Phoenixflare: #6 in The Rogue Witch: A Reverse Harem Romance Read online

  Phoenixflare

  #6 in The Rogue Witch: A Reverse Harem Romance

  KT Strange

  Copyright © 2018 by KT Strange

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Stay in touch!

  1. Darcy

  2. Finn

  3. Darcy

  4. Darcy

  5. Darcy

  6. Darcy

  7. Darcy

  8. Darcy

  9. Darcy

  10. Darcy

  11. Darcy

  12. Darcy

  13. Darcy

  14. Darcy

  15. Elias

  16. Darcy

  17. Darcy

  18. Darcy

  19. Darcy

  20. Darcy

  21. Darcy

  22. Darcy

  23. Elias

  24. Darcy

  25. Darcy

  26. Darcy

  27. Darcy

  28. Elias

  29. Darcy

  30. Darcy

  31. Darcy

  32. Darcy

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  Stay in touch!

  About the Author

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  One

  Darcy

  You ever make a really fucking stupid decision, even though everything is screaming at you to not do it? Because it’s the right thing to do? Because you can’t see yourself not doing it?

  The safe choice, the smart choice, would have been to stay right where we were and let Eli get swarmed by cops. Y’know, allow the lawyers to figure it out after the fact.

  But the idea of him being locked up, even for a minute, had shot so much adrenaline through my blood that I just couldn’t. In a cell, he’d be exposed; a sitting duck. The guys had figured out a long time ago that the hunters must have connections to law enforcement, because they seemed to get away with doing all sorts of crazy fucked up shit and never got caught. Eli couldn’t set foot in a jail cell. I knew it would be the end of him.

  There wasn’t ever a choice to begin with; our choices had evaporated as soon as Eli threw that first hit, clocking Jake Tupper so hard I was scared he would kill him.

  So now we were on the run. I felt like at any moment cop cars were going to surround us, and we’d end up being knocked off the road by a cruiser, maybe flipping over—

  “Darcy? Breathe.” Eli’s voice cut through my panicked thoughts as I sat in the passenger seat. The old van creaked around us. I swallowed hard.

  “What’s up?” I asked, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. His lips pulled into a tight, unhappy smile.

  “I can smell how scared you are,” he said with a shrug of one shoulder. His eyes flicked from ahead of him to the rearview mirror. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “You shouldn’t be the one reassuring me. You’re the one in trouble.”

  “You’re my accomplice,” he replied, his tone almost teasing. “You’re in it as much as I am.”

  He was hesitant under the veneer of calm that coated his words, like for the first time he was off kilter. He was never caught off guard, surveying the world with tired blue eyes that seemed to say ‘I’ve seen this before. Same shit, different day.’ So I couldn’t help the way my pulse picked up or the flutter of anxiety that bloomed deep in my belly.

  His hand rested on the steering wheel, fingers light on the old leather.

  “I got you,” my voice was rough, heavy with feeling. His muscles relaxed and he sighed, letting his head fall back against the seat-rest. I didn’t know how I knew he needed to hear it, I just knew that deep down he needed me as much as I needed him to be a rock. And right now, I needed him to come up with solutions to our problems, like, yesterday.

  “At least you’re prettier than Cash,” his words broke our silence. “Last time I hot-wired a car, it was Cash sitting in your seat, and lemme tell you, he’s nowhere near a sight like you are.”

  My cheeks flushed hot and I fought to keep my lips from curving into a smile.

  “This is serious, Eli, you can’t just—”

  “Take the compliment, Darcy,” he said, amusement warming his voice.

  “Stop flirting,” I grumbled, leaning away to look out the window. We were coming out from underneath one of Seattle’s overpasses, the sky opening up overhead. “Serious business. You may have killed someone tonight.”

  Eli let out a low growl.

  “I’d do it the fuck again,” he said, his hands tense on the steering wheel. I eyed his white-knuckles.

  “Maybe chill out. You don’t want to snap that thing right off.”

  He grunted instead of replying to me and settled his shoulders.

  “He deserved it,” he said after several more minutes. “When a man figures he can put his hands on any woman without asking first, he’s gonna keep doing it until every ‘no’ he hears is a ‘yes’ in his mind. Tupper’s had it coming for all the years I’ve known about him, and I have no regrets.”

  “You’re probably not wrong there.”

  “I’m not.” His jaw was set. If I felt strongly about Jake Tupper, it seemed like the guy had gotten under Eli’s skin even worse.

  “Did he touch you? Something about his sexuality that I don’t know about?” I asked, trying to make light of the intense feelings he was throwing off. Eli’s gaze slid off the road to me and back again.

  “He didn’t have to. He touched you. He took liberties with what wasn’t his.”

  If he had flexed his jaw any more, his teeth would’ve cracked.

  “What’s his, huh? Last I checked I didn’t have ‘Phoenixcry’s Property’ stamped on my lower back,” I said, not able to stop the irritation that was coloring my voice. Being yanked around like a rag doll between men who were determined to claim ownership of me was so 1800s. I was over it.

  “Last I checked you’re carrying most of our pack’s marks on your neck,” Eli shot back, and I raised my fingers to my throat out of instinct. The marks were so soft, thin white curving lines that could only be seen in certain light. He was right— I swallowed hard, a fresh wave of heat spreading out from deep in my belly when my finger grazed one of the bond marks.

  “Ass,” I muttered, leaning even further away. “So where are we going,” I flipped the subject, wanting to get far away from property rights and women’s emancipation. Who was I to be waving my feminist flag when I was literally carrying what could be construed as marks of ownership all up on my throat? I’d never thought of it like that. Had Eli just been protecting what was ‘his,’ what was the ‘pack’s’ when he’d gone after Jake? Was it just a property dispute? A miserable voice in the back of my head dragged me down, spewing to
xic waste all over my thoughts.

  “North,” he said, seemingly not noticing the way I was hunching down in my seat. It was a good thing because I didn’t want to explode at him.

  “What’s North?”

  “It’s a direction,” he sassed me in a deadpan voice. I rolled my eyes. “We’ll get close to the border, figure out where to go from there.”

  “Wait, like, the border as in Canada?” I sat up in my seat.

  “Is there another border at the north end of Washington state?”

  “Jesus you’re full of vinegar tonight,” I snapped at him. “Did you decide to channel Cash all of a sudden? Missing your joyride buddy or something? Cause you can just drop me the fuck off. I’ll hitchhike back to Seattle, say I was in the bathroom the whole time or something.”

  Silence dropped inside the van like a bomb, and I got the feeling like I’d stepped in it something fierce. Maybe his bad attitude and snarky comments were his way of dealing with the stress that we were under. It’s not like he was normally that talkative. Hell, I think he’d probably said more to me in those last thirty minutes than he’d said to me over a period of weeks.

  “Wolfe told me that there were packs in Canada,” his voice was careful, threaded with anger, “that survived the culls down here.”

  Oh.

  “I’ve never been to Canada,” I said, going for more playful than serious with my tone. I needed to lighten the tense weight that had fallen over us both.

  “I hear it’s just like here except less crazy and the chocolate is better.” He cleared his throat, his voice dropping a half-step. “They might be able to shelter us, help us get in contact with the rest of the pack, until it’s safe or we figure out what to do.”

  “I didn’t bring my passport,” I blurted out. Eli laughed, humorless.

  “I didn’t know you even had a passport,” he said. “Where we’re going, you won’t need it.”

  “I think illegally sneaking into another country is a pretty big crime, bigger than knocking somebody out, Elias.”

  “You got any bright ideas?”

  “Could we go back to Wolfe’s?” I asked hopefully.

  “I’m not involving him. I’m not risking Frank.” Eli shook his head hard. I opened my mouth but he growled. “I’m not doing it, Darcy.”

  I swallowed any protest and I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Well I guess Canada is as good a choice as any.”

  “Wolfe’s probably wrong anyway,” he said, although there was a hint of hope in his voice. “He said that a lot of packs traveled up that way. Lots of empty space, few people. Gets cold, but, well, it’s better than watching your packmates get slaughtered by a bunch of hunters.”

  “Well we’re fucked either way, so we may as well go see if there’s any wolf packs, y’know, hanging out at the border and waiting to welcome stragglers and their mates,” I muttered.

  Before I could react, Eli reached up, and his warm fingers grazed across my neck. He shot me a hot look that had me going still in my seat.

  “You’re not my mate yet, Darcy Llewellyn,” he said. My mouth went dry at the look in his eyes, like he was searching me, reaching right inside me and exposing every secret I had.

  “The road,” I croaked after a long second. His hand pulled away, returning to the steering wheel. His gaze followed, as the night swallowed up our car, the lights of the city fading behind us.

  Yet.

  Two

  Finn

  We all looked up when Willa walked in the room. Her face was tight, lips thin. She didn’t smile.

  Well, none of us were smiling either. Ace, Cash, Charlie, Max, and I all sat in an empty dressing room. The whole night had exploded on us, sending out shockwaves that I knew we’d be feeling for months, if not years.

  “She hasn’t called?” Willa asked. ’She’ was Darcy. I shook my head, feeling lost without her, my rudder, my guiding star.

  “Nothing,” Charlie said, his voice coarse. “Calls still go to voicemail.” He coughed once, and cleared his throat. Ace reached out, patting him on the shoulder. Willa cast a look at Max, who sat curled up on the couch, her knees tucked under her chin, her hair hanging in her face. She’d been quiet since Darcy had vanished with Eli.

  “Is there some place you can go?” Willa asked Max, clearly not wanting her in the room while we were discussing sensitive issues.

  “She stays with us,” Cash spoke up before Max could even open her mouth to reply. Willa raised an eyebrow at him. He shrugged, and and shifted along the couch to be closer to Max,. He held out one arm and she curled into his side without a word, a shiver running through her shoulders. A burning anger smoldered away in my gut. Tonight had been traumatizing to Max, maybe re-traumatizing, because she hadn’t been the same since she’d shown up with Darcy at the penthouse. I was caught between wanting to comfort Max, and bailing to search for my mate and my twin. The struggle, as Darcy would say, was real.

  It was too real. I felt ill. Eli had snapped and done what we’d all longed to do: beat the shit out of Jake Tupper. Except he’d done it in front of everybody and their fucking dog, and now Jake was in the hospital, and we had been hauled back into the greenroom to give statements to the cops. Darcy and Eli were gone, and nobody knew where they’d fucked off to. The last thing I remember was Darcy screaming, and my breath catching in my throat; I couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink. The weight of her power had blanketed the entire backstage, pinning us all down, and it had taken long minutes of Jake gurgling on his own blood and teeth until we were able to break free of the spell. None of the mundanes were talking about it, their brains probably having rationalized the whole situation as just shock from the attack on Jake.

  “Guys,” Willa’s voice was soft. “We have a problem.”

  My mouth was dry and I looked around at the other guys.

  “A bigger problem than…” Ace ran out of words.

  “What kind of problem?” Charlie asked. “Like, a legal problem?”

  “That,” Willa said before glancing again at Max, who was curled up like a kitten against Cash. Cash hugged her tight and leveled a stern look at Willa as if to say ’Seriously? She’s not going anywhere. She’s ours.’ Because she was. We’d protect her with our lives, and there was no way we’d be leaving her on her own after she’d witnessed the beat down Eli’d given Jake. Darcy would never forgive us if we let something happen to Max. The phoenix-girl was tied to our pack like she was our own blood and bone.

  “We need to get Eli a lawyer, now,” Charlie said, glancing at the rest of us. “We might need to talk about an advance on our unpaid royalties to make that happen.”

  Willa shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “That’s not going to happen,” she said, voice soft and hesitant. I’d never seen her so uncomfortable. I sat up, and even Max lifted her head from Cash’s shoulder. “Troy wants to pull your contract.”

  Charlie stiffened. Cash muttered a low curse. Ace sat straight up.

  Me? I felt like the ground was crumbling underneath me.

  “Are you kidding me?” Max asked. She’d lifted her head fully off of Cash and sat up, frowning at Willa. “He sent you in here to tell the band that he wants to cancel their record deal? What, doesn’t he have the guts to do it himself?” Cash put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She muttered then fell silent.

  Willa opened her mouth and then closed it. Pain was written all over her face. She didn’t want to do this, I knew. She’d always championed us whenever she could.

  “Where’s Troy?” Charlie asked. Willa shook her head. “When can we see him?”

  This was spinning out of control so fast. I ached to have Darcy here with us, even though it wouldn’t have changed anything. Hell, maybe it would have made things worse. She was the label’s intern, and her loyalty lay with them, not us. A small part of me was glad that she and Eli had vanished. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and she would electrify anything or anyone that trie
d to hurt him. As much as I felt hollow without them close by, this was how it needed to be. For now anyway.

  “Willa, I know this puts you in a shitty position—”

  “It doesn’t look good, Charlie. Jake’s, well,” she made a face and winced. “There’s no way we can keep a band on the roster when one of the members is assaulting people.”

  “It was fucking self defense.” Max was on her feet. “That creepy asshole has been after Darcy since she started her internship, and the label never did anything about it! Well, maybe finally somebody did, and maybe, just maybe, Jake deserved it!” She stared Willa down, who glanced away, her cheeks flushed.

  “I don’t disagree with you,” her voice was low. “It’s complicated.”

  “Seems simple to me,” Max shot back.

  “Max,” Charlie sounded tired. She rolled her eyes but sat down, growling under her breath. Cash patted her on the arm and gave her a weak smile.

  “I’m talking to him,” Willa said, “but we need to get in touch with Eli, get his side of things. Jake can’t exactly talk, but if he was inappropriate with Darcy, we need to hear from her too. Anything. Just give me something to work with,” she pleaded. “Alright?” Her gaze bounced from one of us to the next, until she finally looked at me. I’d always gotten on well with Willa. She worked hard, put in more hours than anyone, and had earned her place at XOhX. This must’ve been killing her, especially given how much she believed in us.