Chapter 29

Lucianus

I left her breathless and sated that night, but I was anything but. No matter how deep I buried my cock in her body and made her cry out in pleasure, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Just the taste of her pleasure, even without the mate mark, had been enough to make me want more. It was like the forbidden fruit of immortality that could drive someone to madness.

My wife was dead, yet I could have her in some ways through this woman. Perhaps I should have stayed the course and refused this course of action. It would have been for the best, but it was too late now.

I could not kill her; thus, I would have her in every way that I could not have my wife. I would simply have to accept that her death would do nothing but further irritate me in the end.

I figured out that Salt Lake City was several hours by human transportation away from the place where we met again, but there was a portal in my world that would take me there in a little under a few moments. I stopped to check in on the castle and how everyone was recovering before returning to the human world.

Henri had regained consciousness, but he was still healing slowly, as were the rest of them. The sight of them only made me angrier.

It took a day to find where the dean lived through the familiar network Ilya had set up over the past few months. It was a sprawling house overlooking a cliff that looked tackier than any building I had seen before.

I entered the house silently and drifted until I found him on the balcony. He turned as I stepped onto the veranda. He trembled and went pale as he looked up at me.

“Y-You—”

He looked terrified when I grabbed him and lifted him from the ground. “No! Wait! I-I can pay you!”

I rolled my eyes and dropped him down the cliff. His body bounced and crumpled below. I had missed the further drop, so he simply landed harshly on his leg, breaking it. I jumped down to him as he lifted his head.

“W-What are—”

I lifted him up again and turned him over, angling his head down to the landing below, and released him. He cried out. His bones crunched as he landed, yet he lived.

I dropped him again and again until he reached the bottom of the ravine. I drifted to stand in the opening and listen to the last groans of his life as his heart stopped. The scent of his blood tainted the air. Before I returned to his house and searched his records. He was a man not in touch with his era, as the thing on his desk seemed ancient and out of use.

A computer is what Ilya would call it. I tried to turn it on, and the screen glitched. I ignored it and started looking through the drawers. One of the drawers was locked. I hummed and went down to the man’s corpse to check for hidden keys.

There were several. The key to the drawer of his desk was a bit damaged, but it opened the drawer. Inside were a lot of folders, all of them marked with various codes. I opened one of them and found a bunch of information about a young woman I didn’t recognize.

As I kept looking, I realized that all the files were of young women who all seemed to attend the same place. They all seemed young, and there were several notes in their files.

Black Tape 5. Blue Tape 3.

I didn’t know what those things meant, but it didn’t matter. If I had to guess, these were other women he either planned to harass or had already harassed. The most recent of these files held a picture of the woman with my wife’s face.

Trinity was her name. My stomach churned. Guilt and desire bloomed in me. It was providence. It had to be that she had a name so similar to my wife’s while bearing her face. Even if it wasn’t. It didn’t matter.

I had marked her as my mate. Her life, her passion, her pain, and everything else that made her was mine. It didn’t matter where she was. I would find her. The fact that this man thought he had the right to touch what was mine meant he deserved a more painful death than I’d given him.

The hospital she worked at, attached to her school, barely had ten psychiatrists. She was a part of some program that I wasn’t completely clear about, but it took no time to find her.

The women at the front desk were helpful, and it seemed that they were overrun with patients, so no one asked much about why I was there. They took my documents and forced me to sign a bunch of forms that meant nothing to me. I was informed that because she wasn’t a real psychiatrist, the visit would go mostly undocumented and be free.

When she entered the room, I felt my lust stirring. I wanted to have her again. To shove her up against the wall and drink from her sweetness as I took her body. She would be sweet and pliant, melting under my touch and twisting in the sheets the way she had been before.

At least, that is what would happen soon enough. As she sat down and considered what I might need, I found myself wondering how best to end this charade when the police knocked on the door. The police officers that took her away were irritated more for their apparent rudeness than anything. When she came back and explained everything, I couldn’t help but sneer at her feeble attempt to change the subject.

“People like the dean are filth among humans and should be damned,” I scoffed. “The police should be investigating crimes that actually harm humanity.”

Her lips twitched. “Are you religious?”

I went quiet. “I was… once.”

Back when my wife was alive, I did. Back then, I believed the Moon Goddess would guide us to a true victory, but not now. The Moon Goddess was a vicious creature of the night, the progenitor of all werewolves, but she cared no more for her children than most humans cared for theirs.

“Your answer to my question seems too simple,” I said.

“Defeated.”

She gave me a thin smile. “It is hard not to be defeated when you have so much against you. But I don’t think you could understand that.”

“Perhaps,” I conceded.

I had as much money as I needed to operate in the way I wanted in the human world. We had half-breeds living in the human world for eons, pooling resources and cultivating pack slaves in less violent ways than what I preferred.

What I did not have now, I could steal or con from these worthless humans. In my world, I was as close to a king as one could get in a werewolf society. Even the royals envied me for the size of my territory and the raw power I had as an Alpha.

“About your past,” she said. “When did these thoughts start?”

I went quiet. It was hard to admit it, but if my plan to seduce her, to keep her, was going to work, it would be easier to simply answer her question.

“When my wife died.” Her eyes widened.

“How long were you married?”

“Not long enough,” I said, staring at her. “But… I imagine any man who loves his wife would say the same…”

I gave her a simplified version of my relationship with Trinitia, amazed that thinking her name did not come with the same sting it used to. We were happy while she was alive. We might have had a rough start because of the amount of time it took Trinitia to acclimate to the noble lifestyle.

Perhaps that was a sign that I was truly taking to making Trinity her replacement. I could see in her eyes that she was empathizing with me. Was she married? Had she lost her husband before I’d taken her? I didn’t ask. There would be time for that.

She asked me other questions about my dreams, about my rushes of fury, and I seemed to relax more and more.

“It seems that you are simply struggling with your grief,” she said. “Maybe you had a psychotic break, but I’m not licensed to prescribe medication. The best I can do is counsel you.”

“That’s fine.”

She nodded. “You should arrange another session with the front staff whenever you want.”

I nodded and left before I felt the urge to lunge for her and bite her. The scent of her skin and the memory of the taste of her sweetness were making it harder and harder.

Before I left, I turned to her with a wry smile. “About your money problem.”

She frowned. “What about it?”

“If you find yourself unwilling to work for spare change any longer, find me.”

Her eyes widened, and I left.