wine glass. It might be empty, but it would have made a decent weapon.

Relying on powerful males had become a common theme in my life lately, but it needed to stop. One day soon they would all be gone, and then it would only be me left. The one I’d always relied on.

There was more bite in my tone now. Some dudes apparently needed to be hit over the head with the truth to actually hear it.

“You know your future can change at any point you want it to,” I told him. “And you are not your parents. If we don’t learn and do better, than what is the point of living at all?”

and we came together like a perfect fairytale.

A stronger chick would have hesitated—good for her. But I needed my fix. Move over licorice, there was a new obsession in town.

“Am I strong enough for this?” I asked the still closed door. “Seriously?” No one answered, thankfully, because a talking door would have been fucking terrifying.

If I was only going to have him for a short period of time, then I sure as hell wanted a hundred and fifty percent of him. Nothing less would do.

“I made a friend out here, a froden, but I had to leave it on the other side of the boulder swamp. Could you check if it’s still there and bring it across for me?” Lucien stared at me like I’d just grown two heads and started singing a different national anthem from each. “You made friends with a froden?”

Dark and electric, I could feel the particles in the air charge with his fury.

When Lucien turned back, he appeared done with this line of questioning as he lifted the sobbing vampire in his hands. Before she could make another sound, he ripped her head from her body and tossed it halfway across the damn field.

Blood bubbled from my mouth as I screamed, and the bathwater surged around us as Lucien fucked me like a vampire escaping his demons.

Water hit the tiles of the bathroom floor in time to the rhythm of our bodies crashing together. My body had been parched of life and health in that forest, and now it was drinking up everything Lucien offered.

“You killed Hattie,” I murmured sleepily. There was a brief brush of his hand against my cheek, and I could have sworn he said, “Killing her once wasn’t nearly enough,” but I was already drifting off.

I lost sense of anything else in the world. I forgot about the selection. I forgot about my near death. I even forgot about my wolf, and she was such a huge part of me that I couldn’t understand how Lucien kept doing this to me.

But I never wanted him to stop. The early pull I’d felt toward him had exploded into an obsession, and part of me knew that nothing would stop this now. Not until we crashed and burned. But I couldn’t care about the inevitability.

“Hurting me would hurt you?” Lucien didn’t mince words. “It would break me. Now, go to breakfast and eat nothing until I get there.”

“If you’ve been missing half of your soul, then you’ve been missing half of your strength.

The spark within his gaze was stronger. Speaking of something more than just his possessive nature and our sexual chemistry. With that came hope, and we all knew that if love was the most dangerous emotion in the worlds, hope was a close second.

“You burn brighter than any star I’ve ever seen.

what he’d just said meant more than any other compliment I’d ever been given. Words were usually used as weapons against me, not as gifts.

Actions that showed he cared for me and considered my feelings. If he kept this up, there was no way I could walk away from him. The gods would have to destroy me first.

“You’re not alone.”

The fact that he understood what I was feeling and sought to comfort me was almost my undoing.

“It’s not close enough,” he said, voice a hypnotic rumble. “You’ll stay here, in my house. After the end of the selection, you will be my mate, and my mate stays with me.”

I needed to climb my vampire and screw him until we were both breathless. Or dead. Whatever.

I was already acting like a damn clingy girlfriend, but… You know what, fuck that noise. There was nothing clingy or wrong about asking for clarification from the dude you were sleeping with.

If he had my body and my blood, then I deserved to know where this was going. From this day forward, I would be stronger than I ever had before.

“The library is not your damn home,” Lucien repeated his words from before, “because your home is here. With me.”

“Your blood tastes like life,” he murmured. “It tastes like energy. I can’t let you go now, Bee. If you don’t feel the same, then you’re going to have a fucking vampire following you everywhere to ensure your safety while he tries to convince you to take a chance on love. You’re part of me now.”

“You’re in here. In my blood and energy. In my cells. There’d be no point to life without you. So, yes, I am claiming you as a real mate.”

“Long before I knew the taste of your blood, you consumed my mind and thoughts. My vampire had already claimed you; the rest of my stubborn ass just had to catch up.”

“Our pack and family were destined to join. I’m starting to understand the reason I bonded with my brothers, and now I believe that Mera’s friends are the catalysts for the other mates.”

She was in my blood long before I’d tasted hers.

I would get her back and destroy every fuck who’d touched her.

“She’s alive,” I bit out. “She has to be.” If she wasn’t, I would walk into the fucking underworld to get her back.

Without my mate, the world was darkness, and I would be as well.

There was no mercy in my soul. No give or understanding. And that was if Simone was alive. If she wasn’t, the world would end today.

I’d never told her the truth because she had so much going on already, but I was never afraid of school bullies. There was a much worse one in my house.

This pain was beyond all torture, as I was burned and pierced and cut with no relief in sight. I welcomed it when the pain got too hard to handle and the darkness found me.