Becoming Red (The Becoming Novels) Read online

  ‘Don’t let them get me, pup. Please ...’

  CHAPTER NINE

  He could still taste her mouth on him. With his distracted brain disengaged from motor function, the soles of his boots took the short flight of steps down to the self-contained basement apartment on auto-pilot, two at a time, scuffing the familiar, worn stone.

  He couldn’t tell if the gooseflesh raising tiny hairs on his skin was down to the chill of hitting the night air, or the residual echo of where her hands had touched, mapping the contours of his body. As he fished the keys from the breast pocket of his leathers, his hand grazed the flesh, throbbing around the hardware of his piercings, where she had tugged and twisted.

  His gaze was drawn back up to the main house and the tall windows that stretched above him, steel-grey eyes reflecting the clouds in the night sky. He wanted to know what she was doing inside. Their encounter had left him hollow, possessed by a deep, gnawing hunger that neither food nor violence would sate.

  Engaging the key in the lock, he crossed the threshold into the sparsely furnished interior. The place looked grim, illuminated only by the jaundiced glow of the street light bleeding through the cracks in the shuttered windows. About as warm and homey as a public toilet. For reasons he didn’t care to explore, the abrupt climate shift upstairs had left him feeling equally bereft. She’d looked at him like he was a monster. Smart girl.

  He breathed in the stale air of the room, hearing attuned to the scuttle of tiny scratching feet inside the walls. They said in this city you’re never more than a few feet from a rat, and yet the real pestilence was breeding right under their noses, and it was the kind of festering malignancy that made a plague-infested rodent look like the damn Easter Bunny. The darkness was lurking unseen in the black pools beneath Dublin’s Medieval walls, and it was that darkness she’d sensed in him. Connal flashbacked to the terror etched in her face as she recoiled from the wolf brand in his flesh. Recognition in her eyes. Her worst nightmare come to life, and shacked up right beneath her feet.

  His night vision was more than up to the job of navigating the darkness. For some reason, he didn’t want any more light thrown on what he was tonight. He made a path to the cramped single bedroom at the rear of the property. The place was scruffy and unkempt, with cheap, anonymous furnishings and an air of careless neglect that served to distract prying eyes and random callers. What lay behind the bedroom alcove was cleverly concealed by wood panelling as old as the house itself, a camouflage that blended seamlessly into the ancient fabric of the building.

  Connal approached the entrance to his lair with a sense of purpose. Distance from the crazy girl with the raven hair had gifted him the clarity of thought his lust-fogged brain denied him in the heat of their encounter. An incident from his past had surfaced like a bubble on the pool of his memories.

  Engaging the mechanism concealed by the ornate woodwork, the warped panel cracked open to reveal the stainless steel of the vault door behind. Deft fingers dialled up familiar combinations and the locks opened on a series of synchronised snaps, bolts sliding on smooth mechanisms, chain links slithering through their bindings like a metal serpent. The door was double reinforced steel, a foot-thick and weighing in at over a ton. Built to deflect monsters, and to contain them.

  Connal stepped inside the inky darkness and located the wall panel by touch, a series of codes closing him into the cellar space that held the familiar embrace of home. The tension across his shoulders began to unwind immediately the cramped stairwell opened out onto the expansive interior. Inhaling deep, the air down here smelled of cedar and candle wax. But still, he wore her scent on his skin. They had barely exchanged un-pleasantries, yet, even in her absence, that female dominated his senses.

  His footfalls echoed off the windowless expanse, light fixtures flickering sequentially to life until the cathedral-sized space was sketched in their candle-like glow. The industrial, brick and iron feel of the vast cellar was offset by an eclectic mix of antiques acquired over his long lifetime. Existence, not lifetime, he corrected his thoughts. You couldn’t exactly call what he had a life. Life, after all, assumed an inevitable culmination in death. Connal bypassed the heavy drapes sectioning off the various living spaces, and made for the central focal point, the huge fireplace, flanked either side by floor to ceiling oak bookcases.

  His heavy boots crushed the velvet pile of the Persian rug. Anann DeMorgan had a granddaughter who was also a Latent. Connal stroked at the corner of one eyebrow. The old witch always had played her cards close to her chest, but as secrets went? Damn. Then again, having your own flesh and blood within an ass’s roar of MacTire and his goons was a serious Achilles’ heel for her, and Nan DeMorgan didn’t do weakness. He hoped to hell she’d taken the time to prepare the girl, before throwing her to the wolves and jumping aboard the gaga train. But their little dance upstairs on the wood floor screamed otherwise. The weight of responsibility the old woman had dumped on him settled like an anvil across his shoulders. Not for the first time since she’d stroked out, he bared his teeth and cursed the day he struck his bargain with Anann DeMorgan.

  Needing something to dull his edges, he reached for a handle of whiskey from the shelf. Pulling the cork in his teeth, he necked the bottle and swallowed back a long draft, pouring the fiery, numbing torrent down his throat. Then he planted his ass on the leather couch, shrugged out of his jacket and began sifting through the cobwebbed database of his neglected memories.

  Eternity seemed a manageable thing, desirable even, until you tried to walk its endless, lonely, identical corridors. Live as long as he had, and experiences became monotone, a jumble of faded prints, each blandly indistinct from the next. But this one night, more than a decade ago, closer to two decades possibly, lit up his synapses like a splash of vibrant red paint across a blank canvas. It was her velvet coat in the hallway that nudged it to the surface of his consciousness, but the memory of that night had stayed with him for another reason. Two of them, in fact.

  The first was that he’d finally taken out that cocky bastard who went by the name of Crys. Vicious scrapper and sadistic little shit who liked to cut things. Like women. Their paths had crossed on more than one occasion, but the slippery bastard had eluded him for months. Last time they’d fought, Connal took a sizeable chunk out of his neck, but somewhere, in the thick of the fight, he’d limped his way back to MacTire and gotten himself fixed up. And this particular night in question, Crys had come back with a fever of vengeance burning up his blood, no doubt looking for payback on his ruined GQ cover prospects. Pretty boy was a vain fucker. Making shit personal was what got him killed. Connal knew revenge better than any son of a bitch walking the earth.

  He’d been carrying Crys’ decapitated head in a duffle bag, and a couple of other braincases in there for company, when he’d walked up to Nan DeMorgan’s house. Loping up the path, the heavy bag slung over his shoulder, he was feeling pretty smug after a fruitful night’s work. He’d dropped the considerable weight to the footpath while he unlatched the iron gates, taking the reprieve to roll his neck on his shoulders, working out the physical reminder that heads are the heaviest of all body parts. He stopped, mid flexion, with his own head cocked to one side, sure what he was seeing must be an hallucination, because Nan DeMorgan never, ever left her house.

  Technically she wasn’t leaving, though, she was stepping over the threshold into the hall, and she wasn’t alone. She was ushering a small figure in a red coat inside the door, her wizened hand a claw at the child’s back. For a horrible moment he actually considered the possibility that the old bird was eating children for kicks. That was a macabre thought too far, even for him, and yet all the more disturbing because it didn’t seem entirely beyond the realms of possibility.

  ‘Nan?’ Her name hung like a question mark in the air. She froze. He paused, and tried on the scenario again, attempting to tease out the logic of what he was seeing, but nothing quite fit. She hustled the small form into the hallway and snapped her hea
d around in his direction. Her expression was all shadows and jowls, dark as a low-hung thundercloud. That was the second memorable event of that night. Mercurial on her best days, that night there was a savage fury in Anann DeMorgan’s eyes he had never before witnessed, or seen since.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ She barked at him and threw a hand up to the sky, where the moon was still hanging, full in the sky. ‘Don’t you have work to be doing?’

  He hefted the bag and its heavy contents front and forward, between his legs, and moved to untie the neck of the bag. ‘Oh, I think you’ll like ...’

  She sliced off his words with a hiss.

  ‘Don’t you bring that here to my doorstep! Not now.’ She glared at his bag of hard-won trophies like they were so much dog shit, and his high deflated like a wrinkled balloon. It wasn’t like he’d expected her to fall on her knees in praise, but who else did he have to share the small victories that gave his interminable existence meaning? Generally, she mustered some enthusiasm for his efforts, especially when he’d taken down one of MacTire’s inner guard. She kept the heads, for God’s sake. Demanded them of him after every hunt. He often wondered what she did with them ... Mostly, he despised the fact that some part of him craved her recognition, the psychological pat on the head in return for bringing his quarry to her feet.

  She’d instructed him to be here, but he didn’t call her out on it, knew better than to throw matches at that pile of tinder. Ill-tempered at the best of times, tonight she was seething. So he’d shrugged it off, hefted the bag back over his shoulder and stalked off feeling like her dirty little secret. For weeks, he’d brooded, down here, in his lair, the duffle bag thrown in a corner, untouched.

  He’d studiously ignored the unusual comings and goings at the DeMorgan house: lights on in normally empty rooms, deliveries at odd times. Until one sunlit afternoon, a police car pulled up to bundle away the young girl who’d been the subject of a month long manhunt, played out in sordid detail in the gutter press. After that, Anann DeMorgan summoned him back to the house where she demanded he bleed MacTire’s men with a zeal that bordered on messianic. Somebody had seriously ruffled the old woman’s feathers and he recalled being glad he was not on the receiving end of her retribution.

  He cast his gaze up to the vaulted ceiling, locking onto the solidity of the curved iron girders, with their bolts and rivets and their patina of long-standing antiquity. Tossing back another hard draft from the neck of the bottle, he tried to fill the void that was opening up inside him, threatening to swallow him whole.

  Once again, it was her scent that reeled him back in, rising up from the ragged shreds of his shirt where they flapped, ineffectual, across his ribs. He grasped at the torn fabric, breathed her in, and the air became charged, like inhaling the aftermath of a wild, electrical storm. God, her scent reminded him of the wild poppies that used to grow in the fresh- turned soil at the edges of the arena. They captivated him, red as the blood spilled where they grew, their delicate drugging scent surrendered only when he crushed the papery petals in his rough hands.

  Connal wiped the wet residue of the spirit from his lips with the back of his hand and rose from the couch. He peeled out of his clothes, abandoning them on a scattered path that lead through the curtain-draped entrance to the bathroom. He cranked the chrome handle to the twelve o'clock position and the shower burst into hot, steaming life. Stepping beneath the spray, he allowed the pounding, wet pressure to pummel the tight muscles across his shoulders, saturating his skin, drenching the dreadlocked coils of his hair in the streaming torrent. The sound of it roared in his ears, drowning out all thoughts of anything but her. He closed his eyes and conjured up her face, imagined he could feel the weight of her gaze on him, watching him through lust-darkened, lash-framed, sapphire blue eyes. He fisted the substantial length of his erection, wrapping a large hand around the hard, veined flesh, cupping the heavy sac beneath with the other. Gripping just under the thick, blunt head, he ran the rough surface of his palm up and down the thick shaft, sliding velvet soft skin over the steel-hard core. From behind closed lids, he called up an image of her mouth, lips parted, lush and glossed. She was biting on the pad of her thumb, tense with restless anticipation. A husky moan escaped his throat. Bringing a closed fist to his mouth, he stifled the sound, canines biting down into his knuckles. He permitted himself to feel her mouth on his again, hungry, ravaging and impossibly soft and sensual. He bit down harder, hard enough to draw blood this time. Drenched muscles flexed hard, abs curling and bunching on a hiss of pleasure. His fist tightened, pumping his shaft in a slow, twisting grind, imagining himself moving inside her, slapping up against her parted thighs. With his thumb, he spread the crystal tear of pleasure that pooled at the tip of his swollen crown. His spine arched into the grip of his hand, one knee flexing up as his thigh trembled a contraction. Lips parted, the hot spray flooded his mouth. His breath quickened and with his wrist twisting over the sensitive head, he dragged down once again to squeeze the base, and felt his cock pulsing in his own grip, in time with the pounding of his heart against his ribs. Now her hand was coasting down, slipping between her breasts, to the apex of her thighs, her fingers dipping into the glistening folds of her sex and her mouth was shaping the words, commanding him ... Come for me!

  ‘Fuck. No!’ A snarl contorted his face as his instincts rebelled against the dominance of her demand, but his body was already on its knees to her. Buckling, he reached out blindly to slam a forearm flush against the wet tile, bracing himself against the shower wall as his pace quickened. Pumping furiously now, drilling down to the base, slipping up over the glistening head, he ratcheted up the tempo until his breaths were coming in hard, fevered pants. He found his free hand coasting up his abs to grip one of the hoops of metal threaded through his nipples. With a hard tug, he twisted his own flesh and cried out, a ragged, lusty rasp. His pecs tightened, the muscles standing out in corded relief, teeth buried in his lower lip as he worked that delicious friction to his head, picturing her beautiful, lush mouth now sealed around his cock. He came for her in hard, shuddering spasms, over and over, until spent and boneless, he slumped, head lolling forward on his shoulders, forehead pressed against the steamed glass of the shower wall, slowly sliding down its slick, wet surface, on a slippery, downward slope that was far beyond his control.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sunlight vanquished the shadows, a bright warmth cast down on the bare skin of her back as she waited outside the door, listening for movement beyond the threshold. Minutes dragged on and Ash ran a restless hand through her hair, shoving it into even more disarray. The fumble of a chain sounded, the click of a lock, a deadbolt being drawn ... Jeez, am I knocking at Fort Knox? ... and then the face of her neighbour appeared in the crack, cut in half by the security of the chain.

  ‘Ummm, hey. Sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘Ashling, right?’ Liath closed the door to release the chain and stepped out a little with a bright smile. ‘Is everything okay?’

  Nodding. ‘Ash ...’ She hesitated, trying to organise the thoughts in a coherent sentence. ‘Weird question, and I know you said that the dog would help dissuade this, but, does this area get hit a lot? With break-ins?’

  ‘Break-ins? No, never. There’s nothing worth taking around here, love.’ Her laughter was light, but concern shut the amusement down as her eyes caught the fear straining the lines of Ash’s face. ‘You got hit? Are you hurt? Did they take anything?’ Such an immediate change, Ash knew the woman was mentally adding security measures to a house already locked up to the max.

  ‘I’m not hurt.’ Not physically, though her head and hormones had taken a bit of a spin. ‘And he didn’t take anything. He didn’t even seem to be looking for anything.’ Nothing but her, anyway. ‘He got into the house before I even knew he was there and ...’

  ‘Oh, Pet,’ Liath grasped Ash’s hand and squeezed. ‘Have you called the Guards yet? What did he look like?’

  ‘Yeah ... ummm ...’ Ash held on
to the fingers for a moment longer before letting Liath’s hand fall with a strained smile, trying to call up details that were forever imprinted in her desire’s eye. ‘Tall, ridiculously tall, and broad, giant muscled mass of annoying ...’ A noise in the back of her throat was a scoff of irritation, remembering his arrogance, his laughter at her choice of weapon, his hands, tongue, teeth. ‘He had a little bit of a Jack Sparrow thing going on, with the dreads,’ her hands moved to her hair, twisting strands in an absent display, ‘grey eyes, like polished steel,’ Could you sound more like a romance novel? Why don’t you tell her about the size of his ‘gun’ too, while you’re at it? ‘What?’ The other woman had gone surprisingly still, her soft jade eyes regarding Ash with strange contemplation. Had she said the gun part out loud?

  Liath’s brows perked up in immaculately tweezed arches and her smile crept up with them. ‘He wasn’t a thief.’ Four words and Ash’s heart hammered up.

  ‘Oh God, he’s a drug lord or something isn’t he? Part of the Irish mafia? Do you have an Irish mafia? You know him?’ What she really wanted to ask wasn’t for polite conversation and something fanged and green-eyed was gnawing at her gut.

  ‘I know him. He minded Mrs DeMorgan’s dog for her, walked him, fed him. He helped her with a bunch of stuff. The lady didn’t get out much. She gave him a key.’ No wonder the blonde hesitated. What a thing to tell someone. That a stranger has a key to where they sleep. Looking sheepish, Liath dropped her gaze and then cast it back up, Ash’s head dipping to follow the sights as cloud-light dread tumble-weeded through her stomach. She waited for a confession. And she wasn’t disappointed.