Page 29 of Bad Moon Rising
He wrapped her hair that she’d secured into a ponytail around his hand and craned her head back. Oh my God, he was coming in to kiss her. A shudder passed through her.Please. Do it.
He didn’t make contact but whispered, “I’ll make you forget.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant he’d use magic or something else entirely. The certainty he’d annihilate the memory completely made her drunk with desire to have it. “I have to do this.”
“I know,” he said unevenly as he released her hair.
She sauntered back to Dom. With a lean into him, she touched her lips to his. A flash of an image of him in a brilliantly lit room with a brunette woman who lunged and sliced his neck. He probably didn’t want to know this.
Then she realized Dom had frozen. She arched a few millimeters away and whispered, “Whatever I saw remains secret. To do a believable kiss requires participation.”
Her fingers cupped the back of his head as her lips returned to his. Then she kissed him, but imagined Roman. Dom’s dick pressed tight against her, but even that didn’t make it a fuckable kiss. She fully channeled every ounce of desperation to be with Roman with a fantasy of being hard against the wall, his chest pressing into hers.
“Enough.” Dom thrust her away from him. Face ashen, he blinked rapidly for a few moments before wiping a hand across his forehead to remove sweat.
Desire is power, a male voice echoed inside her head. A memory from her past of someone?A male who desires you will do anything for a taste. Anything. Because of what you are.
That could refer to either the lycan or the magic, or both.
Dom put his hand on her forehead and closed his eyes. “Your last memory…your only memory. You wanted this, the amnesia. More than anything in your life, you wanted to forget. Remembering was dangerous. Still is dangerous. You warned yourself not to try to remember. There’s a feel of hypnosis, which might be why you can’t remember your species. I wonder if you did both hypnosis and the drug to ensure you forgot your past? Only, hypnosis is unpredictable, and as a side effect of forgetting your past, you forgot you’re lycan.”
Dom flipped a hand, and they were back in the medical office.
Roman looked like he was about to pop a vessel in his forehead. He panted like a wild animal with his mouth open and canines on display.
“You don’t want to fight me, lycan. She doesn’t want me. I don’t want her. The power of that was her channeling you and me channeling someone else. It had nothing to do with anything between the two of us. I swear to all gods of the universe that neither she nor I will ever do that again.” Dom took a step away from her and addressed Roman. “You’re the fucked one. Not me.”
“Do you want to know what I saw of you?” she asked Dom.
“Perhaps someday. Not today.” He sobered and said to her, “Your magic will work when you need it most. Someday when you figure out what’s going on, you’ll require training to re-learn everything. Just remember the lengths you went to in order to forget. We’re done.” In a blink, he was gone.
Chapter Seven
Roman set his tactical go-bag on the old metal desk in the middle of the repository that acted as the brothers’ headquarters. Rusty scratches covered the entire gray-painted desktop. The place reeked of the mold from decades of underground occupation mixed with something minty, which was Gerard’s failed attempt at deodorizing.
Confiscated relics from the past four centuries littered the room’s tables, shelves, and a few glass cabinets. A locked bulletproof, tempered glass case housed objects like the cursed Burnholm amulet, which he and his brothers lifted off a demon-possessed woman in Stockholm forty years ago. Also in the case was a Curmsun disc—a pure gold Viking relic, which would inflict upon any who touched it a one-way ticket to hell. He squinted at the cabinet, not seeing the disc through the glass door. Blood pounded in his ears while he shifted around in front of the case and angled to see if it fell to the bottom. Where the hell was it?
He removed the protective wards on the case and unlocked it to put the newly recovered vial inside. An inspection of all shelves and corners found no disc.
A hasty search of nearby tables that housed a jumble of jars stuffed with oddities such as a mummified foot, jeweled viper fangs, and a box of silver bullets yielded nothing. He rifled through dusty shelves and looked in the file cabinets. Not there.
Only he, his brothers, Gerard, and the king had access to this room. Of all items to mess with, the disc wasn’t one. It had taken months to track down and contain the first time.
The witch who cast their blood curse was the king’s second or third cousin. Maybe she’d been granted access down here and had been pilfering things? He hadn’t seen her since that fateful day decades ago, certainly never down here.
No one touched the relics. If he could, he’d destroy every one of these terrifying items, but no one on the planet knew how. Therefore, they remained here, locked away far beneath London.
A printed page sat on the desk.R and F,it started. He skimmed to the sign off, confirming it was from his brother, Ky. Gerard must’ve typed up the transcript of Ky’s phone call.
OFF TO ANKARA. RIYADH ISN’T THE ONLY DEAD-END CASE. CLOSE ONE.
Roman folded and tucked the message in his front pants pocket. When they had messages that were okay for public consumption, they called them in from a public phone. All refused non-burner cell phones out of concern that they might be tracked. Ky, their second-youngest brother, had been sent on a separate mission to Turkey. Which was odd, since normally they stayed together, with Gerard’s blessing—all the better to protect each other.
“Close one” didn’t imply a narrow escape. It was their code that meant the note was deceiving. He didn’t want anyone other than his brothers to know he wasn’t off to Ankara. Roman had to puzzle out where in the world Ky went and why the secrecy.
He sent a quick email on the computer in the office to Flynn, asking him to move south and track Ky. They’d meet up tomorrow.
Weaponry from all ages and nationalities covered the far wall in a haphazard display, all of it functional, not museum quality. A hundred or more ammo boxes sat stacked against the opposite wall. Roman snagged two cases of 9 mms and tossed them in his bag.
