Crucible of Fate

but mostly it was just them. Mates.
    I bolted from the porch, but Logan caught my arm before I could reach my car.
    “Are you all right?” he inhaled. “You smell like you’re hurt.”
    It was just my heart, though; I wasn’t bleeding.
    “Domin?”
    I cleared my throat. “Your brother is fucking a yareah in his room. You better take care of that, my semel.”
    His eyes widened, and I saw the anger and embarrassment flood his face.
    “I mean, we both know Talon Danvers is a whore, but still… under your roof?”
    Logan ran up the steps into the house, and I was almost free. Except for Jin.
    “What’s wrong with you?” He sounded worried.
    “Koren is screwing Talon Danvers in his bed.”
    His eyes got huge. “But you were waiting for him to get home.”
    “I was,” I said, and I got in my silver Gran Turismo and drove away.
    “Domin!”
    Back in the present, I realized, as I had the day I left for the sepat with Logan, that I didn’t need to say good-bye to Koren. There was nothing left between us.
    “I think someday you’re going to find someone who absolutely transfixes you,” I said.
    “I already have,” he said, furrowing his brow as he reached for my face.
    My head swiveled as Jin and Crane and Kabore walked into the room, followed by several servants.
    “You must eat and drink again, my lord,” Kabore announced, snapping his fingers at everyone, directing them. “And you, ex , move away from my lord.”
    Koren clenched his jaw, but he got off the bed as my steward swept forward, his shiny black knee-high boots clicking on the stone tiles as he rushed to my bedside.
    “Now, my lord, shift and eat. We’re all here, and the moment you regain your strength, we will go and find your mate.”
    “Yeah,” Crane murmured. “What he said.”
    I took a breath. “I have to get to Yuri.”
    “Of course you do.” Jin’s eyes glowed quicksilver. “He’s your mate.”
    Yes, he was.
     
     
    T HEY fell asleep around me, all piled onto the bed I normally shared only with Yuri. I would have to give orders to have the bed stripped and the linens washed while I was gone. If my mate smelled Koren Church on the sheets, he would annihilate me. I sighed at the thought. Yuri being possessive of me, when no one else had ever been, never failed to arouse me.
    I missed him, I wanted him beside me. I was hurt and I needed to rest, but even more, I needed my mate. His touch on my skin would be so good.
    We had fought the night before he left. I had ranted and raved, and when he had defended me, even though I was telling him how horribly I was failing—he was always my staunchest supporter—I had launched myself at him only to be grabbed and thrown up against the wall.
    I was strong, but Yuri was stronger, bigger, and had easily fifty pounds of muscle on me in human form. In my werepanther form, I would have had the upper hand, but that was not what I wanted. His might, a display of it, was what I craved.
    “You try my patience, my semel,” he rumbled in my ear, holding me tight with a hand around the back of my neck, pressing my cheek hard against the stone wall, his knee pushed between my thighs, parting my legs.
    I shuddered under his power exerted over me because only Yuri knew, no other lover ever suspecting, even Koren, that my desire to submit was just as strong as my need to dominate. It was absolutely necessary for me to relinquish control so that my mind could finally, just for a moment, rest.
    The shirt I wore was torn away, swept to the floor in tatters. He licked up the side of my neck to behind my right ear and made my knees go weak even as I ordered him to get off me.
    “You don’t want me off you,” he taunted, biting down hard into the tender skin. “Do you, my semel?”
    I almost came.
    When he shoved me forward, my groin forced to the wall as he rubbed against my crease, grinding, pushing, I demanded that he get on the bed and put his ass in the air.
    “No, that’s not what my mate needs.”
    The restraints Yuri had hammered into the wall were freed from where they were hooked behind a curtain on the left and another on the right. He had put the bolts into the wall himself, secured heavy silver chains to them, and finished them with thick manacles. He had then covered the shackles from any prying eyes that might ever enter our private rooms. The benign swath of silk that draped over the shackles was dark midnight blue.
    He unhooked the first and I heard it, the scrape of metal