It takes outside forces, and the threat of losing it all, before this trio can set aside their differences and accept how much they need each other.
Remi Parascu has unearthed a traitor in the midst of the Council she oversees. Armed with evidence, on her way to request a kill order, Remi’s plane is crashed, her bodyguards are killed and she’s taken hostage. Things would be a whole lot simpler if her captor had been the traitor.
Jaguar shifter Czion Whitehall has distanced himself from his family and the woman he recognizes as his mate. There’s no way he can be with the President of the Council, so Czion walks away without ever cementing the bond with Remi. The absence of that bond makes it much easier for someone else to swoop in and take his place.
As a skin walker, able to take on the appearance of anyone, Jaxon Fenti wears the face of a man Remi can’t resist in an effort to get the name of the person who killed his brother. What Jax didn’t count on was Remi being one-third of his Trinity, and a stubborn jaguar being the one to complete their triad. Czion wants nothing to do with any of it, and Remi and Jax can’t make it without him. It takes outside forces, and the threat of losing it all, before this trio can set aside their differences and accept how much they need each other.
Reader Advisory: This book is a MMF ménage story with MM scenes. It contains scenes of dubious consent and non-consensual sex, rough sex and bloodplay.
Publisher's Note: This book is best read in sequence as part of a series.
General Release Date: 23rd May 2014
The smell registered first. Sweet, but decadent, it invaded her nostrils when she inhaled. Remi Parascu flinched. The pressure on her wrists hit her next. Even with her eyes closed, she frowned, trying to clear the fog from her brain. Something, an explanation maybe, hovered outside of her grasp. Something she should know. Something she needed to know. But what? The information remained elusive.
She shifted on whatever soft surface she lay on, but found her movements restricted. Bound hands. Bound legs. That left her midsection and head free to move. She arched her body, tried to make a sound. A muffled squeak emerged. She licked her lips and tasted cloth.
Panic threatened to ice her insides, but she shoved that aside. No time.
Despite blinking, she saw nothing and that scared her, until she turned her head and felt the blindfold. Soft against her skin. Like silk. A lover’s attention to detail? But Remi had no lovers. At least none she’d laid claim to, and the last thing she remembered was boarding a plane to Geneva. Her mind shied away from that memory. She took in another lungful of the intoxicating scent surrounding her and poked the shadowed recesses of her mind. Searching for answers. Explanations.
She watched the last few days play out behind her eyelids. Someone was attempting to dismantle the Paranormal Security Council, the organisation overseeing all Para beings in the world. They wanted to bring its members to their knees and burn the building to the ground in a pile of ash. As president of the Council, it had been her duty to ferret out the traitor within the Council. When she’d learned that person’s identity, Remi had been floored.
The betrayal, it was personal. And unexpected. A complete surprise she hadn’t gotten over when she’d packed her bags for the trip to Geneva. She’d had proof of the traitor’s crimes. Irrefutable. Her plan to present it to a few selected, and trusted, members of the Council and request the entire Death Squad be sent after the traitor had crashed and burned when her plane went down.
Despite being…who she was, her genetic make-up, she wasn’t immortal. Far from it. So why am I still breathing? If the traitor had planned to kill her with that plane crash, why was she still alive?
She gave up on attempting to free herself and cocked her head, listening for any sound. Anything to hint at where she could be and who held her captive. Most likely the traitor was behind all this, but Remi knew better than to jump to conclusions. All she had to go on was the burn of the fragrance filling her nostrils like a cloud, obstructing her breathing. No Para being she knew smelt that way. And she knew them all.
If the smell wasn’t coming from a being, where and who was the source?
She wasn’t one to give up, to sit by as a silent observer and watch things happen. But at the moment she had no choice, and the knowledge stung more than being restrained. Remi lay quietly, arms suspended over her head, legs splayed with her ankles also secured, eyes and mouth covered. The sight she must make. A sacrifice. Willing, not at all. She still wore clothes, that much she knew, but the knowledge wasn’t any consolation.
She wanted to meet the traitor face to face, confront him on his dastardly deeds, then watch as he got his just punishment. She had no qualms about sentencing him to death. He wouldn’t be the first, but he might be the first whose death she’d rejoice over. By betraying the Council, the organisation making it possible for all Para beings to be seen, to be protected and to be welcomed among the humans, he’d put them all in danger. Working alongside a human, one who expressly worked to discredit the Council, was unacceptable. Attempting to kill fellow members of the Para community without first having the act sanctioned by the Council was treason. The traitor had infiltrated the Council, stealing members’ faces, their souls in his quest for power.
All crimes punishable by death. Remi wanted to be the one to deliver the fateful blow. First though, she had to make it out alive. And she knew the group of people to ensure she did. She took another breath without grimacing at the smell this time, and cleared her thoughts. She needed to send information to Voltaire, the most receptive of the Death Squad members who would in turn update the others. A powerful being with unknown gifts, Voltaire was known in the Para community as the Death Bringer. She walked side by side with death.
Remi projected as much information as she could. She didn’t tell Voltaire who she suspected was behind the crash or the traitorous actions at the Council, but she’d bet everything she had that Voltaire and the rest of the team wouldn’t take long to figure everything out. Remi showed Voltaire what she smelt and felt—the perfumed air, the softness she now laid on and the ties that bound her wrists and ankles. Through the mind link Remi shared with all members of the Death Squad, she was confident nothing would go unnoticed. Every sound, every smell, would register with her Squad and they’d do what needed to be done.
Not for her. She wasn’t vain enough to think they’d all rush to her aid because they loved her. No. They had a traitor in their midst and as each member of the Squad found their soul mate, they’d each found something or someone else to fight for, to protect. They’d come for Remi, if only to eliminate the threat to the mates none of them had expected to find. She had no mate. There was a time when she’d thought maybe there was something more to the pulsing fever she felt whenever Czion Whitehall looked her way. But no. The powerful jaguar had got what he’d wanted one night then disappeared from her life. No communication. Nothing to say he thought of her, or wanted more than stolen kisses and barely-concealed, heated gazes.
He remained her one regret. She should have pushed harder for more. That night she’d spread her limbs for him, she could have sworn he’d felt it, the invisible threads that connected them to each other, that bound them, but he’d gotten that closed-off look on his face and walked away without a backward glance. So, no, she had no one to fight for except herself and she’d battle until the last vestiges of her strength faded away.
She wasn’t the president of the Council because of her pretty looks, although sometimes that did help things along. She’d been cultivated from her tenth birthday, by the first president of the Council himself. A bargain made by her mother to protect Remi. She doubted her mother had expected for her daughter to go all the way to the top.
Remi turned her head to the side and tried to rest. The stillness around her, mixed with the cloudy, perfumed air, lulled her into a sleep filled with orange-red flames and streams of blood.
A Caribbean transplant, Avril now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y with a tolerant spousal equivalent.
Together they raise an eccentric daughter who loves reading and school (not so much school anymore). Avril's earliest memories of reading revolve around discussing the plot points of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys with an equally book-minded mother.
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