I swear to the Goddess, I don’t think I’d ever met a woman as beautiful or as sexy as she was, and I had met my fair share of individuals. Effie stood out, though. Like a vibrant, exotic flower. A delicate, beautiful treat. I could literally smell how good she would taste from just scenting her, and I knew I would be fighting the constant urge to bite her neck, marking her as my mate, until she let me. Let me mark her as mine.
I knew it would calm down my wolf to some extent. Maybe. I imagine I would never fully be unconcerned about Effie again. I had met her moments ago, only spotted her over an hour ago, and I was already terrified someone would take her away from me. As if I had ownership over her. Maybe it was because I hadn’t bitten her yet? Then again, I would probably still want to bite her neck again and again after marking her, especially if I was buried deep inside of her, hearing my name on her lips. I wanted to bite, kiss, and touch every part of her. Cover her in our scent so she could be ours.
“She is ours.”
I startled slightly, my wolf’s growl causing me to freeze as I realized he was actively communicating with me. I mean, I knew it was possible, but he had never done so before, so it was shocking to say the least. I looked down at my phone as I felt the nervousness infiltrate both of us at her lack of response.
“Not yet.”
His snarl at my mental remark about our possessiveness over her wasn’t one I could even be pissed at. She wasn’t ours… yet. But she needed to be someone’s, and she sure as hell was going to be mine.
Plus, someone as tiny and delicate as Effie shouldn’t be in the world by herself. She was like this sexy little glass doll that I wanted to protect from shattering while running my hands over the curves I could see pressing against her worn jeans. My fingers twitched, resisting the urge to go find her so I could just grip her hips and feel how good it would feel to hold her like that. Fuck. I could imagine how she would look bent over as I filled her up again and again, her ass bouncing…
Fuck. My. Life. I was so fucked.
How I could feel protective over her while wanting to absolutely shatter her body while fucking the hell out of her was beyond me. I needed to get back to campus. I needed to act now, to make it crystal fucking clear who she belonged to. I would just have to hope that she would understand why a man she just met today was acting like a certifiable psychopath.
“Julian,” a familiar voice called out to me. I turned my gaze to the man in question, the reason I wasn’t on campus with Effie to begin with. Jogging up to the expensive truck, I leaned forward, putting my arms on the rolled-down passenger window as I met Caedmon’s arrogant and expectant expression.
Such a bastard. Always. Honestly, if he wasn’t someone I still considered a brother, after all the shit he pulled… I would probably, most likely, for sure, kill him.
“Let’s make this fast,” I determined.
He rolled his eyes, unlocking the door as I slid into the car. He sped down the narrow road, parking in a lot that was off the lake just outside of campus. My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out, smiling as her nickname popped up on my phone. It also helped that we were closer to campus, which meant we were only minutes, if not seconds, away from her.
Precioso: Just got to campus, thanks for all of your help today.
So sweet. That was what Effie was—absolutely, without a doubt, sweet. Too bad I wanted more than that sweet response. The quicker I finished with this conversation, the faster I could see her in person.
“Stop smiling at your phone like an idiot.” Caedmon lit a cigarette, unrolling the window slightly as I put my phone away, not in the least put off by his behavior. He’d always been like this and probably always would be.
“Let’s get this shit over with. What do you guys want for the sixth floor of the Eclipse building?” I asked, already feeling bored with this conversation. Then again, I wasn’t positive that anything could compare to my interest in Effie. Ever. Even one of my best friends… well, old best friends.
For so long, it had been the four of us, until Caedmon decided that his father’s ‘need’ for him to make connections was more important than our friendship. Now the fucker lived on the floor above us with four others that I was still on the fence about. I had absolutely no idea what his father intended to accomplish, considering our group was already bonded, but I wasn’t going to mess with their business.
The group that Caedmon’s father had him hanging out with were mostly from overseas and considered to have more ‘influence,’ in his family’s mind, because Caedmon himself was from there. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that one of the members of that blood-bonded pack was the son of SFU’s president. Because of this, it didn’t matter to Caedmon’s father if he wasn’t really friends with him or that we were already bonded—hell, he probably wouldn’t even care that we had found our mate, most likely—because to him, the only thing that mattered was connecting with those that could further influence his social standing.
It didn’t really matter anymore, though. I knew now, literally as of today, it was a matter of days, possibly hours, until he moved back in with us, and not because of our previous friendship.
“They are willing to switch down to the fifth if they get the house this summer,” he explained lazily. “I think it’s bullshit, but whatever.”
It was bullshit.
At SFU, there were prestigious shifters that came from an array of international and national ‘royalty-like’ families that founded the supernatural community and its packs. They sent their children here because this was essentially an expensive breeding ground. It contained the best genetics, so you were expected to find your mate here while working on a degree that was somewhat useless in the scheme of the expectations your life probably contained.
When I first arrived at Silver Falls, there had been several families that had been in the process of deciding that there needed to be ‘mixed’ pack bonds created. That was when you took four male shifters and had them leave their ‘pack,’ or the breed of wolf they’d arrived with, and bonded them together so that they were a group of four different wolf species. It was a blood bond, a promise that you would share the same mate. It was for life. The four of us made up one of the blood-bonded packs.
So despite Caedmon and I being worlds apart in how we had grown up, along with our two other pack brothers, we had been selected to form one of these groups. Honestly, it wasn’t an ‘honor’ I probably deserved, considering I didn’t come from a prestigious background, a strong militia pack, or anything interesting like the others… but I was a bitten, and that was considered a lot in our world.
The goal was that there would be harmony if the alphas of these species all shared the same mate. That these mixed packs would help our community as a whole because it would allow for less separation between species of wolves and make it easier to work together. What they didn’t account for was the bullshit dominance fight between the four blood-bonded packs on campus.
So yeah, we had to put up with this stupid competition of which floor we would live in each semester, because for whatever reason, our wolves had convinced us that the sixth floor was important. It wasn’t. I honestly think the two packs were just bored and looking for something to do, and that happened to be fighting over who got the top floor.