her in place while he mated with her.
For the rest of the night, as they made their way back to Mitya’s estate, the two cats had rough sex every twenty or thirty minutes. It went on for hours. When they weren’t having sex, Dymka stayed close to her, rubbing along her sides and nuzzling her neck. His tongue lapped at the bite marks on her neck and she tried to soothe his battle wounds.
By the time they made it to the house, Jewel was exhausted and stumbling with the effort to walk. If it wasn’t for Dymka urging her forward, she would have just lain down and gone to sleep. As it was, when they got to the porch, she curled up into a little ball and put her head down on her paws.
Mitya shifted, his face grim, his mouth tight. “Ania, kotyonok, you need to shift for me.”
Too tired.
“I know.” He was patient. Already he was looking for Sevastyan. Furious that a shooter had nearly gotten to his woman and that three leopards his father had sent had attacked them. “You can’t sleep there. Just shift and I’ll take you inside to the bedroom.”
Ania did so, although he could see it was an effort and she didn’t do it well. She also, like him, needed a shower. In her case, probably a bath after to soak away soreness. He had work to do, but before that, he needed to care for her. The heat would go on for at least a week, and no matter what else was happening around them, neither Jewel nor Ania could be neglected.
13
“WE’VE got two factions coming at us,” Mitya explained. “There’s no doubt about it, although it is possible they are now working together. Lazar is making his move. He wouldn’t do it unless he was certain he had the upper hand. That means he has allies and he may have someone on the inside. We knew he was going to come after us sometime. That isn’t news. We can get back to him in a bit and decide how we’re going to handle it.”
Mitya looked around the room. These were the men he was supposed to be able to trust with his life and the lives of those he loved. He didn’t trust so easily. Fyodor, his cousin, had brought him back into the world he was most comfortable in. One of crime, deceit and treachery. Those in this room were supposed to be the ones that were solid, part of an alliance forged in hell and written in stone. Fyodor trusted each of them. Mitya . . . not so much.
Trust was earned, often through life-and-death situations. He had stepped between Fyodor, Evangeline and bullets. He’d nearly lost his life, but his cousin knew with absolute certainty that Mitya would never betray him, that he was willing to give his life for him and his family. That was trust. That was how it was earned.
Jake Bannaconni was a businessman. He owned a cattle ranch. He was considered a ruthless man, willing to take apart any company, and his enemies had to be careful because he found legitimate ways to destroy them. He was a man many feared, but there was never a whisper of him being anything but legitimate. There wasn’t a shred of anything illegal attached to his name. Somehow, and Mitya didn’t fully understand how, Bannaconni was part of their coalition. When one didn’t have anything to lose—like their life—Mitya wasn’t certain they would be as committed as they needed to be.
He paced across the room and turned back to look at Drake Donovan. “Amory Binder worked for you in Borneo. You vouched for him. Got the job for him with Bannaconni and then here, with me. You had Sevastyan hire him.”
There was Donovan. The start of all the conspiracy, the gathering of shifters to get rid of the worst of the criminal element of shifters—men who had risen to the top to become crime lords and claim territories. Drake’s vision was to remove them permanently and take over their territories, weeding out the worst of the crimes and keeping some level of sanity.
It wasn’t a bad idea, it just put those doing the work in double jeopardy. They would be hunted constantly by the police. Their families would always carry the taint of criminals on them in regular society, and if it ever became known that they were double-crossing crime families, they would be hunted down and killed.
Drake