Moonlight's Ambassador (Aileen Travers Book 3)(6)

I shut the door and shuffled back to my couch. I collapsed onto it. "Who are you talking about?"

"Don't try to lie to me. I smelled her on your landing. I know she came here."

I made a whimpering sound. Why couldn't the big, bad werewolf just shut up and leave me in peace? Couldn't he see that I was in no shape to deal with his shenanigans?

"She's not here," Sondra said, appearing from the hall that led to my bedroom. She moved with an almost feline grace through my apartment, which was funny since she was a wolf. Her hair was a curly mess around the feral beauty of her face.

Brax leaned down, trying to use his standing position and general badassery to intimidate me. Most days that would work. Today, I was just too tired to feel anything beyond the smallest spurt of concern. Then that too was gone. Even now, I could feel the allure of sleep sucking me back down.

"Where's Caroline?" he growled.

"You're her alpha. You tell me." I gave him a sleepy smile. "Guess you wish you'd been a little more forthcoming when I needed you to. Tit for tat."

He stared at me for a long moment. He wasn't handsome, not in the traditional way. He'd never be on a billboard or featured in a magazine. He was rough around the edges, like a really sexy mountain man—one capable of changing into a wolf and ripping your throat out at a moment's notice. He had a presence to him, a way of demanding attention anytime he was in a room. Right now, he was trying to use that same sense of charisma to get answers from me.

The pixies landed on either side of my shoulders, Inara haughty and amused, while Lowen had an implacable expression on his face. Brax eyed the two of them with a look of distaste before whirling and sending my coffee table sliding across the room with a well-placed kick.

"Rude animal," Inara said with a moue of disgust.

I patted next to her, mainly because she managed to evade the pat. "Shh, don't upset the alpha. You wouldn't like him when he's upset."

I realized what I just said and snickered.

"What's wrong with her?" Sondra asked, watching me with fascination.

"Nothing’s wrong with her," Inara snapped. "She's just tired."

"This isn't a game, Aileen. You need to tell me where she is right now before someone gets hurt." Brax paced the small space, running a hand through his hair and making it stand upright for a moment.

"Did I hear you right? Were you just threatening one of my vampires?" a silky voice asked from my open door.

I cracked one eye open from where it had drifted shut and glared at the newcomer. "Does nobody respect a person's private space anymore?"

Both men ignored me. Liam stepped into the room, his enforcers at his back. A vampire several centuries my senior, Liam was a dragon given human form. He moved with the grace and confidence of a predator at the top of the food chain. Every movement he made held the potential for violence even as it looked like it belonged in a dance.

He had a maturity about him that said he'd been turned somewhere in his early thirties—something I envied him for. Who wanted to be stuck in their mid-twenties forever? He had dark hair and electric blue eyes that had a habit of seeing right down to the very core of a person, stripping away their paltry defenses. His cheekbones were sharp and his jaw stubborn, but his lips were utterly soft and kissable as I'd discovered during the one and only time I'd ended up kissing him. I claimed the distraction of my first blooding as the reason. He was the thorn in my side that just kept digging deeper.

"Hey there, baby ass-kicker, you're looking kind of rough," Nathan, his enforcer, said with a playful smile on his face. He was light where Liam was dark and acted like a flirtatious frat boy. I'd seen him kill, though, and knew he was every bit as deadly as everyone else in this room.

"I'm gonna kick all your asses as soon as I have my energy back." I gave up and let myself collapse on the couch, falling sideways.

"Aw, it's cute that you think that."

I made a grunt of argument. It was all I could manage with my current level of exhaustion.

"What are you doing here, Brax?" Liam asked. He moved with the grace of a tiger, beautiful and deadly, and oh so distracting.

"Your vampire is hiding one of our pups," Brax said.

Liam flicked a quelling glance my way. That would have normally made my night—I lived for pissing him off—but right now the effort was too much. I really just wanted him to go away and take all these other trespassers with him. He jerked his head and Eric, his other enforcer, strode for the hallway leading to the rest of the apartment.

"You won't find her," Sondra called after him, posting herself at the mouth of the hallway. "She's long gone."

Eric returned in moments and shook his head, confirming Sondra was right. She folded her arms and leaned back. All eyes turned to me.

"You're sure she was here?" Liam asked, fixing me with a stare.

"Her scent stops right outside the door," Brax responded.

I met their stares with as much energy as I could muster.

"I don't think you understand the severity of what is happening here," Brax began.

My eyes drifted closed as the conversation continued around me. I woke with a start, the taste of life and decadence on my lips. A weight pressed hard on my chest—Liam holding me down. One of my legs had curled around his. His eyes flared briefly as he finished licking the wound on his wrist.