The Accidental Druid’s Guide to Binding Demons

I wrote Accidental Druid because I couldn’t find anything like it on the market. When I hit on a book craving, if I can find something almost sorta kinda like what I’m looking for, cool beans. Good enough. But this? Crickets. Literally nothing.

Dammit

I could not—would not—let it go, though. A great deal of cursing was involved, but I ultimately decided I wanted David and Jae’s story bad enough to bring the movie playing inside my head to the page. To life. It’s magic and demons, treachery and secrets. So many secrets. It’s losing everything you thought you wanted, but finding yourself and what you truly needed instead. Discovering who you are behind the lies you present to the world. It’s learning to trust, especially when the one you need to trust most is you. It’s realizing you aren’t alone if you don’t want to be, if you just reach out.

It’s also really fucking long, LOL

Those of you familiar with my work…This ain’t no porny romp. I don’t even know how you’d go about writing 130K worth of fuck fest. Even for me…Well, I couldn’t pull it off. So, if you expect a raunchy boink on page 3, Accidental Druid is not for you. For one, this is urban fantasy, where romance is a subplot to the main driver of the story, in Druid’s case a mystery. Who killed David’s father? And what does the magic his dad left in his last grimoire do? For another, UF is a playland if you like action (I do) and the length (UF runs long) is a rich opportunity to spread outside the limited cast of characters I normally work with inside romance. You’ll meet Jae, my demon, of course, but also an imp, a hellhound pup named Peaches, a dragon, and I haven’t mentioned the humans yet.

That said, I’m Kari Gregg. You bet there’s sex in Druid and girlfriend, I pay that bill in full, if I say so myself. But…Just don’t let the fact that Accidental Druid has a plot alarm you. Yeah, I know. Shocked me, too, LOL. But dayum. Druid was one hell of a ride.

If unraveling secrets with a short, mouthy demon sounds cool to you, I hope you give Accidental Druid a try. And I hope you love these guys and their world as much as I do.

Much love,

Kari

After testing as mundane, David just wanted to earn his botany degree and enjoy his ordinary life. He didn’t count on a First Blood demon portaling into his part-time job to bind with anyone near that dormant nexus, though. Bad luck for David—demons only bind with magicals.

The jig is up.

Now outed as a druid, David navigates the Cumberland metro’s perilous magical community while exploring his link to that demon, Jae. David’s father, Teddy Mace, had closely guarded secrets, including how strong David’s powers were as a child, but what else had Teddy hidden? What got him killed? And once Jae helps David decipher his dad’s lost grimoire, will the murderers target them next?

Add in David’s godfather and Towpath Guild Boss John Griffith, an edible-loving imp sent to be David’s familiar, and frenemy roommate Finnegan who is inarguably the worst fire mage ever, and David’s dream of a normal life spectacularly implodes.

Whoever dismembered Teddy Mace will have to stand in line if they want to eliminate David to keep that cold case arctic. He and Jae are hard to catch. Fully bound? Killing this new demon/magical team may be impossible…if they can stop pissing each other off first.

Content warning: violence, blood magic, explicit male/male sex, generational trauma, parental estrangement, alcoholism recovery…All these people are super fucked-up. But you don’t want to miss necromancy, the dragon of Pittsburgh, and a twelve-year-old oracle who can be bought with video games and chalupas.

No part of this work was created with generative AI.

131,160 Digital Words

Amazon/KU

Chapter One

Shoving my uniform ball cap onto my head, I climbed from my truck in employee parking at the Western Maryland Botanical Garden. Heat from the baking asphalt scorched the soles of my work boots. I swiped at sweat already slicking my temple while I took in the vibrant color beginning to pop in the maples towering over the stone, glass, and cedar of the Visitors Center. I grimaced. Way too hot for early October in the mountain highlands, but I trudged across the arid desert of the parking lot, anyway. Fucking climate change. I veered onto a path to the left, ducking around the rear glass double doors of the Visitors Center to head toward a humble staff building on the side.

The Visitors Center boasted open spaces with interactive exhibits of flora and fauna guests could expect to see in the garden, a gift shop, and an event room that spilled onto a patio frequently reserved for weddings and parties. More importantly, the Visitors Center boasted air conditioning.

The shed for staff did not.

As soon as I stepped through the door, I turned to my right to clock in for my shift. A clipboard hung on a roofing nail next to the time clock, a pen dangling from bailing twine tied to the nail. Signing my name to the roster, I grabbed a radio from the wire basket installed below—cell service was spotty in the mountains and much more so throughout the stretch of acres that made up the botanical park. Two-ways worked better. The valley in which the garden’s designer had developed waterfalls and a pond were a complete dead zone, but radios were good enough otherwise. Mostly.

I dragged the lanyard with my ID badge from under my forest green WMBG polo as I exited the shed and strode toward the greenhouse, which was the genuine beating heart of the garden.

“Running late?” my boss asked when I pushed inside, but she said it with a smile.

Megan was all right. Standing five-foot nothing, the blonde could’ve been mistaken for any of the biology majors the garden hired as grunt labor instead of the PhD and formidable grant wrestler she was. Her jaunty ponytail, blue jean cutoffs, and WMBG logo tank top screamed student instead of management. In the two years I’d worked there, she’d never been afraid to get her hands dirty, though. To wit, she danced around her ongoing pet project, pruning shears at the ready—grafted fruit trees. In fact, the tree she tended was mine, a singularly unambitious graft of crabapple to Granny Smith.

“Class ran over,” I said.

“Dr. Dixon likes the sound of her own voice.” Megan hummed while she snipped away grafts that hadn’t taken. “Not like the trees are going anywhere.” She snickered. “Well. This one will go into our Franken-orchard in the spring, but my point stands.”

The orchard was on the garden grounds without officially being included in the park, a special exhibit open for students and locals later in the fall. Like me, most who registered for the single elective class Megan taught at Frostburg State University chose varieties of apple trees to graft. They were most likely to thrive in this hardiness zone of the Appalachians, and since every student’s grade depended on the success of their grafts, we tended to choose conservatively.

I’d done the same varieties of apple as everyone else for class, but I’d also experimented with other fruit bearers at my childhood home outside town. The only times I’d been willing to revisit the place had been to tend my grafted trees just as Megan pruned to encourage better growth in the scions here. Until Megan’s class had awakened my curiosity for novelty grafts, I hadn’t been to the house since my father’s murder. I’d planted my rootstock and grafted them outdoors rather than babying them in dad’s greenhouse, but they’d flourished. Bonus: I’d discovered I could handle returning to the landscape of my boyhood if I stayed away from the house, where memories of my father and my old life haunted me most.

If I was careful no one saw my truck before I crossed my dad’s wards onto our land, I’d convinced myself it was okay. I’d be safe.

Everything was a risk, wasn’t it?

“You want me at the pond?” I asked, shying away from the No-man’s-land of my dad’s violent, premature death. “I almost finished replacing the walking bridge on Wednesday. Just needs an hour and a quick clean-up.” Or a lot of clearing tools and setting the space to rights, but given my gloomy thoughts, I was in no hurry to play field guide to tourists.

Megan shook her head. “Nah, I sent Cooper.” She put down the pruning shears. “Can you check out the oaks in the Grove instead?”

Since she’d hired me, I’d occasionally wondered if Megan might have a little druid in her. She was that good with plants, flowers, trees, and shrubs, but other times, I was certain she must have some witchy ancestors. Not enough to identify her as magical at age thirteen when everyone tested for latent abilities, but she always seemed to read me and give me whatever I needed to keep going, to keep growing. Like the plants. She nurtured me as adeptly as she tended to anything with chlorophyl.

The Grove was the most distant section of the botanical garden. So far from the Visitors Center, many guests didn’t bother to hike there. We maintained a cleared understory so the area featured groupings of old-growth trees and not much else. Kids from the junior high came for lessons in leaf identification when school resumed after summer break and Megan had built a roofless reading cabin with a tiny library for selfies as well as dotting faux gnome houses throughout. That area was my favorite in the botanical garden and not just because fewer guests were likely to get in my way. The quiet soothed me. I could bend to settle my palms against the verdant earth to share in the place’s peacefulness and no one saw or cared.

Still, my mouth thinned. Because the Grove featured groupings of many tree varieties. “Just the oaks?”

Megan nodded. “Tourists from Baltimore reported trouble with the dryads.”

I winged up an eyebrow, surprise arrowing through me.

“I know. Right? Since when do dryads let us pesky humans glimpse them, forget watch them racing around.” She rolled her eyes. “Something stirred them up.”

“Maybe a bear.” The black bear population ranged pretty far in search of food before hibernating, though we had spotted none except young adults passing through in the spring since I’d worked there. “If a bear is marking trees, that’d set the dryads off.”

“I don’t think so.” Megan wrinkled her nose. “A bear would make the dryads mad. The Baltimore people said they looked scared.”

My brow furrowed because seriously? What scared a dryad? They were tree nymphs, shy, rarely appearing even to me. The only things I knew about them fearing were loggers and wildfire. “No fire?”

She shook her head, ponytail swaying. “It’s been hot and dry, but no signs of smoke. Cooper’s a fire mage, low-level or not. He said the closest blaze is in Lonaconing.” She shrugged. “We need to confirm that, though. Make sure you have your bear spray on you just in case,” she said, returning her attention to the scion she’d been prepping for winter. “Whatever the problem is, don’t try to fix it yourself.” She lifted her chin to pin me with a flinty stare. “I mean it. Find out what’s bothering the dryads and report back. We’ll plan what to do about it as a team. In the meantime, Cooper blocked the trail to the Grove to keep guests out on his way to finish work on the walking bridge.”

“I’ll be there and back in two shakes.” More like thirty minutes if I hustled and pinpointed the problem as soon as I reached the oaks. The Grove was a couple miles from the Visitors Center, minimum.

“Take the golfcart. We keep the forest floor bare in the Grove as a defensible space against wildfire, but if a spark kindled anyway, we need to know.”

Nodding, I turned, but halted when Megan called to me. “David?”

I looked over my shoulder. “Be careful,” she said.

Uneasy, I exited the greenhouse and headed to the garage where we stored snowmobiles, our lone golfcart, and other heavy equipment. I swiped my employee badge across the reader of the security system and signed out the cart from another dangling clipboard. Moments later, I drove south.

WMBG didn’t own a fleet of golf carts because we preferred ATVs. Western Maryland was all hills and valleys, the topography steep and rough in the botanical garden where we maintained the ecosystem so meticulously. ATVs could handle trailers hauling supplies, mountains of compost, and heavy trees and shrubs. Megan had equipped our golfcart with all-terrain tires, but it still labored in steeper areas of the park.

Students didn’t line up for jobs at the garden to ride, anyway. We logged in a lot of miles during our shifts because we enjoyed hiking. We wanted that. Didn’t matter what field we studied: environmental science, wildlife and fisheries, or botany. We wanted our boots on the ground, not pressing gas and brake pedals.

At least the golf cart was quieter.

I zipped along the most direct path to the Grove, keeping an eye out for guests. Weekdays this late in the season, when fall colors began painting the forest in yellows, vibrant reds, and oranges, we didn’t see many tourists, but locals bought annual passes to log their daily steps on cultivated paths with breathtaking scenery. The heat wave must’ve kept those diehard nature-lovers away because I only had to maneuver around an elderly couple and a jogger before I reached the sawhorses we used to close areas under maintenance and repair. I pulled one aside, returned to the cart to steer past it, and then put the golfcart in park so I could drag the barrier back into place.

After, I could drive at full throttle, which was a whopping thirty miles per hour. Quicker than I could run, but didn’t seem much faster, especially if Cooper was wrong about the fire risk. I didn’t spot telltale smoke or smell anything burning, though. I was no mage, but I would’ve sensed something. If a blaze had sparked leaf litter we hadn’t cleared yet…The ground didn’t feel wrong, not like fire at least.

I slowed the cart and parked it when I spied the first dryad outside the Grove’s standing oaks. Megan was right. From a distance, the dryad’s mossy eyes were as wide as pie plates. The green and browns of her skin that operated as a camouflage for the nymphs when they weren’t burrowed deep into tree cores was mottled too, her thin chest heaving with panic. When I stepped away from the cart, two other dryads joined the first, all of whom moved with agitation and distress.

I’d never spoken to the dryads. Tree nymphs were happiest left alone. If they weren’t so shy…But getting caught speaking to a magical creature would’ve blown my cover as a mundane. Non-magical folk didn’t make a habit of talking to skittish dryads. I’d nevertheless befriended the nymphs who had claimed the Grove as their home. I respected their circle and taught other staff members to honor their sacred space. In exchange, they left offerings for me, usually the feather of a bird nesting high in the branches of their oaks or an especially perfect leaf. Last winter solstice, I’d brought them a gift of honey—dryads were suckers for out-of-season sweets—and they’d reward my generosity with an enchanted pebble. I wasn’t sure what the pebble was supposed to do, but I appreciated their good intentions.

Today, the dryads wanted me nowhere near their home. Panic-stricken, they waved me off. “I can’t,” I dared to say as I approached them. With access to the Grove blocked off, no one would hear me speaking to magical denizens of the forest few among magicals could communicate with, so I chanced it, if only to calm them a little. “I need to find out what’s gone wrong.”

And there was something wrong.

I leaned down to dig my fingers into the soil to try to pin the wrongness down, but this was different, something I hadn’t sensed before. Wholly unique. Not fire, no, but this didn’t feel like a bear either. Glancing over my shoulder to ensure it was safe, I stretched my senses. Lines grooved my forehead as I concentrated.

Animal.

Dangerous…but intelligent?

While I’d focused, a pair of dryads drew closer, which set my heart to thumping. These two were the oldest, the ones I’d judged most powerful in their clan. One darted forward to give my shoulder a hard shove, then scrambled away.

Caught off guard, I fell. My ass planted in the dirt. I scowled at the dryads. “What? This is my job. I told you I need to—”

Both glared at me, arms crossed over their chests. The one who’d pushed me pointed with insistent jerks at the golf cart.

I was only positioned a few inches lower, but containing the hidden parts of myself, ignoring those secrets, became exponentially more challenging for me the more of my skin touched the ground. My breath caught as my senses sharpened. Then I inhaled deeply. “What is that?” The scent lingered in my nostrils, but the vibration of wrongness—alongside the trill of danger that lifted the small hairs on my arms—was what resonated inside me. “Blood?”

Ignoring the shrill alarm from the dryads, I pushed to my feet.

Whatever had troubled the nymphs wasn’t dead. I’d know. But the flood of coppery metallic scent swamping me indicated that death loomed, inching near. I lurched forward, so transfixed I barely registered the sudden halt of birdsong. The dryads shrieked. The others joined the pair who had stepped forward, but I only vaguely noted their hands on me, struggling to yank me away, which was a neat trick considering how strong the nymphs were when properly motivated.

They just weren’t motivated enough. They couldn’t stop me. Once I caught the aroma of spilling blood, nothing could.

I lurched into the cluster of oaks and crossed into their sacred circle. The dryads abruptly fled and without their tugging to pull against, I face-planted into the loamy earth. I shook my head, no doubt streaking dirt all over me as my bleary head spun.

A faint whispery growl reached my ears.

I froze. Horrified trepidation filled me. I lifted my chin…

A human-sized lump filled the center of the dryad’s circle. Not human, though. The form was deep red, almost black. My muzzy mind puzzled through the pieces, incapable of connecting them to a whole. Strong, muscled legs similar to but not quite like mine. The arc of an inky claw as big as my fist led to more claws and a foot. Midnight black armored braces hugged a heavily muscled forearm, a thin gap in the metal revealing more shadowy skin. I squinted, fighting to focus. Were those sigils? My attention flitted to the still, barbed tip of a long tail, then the leathery edge of an oddly bent wing, onward again to a curved horn rising inches above thick curls, the red shading of the horn contrasting with a black mop of hair.

Sucking in a stuttered breath, I startled when my brain finally processed the eyes that slowly blinked at me. They, too, were devoid of color, as dark as the remotest crevice never to greet the sun and my stomach roiled, the sense of wrongness exploding inside me like a nuclear warhead. Because those irises should not be black.

They should be red.

Instinctive terror shattered whatever magic had mesmerized me and, with a gasp, I scrambled backwards in the dirt. My heart galloped, beating against my ribs so ferociously, I wondered in a daze if it would flee my chest. The shaking started then, my hands, legs that threatened to no longer support the weight of my body, the shiver of mortal dread quivering in my belly.

The demon didn’t pounce. He stared. Motionless. Weak.

Pumping the last dregs of his blood from gaping slashes that canvased his entire body into the soil of the now ruined sacred circle.

A small sound worked up my throat, one I’d never made before, part horror and part…something else. The something I’d ruthlessly smothered and denied my whole damn life. Despite that sound, I fumbled for the radio I’d stuffed into my back pocket and brought the receiver to my mouth, shock making my fingers awkward as I floundered at punching the buttons. I shuddered my relief, my stare never leaving the demon’s when discordant static fractured the silence.

“Megan,” I mumbled, trying to remember English, how to form words.

“Copy, David. You find whatever’s causing trouble at the Grove?”

I trembled anew, an equal mix of fear and comfort addling my already swamped mind. “Evacuate the park,” I said, putting a little more steel into my voice. Proud that it had stopped shaking, “Evacuate immediately.”

Megan squawked my name, her tone shocked. Frightened.

She needed to be both. “Especially the magicals. Clear them out as fast as you can.” I swallowed the knot lodged in my throat. “Call the cops. We need their battle mages. All of them.”

I wanted to explain to my boss, confirm she grasped the life-imperiling danger I’d found in our midst, but the radio tumbled from my numb fingers to the forest floor, my concentration narrowing on the dying demon. Choking down sour bile, my gaze locked onto the demon’s fixed stare, I inched off the ground and my blood curdled at the curl of his dark crimson lip, revealing a flash of white teeth. They, too, were stained with blood.

So much blood.

My head told me nothing could survive the loss of thick dark red forming a widening puddle around the demon’s prone form, but my head could go fuck itself because refusing to allow my power to rise or not, everybody knew demons became more dangerous when they were this near death. Even mundanes knew that.

The demon said something. Softly. A whisper that slid past his cracked lips. Gibberish, at least to me. I wasn’t sure which language the demon fought to speak, which tribe this demon called his own, but that ultimately didn’t matter since I didn’t know any of their languages, including the smattering of random words kids liked to toss at each other in junior high to front how tough they supposedly were.

Understanding the words he spoke wasn’t important. What was vital for my survival was grasping that the demon was tempting me, trying to lure me in.

Reaching the sacred circle would’ve helped. The demon must have been on the edge of death to remain so debilitated despite soaking up the magic the dryads had invested their lifetimes sinking into this patch of earth, but dryads numbered among the weakest of magical creatures. Their power wasn’t enough.

The demon needed to feed and in hiding though I may be, I was the strongest magical nearby. The circle had been an appetizer. I was a feast.

The demon said my name. Thick, as though both syllables were exotic to him, his voice tremulous, he called out to me. “Dah-veed.”

And that something else buried deep inside me snapped.

I flinched, the twang of that garbled name resounding within me like a ricocheting cannon ball. The demon crushed the determined madness at my core that had held my powers at bay. Magic poured out of me in an excruciating rush. Grunting at the ache, I gritted my teeth. My muscles clenched.

The demon smiled, mouth curving regardless of the weakness that made him unnaturally still.

His compulsion had me now. My power was his to plunder. He knew it. I knew it too.

I was strong. The only magical I’d met who’d equaled my intensity had been my dad, murdered when I was a boy. My power was so fierce that only it could be wielded as a tool to conceal what I was and what I was capable of, not just from mundanes but also from other magicals, specifically the ones who monitored me for any hint of my father’s talent rising inside me. My power had placed me in so much peril and yet, was also what allowed my masquerade as a mundane. I was ten when my father was killed. I’d turned twenty-one last month and in all the years between, no one had suspected I wasn’t as mundane as my mother. Nobody had guessed.

The demon saw through my subterfuge. I hadn’t needed to succumb to the demon luring me within its physical reach. He began siphoning my magic from me, anyway, and if the demon recovered enough power? He could cast his own magic to heal the devastation inflicted on his body.

The demon’s hold on me was faint, though. I could retreat and if I crossed the barrier of the dryad’s circle, now tainted with the demon’s blood, I knew with astonishing certainty that re-entering the Grove would end the sapping of my magic. The demon would die.

But I did not step away, even when a spark of ruby red lit the demon’s eyes.

The cursed magic he’d unleashed within me rejected the clamoring of my beleaguered mind to run as far and as fast as I could. My long-denied power would suffer no escape, not with so strong a potential partner this close. If I inched forward, stretched out my arm…My stomach plummeted, sick and horror-struck, because the moment the thought entered my head, my hand lifted toward the wounded demon, who grinned evil intent.

For once, my magic controlled me.

I don’t know how he mustered the strength. The demon had to be almost gone to whatever awaited him in the afterworld, but the demon shoved his clawed hand forward too.

My spine bowed as our fingers brushed. Agony shot through every part of my body as my power rushed out to greet the demon’s desperate, dying quest to survive. The pain was unbearable, like electric shocks and an inferno encompassing me all at once. My screams echoed distantly in my ears while my torment consumed me.

I must have blacked out. When I blinked, struggling to bring my surroundings back into focus, I wasn’t crouched low in the leaf litter at the perimeter of the dryad’s circle anymore. I was in the center, bands of flaming hot steel that were the demon’s arms locked around my abdomen. His heated breath puffed my temple, rustling my hair. My heart seized, my body stiffening in instant alarm.

Demons weren’t of this world. Contrary to what mundane religions taught, they weren’t from Hell or any other deathly afterworld. They lived all right, same as every other creature, and they suffered and died as readily as we did, too. Demons simply came from another dimension, one vastly different from ours. No human had ever portaled to that plane, to the daemonica’s origins. None who tried had survived to tell the tale, anyway, but safe to say the environment, cultural norms, and social hierarchy were as foreign and unthinkable to us as ours were to the rare demons who fled to the human realm.

My life was nothing to this demon. Less than nothing.

If, in our foolish arrogance, we humans applied our psychological constructs to this alien species, demons fit every parameter of psychopathy I’d learned in Psych 101 my first year at Frostburg State U. They killed without mercy or an iota of remorse. Sly trickery and manipulation were a demon’s bread and butter and they enjoyed playing with—tormenting—the prey they hunted, be their target a simple woodland squirrel or humans. Us. Demons had no capacity for empathy and any idiot stupid enough to search for kindness in them would discover only a black void. A demon’s singular focus was survival. They dedicated every moment of their every day to that lone pursuit. Demons took no action that didn’t improve their odds of sustaining life—theirs.

Tearing a human to shreds with razored claws to feast on both the meat and drink deeply from his prey’s well of agonized terror was not outside the sphere of typical demon behavior, particularly one that had recently portaled from their dimension to ours.

And this demon had caught me in his grasp.

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Fine Print and Our Ticket to Ride

I don’t know that every author goes into the game with idealistic fantasies of what the writing business is like, but when I started as a green as grass newbie a thousand years ago, I was super, super naïve. My first few years as a published author were extremely educational and frequently painful as a direct result. Rather than whining about every totally predictable blow that came my way, which I knew would be professionally stupid, I started a list instead. This list.

To me, writing has always been an amusement park ride and every book you write provides you a ticket. Just one. Some tickets are a climb onto a roller coaster. Some put you in line for the carousel. Bumper cars. White water rafting or the log flume. The Ferris Wheel. The book can tank so hard all you get is a parking ticket, that can happen too, LOL. No matter how smart we old-guard authors like to pretend we are, you never really know which ride you’ll get until you are strapped in and by then, girlfriend, it’s too late. You’re stuck with your ride, baby. Just hang on. Stay in the business long enough and you’ll figure out which ride you like best, but you’ll eventually learn to like—or at least tolerate—them all. That’s just how it is, the name of the game.

But every ticket to ride also includes some pretty extensive fine print and like every TOS in the existence of ever, we usually don’t read that fine print. Some, like me, are so excited to get a ticket, we aren’t even aware the fine print exists, but it does. It so does.

I started writing out my fine print as I experienced it to process the fuckery that can and does happen in the writing gig. I never intended to share it with anyone. Sounded like career suicide to me. I don’t know. Maybe it still is. Maybe I’ve been at this so long I just don’t care anymore. Very possible. Even probable. And maybe—just maybe—there are enough of us old guard around that will glance over my fine print who will nod and think to themselves, OMG, ME TOO.

Some of the fine print below is dated. Very. I got my start in the biz signing with several digital-first publishers, all of whom are gone now. The business model of BookLandia changed, as it always does. But deep down, the heart of the business, where all of us live and breathe and struggle and succeed and fail? That doesn’t change. Not really.

So. 15 years down this road, I’m giving my middle finger to #86 and sharing my fine print. If you are new? This is what a writing career looks like. If you aren’t new? This is what MY career has looked like, LOL.

Screw the fine print. I hope you do what it takes to buy your ticket. And wherever your ticket leads you, I hope you enjoy the ride.

Kari

FILENAME: 35 points included in the fine print of every author

(Kari’s note: Yeah, I started my list with 35 items. I continued adding to the fine print as I went along and never changed the filename. Sue me.)

1. You will be pirated.

2. You will also be plagiarized.

3. Publishers go out of business and keep your royalty money.

4. Vendors/distributors do too.

5. Some colleagues will stab you in the back in hopes of selling just one book or otherwise throw you under the bus to make themselves appear/feel more important.

6. Popularity Club Colleagues (PCCs) will expect you to kiss the ring.

7. Troll reviewers will gleefully rip your book (and just for kicks, sometimes you personally) apart A) to build their reputations, and B) for fun. And no matter what, you will need to shut the hell up about it. Just shut it.

8. Even when you include word count in story descriptions, someone will complain they expected the story to be longer.

9. Some expect your book to be free (or permanently priced as a loss leader) and loudly complain any time it isn’t. Attempts at public shaming may be involved.

10. Peers will look down their noses at you because you write <fill in the blank with anything, anything at all>.

12. Get used to lying about how much you like your book cover.

12. You will be orphaned by an editor you love.

13. You will be judged on your merit as an author based solely on your gender. Which gender you are doesn’t matter. Male, female, or genderfluid, expect to be bitch slapped. Repeatedly.

14. As a self-employed author, you pay twice as much FICA. Tax season is hell. If you’re very lucky, you will endure excruciating panic after underestimating your taxes and owe the IRS thousands. Yes, plural. Your children may come to refer to one of your stories as Mommy’s Tax Book. If you’re not too bright, Mommy’s Tax Book will be the only book in your career to get a sequel.

15. Reviews will occasionally be inaccurate. Wrong character names. Wrong story details, both major and minor. The review might even get your name wrong or be for another book altogether. This shit is normal, totally normal.

16. Someone will suggest your story is recycled fan fiction and deride it as such.

17. Facebook prison and other social media WTFery is permanently on your menu.

18. Regardless of how much money you make, your RL peeps are still waiting for you to write a “real” book.

19. You will stumble over reader complaints about author greed the month you raid sofa cushions for loose coins to buy milk.

20. You will make friends, enemies, and frenemies. You will be wrong about who falls into each of those categories.

21. At some point, someone may claim you have plagiarized somebody else because both works have one detail (out of fifty thousand details) in common.

22. You will discover an author you admired and held in the highest esteem when you were unpublished is a ginormous fuckstick.

23. You will invest significant time into — and pay a considerable amount for — editing…and you will still be criticized for that editing.

24. Working your tail off to strengthen a writing weakness clears the field so you recognize other writing weaknesses. Rinse and repeat. Forever.

25. You will make promo mistakes that ultimately embarrass you. If you’re lucky, it won’t cost you readers or a ton of money too, but don’t hold your breath.

26. Some will hope you are desperate enough to give them a bounce because you write erom. Strangers, yes, but it’s worse when the perv on the prowl is an old friend. (“I bet you’d be great at sexting.” No. Just no.)

27. Posers pretend to be your pal only as long as you’re useful to them and discard you like a snotty tissue the moment you aren’t. Sometimes you recognize posers right away, but other times, you won’t.

28. You will mistake a business relationship for a friendship.

29. Ego monsters (colleagues with a puffed up head over a hit book/series) will slight you or even slap at you.

30. Porn outsells you. By a lot. Some will insist, despite your bank balance, that what you do is porn, anyway. (I wish, buddy. I wish.)

31. Feast or famine — your income stream varies wildly. Low months will leave you despondent…and paranoid. Because there is no guarantee you’ll see a high month again.

32. Amazon can crush your career. Literally crush you. Whenever it wants.

33. The longer you’re in the business, the more people will quit and you may never know why. One day, you look up and pffft, they’re just gone.

34. No matter how much time you sink into social media or how many social media platforms you’re active on, it isn’t enough. Even if you spend every waking moment on social media. Srsly, you coulda scheduled overnight tweets for the international audience, dude. Social media guilt is your new BFF.

35. You are one misspoken word or asshat moment (we all have ‘em, right?) from provoking the social media outrage machine. Brace yourself. If your turn hasn’t popped up yet, you’re due.

36. As a writer, you are a public person. Private people are free to do, believe, and like whatever they want. Public people are not. Every opinion you express, decision you make or action you take, everything you do as the Public You can and will influence your career and ultimately your paycheck. Feel free to check your freedoms as a private person at the door – exercise those freedoms at your peril.

37. You will make mistakes. You will fail. Enemies and colleagues who consider you solely as The Competition will celebrate those mistakes and seek to capitalize on them.

38.  Intentionally or otherwise, someone will “steal” your title. Intentionally or otherwise, you will “recycle” someone else’s title.

39. A stubborn core of Professors will generate saga-length blogs and status updates schooling Teh World on what they deem acceptable to: write, feel, believe, like, and how you should spend the money in your wallet. What you write, feel, believe, like, and how you choose to spend your money will agree with the dictates of the Grand Poo Bahs only by wild coincidence. This has zero bearing on the Grand Poo Bah’s sense of self-importance.

40. An author you respect will publicly criticize your book, your brand, or both.

41. Someone working the production end of the business (cover art, editing, format/conversion, promo, etc) will take advantage of you.

42. You assume none of your colleagues are reading you…or that all your colleagues are reading you. Either way, you’ll be startled when you discover you’re quite mistaken.

43. You will struggle with and regularly question where to draw your privacy line.

44. A colleague you bent over backward to help will bitch slap the shit out of you.

45. You will be screen-capped.

46. The dramaz! Oh, the dramaz! A month (week?) can’t go by without a new scandal circulating in this business. If you’re lucky, you and people you consider yours won’t be directly involved. Participation in kerfluffles can and frequently does convince readers you are a knob who should be blacklisted so choose your battles wisely, grasshopper.

47. Readers might attack when they perceive another author has wronged you. You probably won’t be aware this is happening. You might be blamed for it anyway. By the time you realize something is awry, months have passed and it’ll be too late to contact the author to tell him/her you never felt wronged and apologize for what that author went through that, again, you had absolutely nothing to do with. Years after the fact, you’ll still feel bad that happened, though.

48. Your publisher will make a mistake that embarrasses you.

49. By their fruits, you shall know them and by fruits, I mean the attention and glory that crusaders draw to themselves instead of their purported causes.

50. Your cover will be mocked and/or a price point heavily criticized when you had zero control over those decisions.

51. You will be criticized for fetishizing gay men (M/M only).

52. You will sign a contract you regret.

53. A publisher or editor will ask you to include more sex, make the sex happen faster, or write in some spanky pants.

54. You will discover the cover model you loved so much has been used on two thousand covers in the past week alone.

55. You will toss good money away on swag nobody wants with the possible exception of you. You may not even want it, frankly.

56. You will write a story that bombs. This will probably be your favorite. If you’re extraordinarily fortunate, you’ll write a story that hits and squint at it for years because you can’t figure that shit out. At all.

57. Some ABBs (Authors Behaving Badly) will continue producing work, that work will sell, and you won’t be able to figure that shit out either.

58. Some confuse high (and usually heavily padded) word counts with assurances of quality and sneer in self-righteous disdain at shorter, though tighter, prose.

59. One-trick ponies drop dead eventually.

60. Colleagues who talk about high sales numbers in public are A) trying to let newbies know what the market is like, B) braggarts, or C) trying to make themselves seem like a BFD. What category a numbers talk falls into is usually transparent by context. Proceed at your own risk.

61. A personal tragedy could disrupt your work and you won’t have a single clue about how to handle explaining the disruption as the public you. The stresses of whatever personal issues are weighing you down intensify with the fear that readers will forget or give up on you.

62. A colleague you consider a friend will be sucked into the pit of a publisher asplosion and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it except hurt for him/her.

63. A newbie will pull some outrageous stunt that will prompt you to shake your head and think “damn, was I ever that stupid?” Yes, you were that stupid. Zip it, skippy. Just zip it.

64. You will blow a deadline.

65. You’ll seriously consider quitting. Even though your rational self will eventually prevail, your irrational self will be heartily fed up and, for a short while, make you forget why you love what you do. If you’re smart, you’ll stay off social media until you pull your shit together, but nobody’s ever accused you of being a genius so…

66. You will suspect someone of catfishing and you will be proven correct.

67. You won’t suspect and once revealed, the catfishing incident will rattle you to your core.

68. You will work through an expensive vacation. Your family will give you grief about it even though royalties from work paid for the trip to start with. Then you’ll feel guilty for being a bitch, an over-scheduled bitch, but a bitch nevertheless. A bitch who needs a vacation.

69. Your family and real-life peeps will mistake attending a conference for the vacation you need so much.

70. You will decide a day off social media is kind of like a vacation.

71. You will burn out.

72. You’ll happen upon a scathing review of a colleague’s book and pray like you’ve never prayed before that your colleague doesn’t see it.

73. Two words: blog tour.

74. Someone who dicked you over will be hired by one of your publishers and/or added to the author roster. Every time one of their emails streams through the publisher’s loop, you will lose your shit. Get used to this feeling because the person who dicked you over will reply to every GD thread and never STFU.

75. Cliques develop in this business too. We just call it networking. If you enjoy social posturing and gamesmanship, rock on. If you don’t, pretend.

76. The nanosecond you think you might finally have a grip on current market conditions, the market will flip, tank, or explode.

77. You will share a secret and/or private info with someone who fucks you over.

78. You will consider hiring an agent and/or a personal assistant, even though maintaining a high overhead is supremely unwise.

79. You will agonize about whether you should tell your real-life peeps what you do or what your pen name is.

80. If your real-life peeps know, you will be asked to edit college application essays and trunk books. Lottsa trunk books. The fact you pay a proofer significant coin because you are dumb as a brick when it comes to proper comma usage is beside the point.

81. You will fail to back up your work and lose a book or a significant portion of your book during a computer crash or other technical WTFery.

82. The first one-star review you see of your work will stab you in the gut. You might learn to lie about it and you might eventually realize one-star reviews can be useful to you. But the stab-to-the-gut of a bad review never really goes away.

83. One of your real-life peeps will sign up for your newsletter, leave a review, or comment on a blog post and that will weird you right the fuck out.

84. The death of a writing peer will break your heart.

85. If you are very fortunate, you will one day realize you’ve become a seasoned/veteran author, which will make no sense to you because you were a green as grass newbie, like, ten seconds ago.

86. You will be tempted to write a non-fic how-to book on writing. RESIST THIS TEMPTATION AT ALL COSTS.

87. Authors measure success in different ways: royalties, reviews, productivity (high word counts), awards, personal popularity…Be aware of your measure of success. Prepare to never understand anyone else’s. Some of the measures that differ from yours will probably piss you off.

88. You will helplessly watch colleagues (some of whom may be friends) repeat mistakes – silently watch because they don’t genuinely want to hear what those mistakes are and/or are wholly disinterested in correcting those mistakes. And they didn’t ask you, anyway, Madame Smartypants. Shut yer trap unless you want everyone else pointing out the mistakes you keep repeating that you probably won’t listen to advice about, either.

89. Colleagues will approach you about doing joint promo, which can be useful if the involved authors have a readership overlap that can be realistically expanded for both authors, but this will probably be a complete waste of your time. Odds are pretty good the author who approached you will expect you to jump through hoops to even do the joint promo because, hey, risking your readership costs the other author nothing. Don’t be a fool. As flattering as being approached is, nothing is worth alienating your core readers. Stick to your guns. Guard your readership zealously.

90. You may receive invitations to submit your work from publishers. Also wildly flattering. Research the publisher as you would any other publisher before deciding to partner with that publisher. Would they benefit from the relationship more than you? Pass.

91. Green as grass newbies will take it upon themselves to give you career advice. Resist any and all urges to laugh at them and getting pissed about it isn’t helpful either. They’ll eventually find a clue or they won’t. Ignore, ignore, ignore.

92. Writing is a smaller community than people think. At one point or another, everyone will be presented with an opportunity to help someone else…or not help that someone. If that someone has dicked you over and you are fine with not helping them as much as possible, TELL NO ONE. Insiders will figure out you are not an author to be fucked with all on their lonesome. Bragging about it just lessens the effect. It’s always better for the ones who have fucked you over to wonder what you’re going to do to them, anyway. Let them sweat it out.

93. Someone may compare their work with yours as a marketing gimmick.

94. Authors game Amazon’s system in a thousand ways and many times, the gaming pays off for them. This has nothing to do with you or your sales. Repeat after me: GAMING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU OR YOUR SALES. Readers like your work enough to buy/read you…or they don’t. Getting outraged at gaming authors might make you feel better, but will do nothing to improve your bottom line and complaining about gaming in public will just reflect poorly on you and your brand.

95. Colleagues will nominate themselves (or orchestrate their nomination) for an award and campaign for votes to “win” that award. The fact that readers don’t give two shits about awards is immaterial.

96. A reader will (astonishingly) nominate you or one of your books for an award against one of these campaigning authors. Enjoy the satisfaction of being legit nominated. Remind self that most readers don’t give two shits about awards and go on with your day.

97. You may win an award. This is super unlikely to help your career at all, but hey, still nice. Add a reference to the award to that book’s page on your website and go on with your day. Resist any and all urges to add “award-winning” to author bio/description. Because it bears repeating: readers don’t give two shits about awards.

98. Because Amazon breaks down bestseller lists to a minute degree, you will very likely make one of their lists. Unless it’s a main hub list (paranormal, romance, erotica), it isn’t worth bragging about. Adding “bestselling” to author bio/description won’t impress anybody until and unless you are at the very least a main hub bestseller. It’s like being beautiful. If you are beautiful, you never need to say so. People look and see for themselves. If you have to say it, you aren’t as beautiful as you think. Same goes for being a bestseller. If you have to point this out to readers, you probably aren’t as big a deal as you want to believe.

99. A peer will launch a crusade against you, talk shit about you, encourage others to talk shit about you, push nasty rumors around the community, urge readers to leave horrible reviews, the whole ball of wax. (See #92 in the fine print.) Those of us who have been in the business a while see venomous authors for what they are. Few will help them and you won’t get far in this business without help/support. Their time is coming. Feel free to anticipate the venomous author who is currently the bane of your existence becoming a nobody within a few years and in the meantime, keep it classy. Nicely contrasts with the banquet of ugly the venomous author is serving up and hurries their downfall.

100. A friend will ponder writing pro and you will trip over yourself warning them what a sweaty fuckball of disaster pro writing is, no matter how much you love it and can’t imagine doing anything else.

101. You will be tempted to end your novel with an apocalyptic meteor strike, zombie plague, and/or your star-crossed lovers becoming lunch for a random T-rex. You will entertain yourself endlessly with the idea of distributing files with a collection of your favorite alternate endings to as many piracy sites as possible.

102. A gaming author (or posse of gaming authors) will come after you with random, troublesome bitchery and a raft of dirty author tricks.

103. Once you’ve been in the business long enough and/or produced enough work, one of your later books will share basic similarities with an earlier book. This is because every author tends to be drawn to exploring specific themes and tropes that comprise that author’s core story. If readers are on board for that core story, rock on, but be aware that pushing a product with too many similarities with others in your backlist will turn you into a one-trick pony. Make every effort to bring something new and fresh to your core story every time or suffer the consequences.

104. You will be told that you can’t succeed unless you write a book every month. Welcome to the tension between quantity and quality authors. If you enjoy producing a lot of work at a fast clip and have chosen the quantity model for your career, go for it. Just be aware that churning out books at a rapid pace is no guarantee of success, same as investing months of your life in a work is no guarantee of success. Both business models – quantity and quality – make viable careers, but neither model guarantees success. Only producing a story that readers desperately want is.

105. Writing to current market trends isn’t selling out unless the hot trend is something you have previously mocked. Readers may never know of your secret disdain and contempt, but if you shared your ridicule back channel…that shit never dies.

FINAL ITEM, 2024:

You will make friends, true-blue friends. Not just other authors, either. Readers, editors, cover artists, bloggers, and reviewers. Super fans too, if you’re lucky. There are a lot more good people in this business than the fuckwit baddies. Stick around. Your tribe will find you and when they do, cherish every single one of them. That’s real. The rest? It’s just fine print bullshit. One day, a thousand years down this road, you’ll finally understand the ticket to ride was never the books you wrote. Not really. It’s the friends you made and they are worth way more than any stupid fine print.

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Lady Scouts: A Non-comprehensive Handbook

Just a quick shout-out to say I am uploading this book to the Zon soon-ish and forewarn everyone that:

THIS IS NOT A M/M BOOK.

Lady Scouts is a fun and funny pet project I’ve been working on the last little while, a harebrained idea I completely obsessed over. I had so much fun creating Lady Scouts, I didn’t want to keep it on my hard drive, wanted to share it. The thing is, my brain is not so hot. I’m not sure I am capable of creating a brand new pen name, but I seriously doubt it. So I said screw it. Everything is already set up as Kari. I’ll just roll it out as Kari and warn everyone this isn’t a new m/m book.

So. What is Lady Scouts?

Because being a woman is hard.

Lady Scouts celebrates and empowers women to have fun! Work on achievements such as Adult Beverages, Peopling, Tinhat Club, and Yas Queen on your own or with a group of buds. Reward yourself with achievement-themed wine charms and/or your own Wait Wut Lady Scout lanyard. You can even host a Lady Scout event in which the lone requirement is playing a song from my personal favorite and the best band ever, Def Leppard.

OG Lady Scout’s Note: No Lady Scout store currently exists so nope, not trying to upsell you sumpin. Pick and buy your own charms, Queen. The point isn’t side hustle. The point is F-U-N and living by the Lady Scout motto: Do Your Good Enough!

Keywords: scouts, scouting, parody, sisterhood, end the patriarchy

6,013 Digital Words

Thar ya go. If you’re a m/m reader and have exactly zero — if not less than zero — interest in the joke, that is totally cool. I don’t want to offend any of my m/m readers or make anyone feel in any way that I tricked them into thinking I had a new romance release when I most certainly do not. This isn’t a romance. It isn’t even fiction. This is just something I did for kicks. If it seems like something you might like, also cool. It’ll be in KU and a POD booklet if you’d rather. But I certainly have no expectations from m/m readers over my pet project. I’ll edit to add links once the handbook is live, but I won’t include it as a tab here on my site, as Lady Scouts does not fit in my back or front list Kari branding, to say the least. Please don’t feel obligated. At all.

Much love,

Kari

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Available NOW: Starting Over

Start the new year as you intend to go the whole year, amirite? A new book, my first in nearly four years, calls for a serious dose of happy! Better, I’ve started the next story too, which is going extremely well. Not sure what finally shook loose in my head, but thank God. All I have to say.

Anyhoo, the new story…

Life is what happens when your irritating ex shows up to wreck your plans.

Danny Thresher left his cheating boyfriend in New York City days before the Covid lockdown froze the country in place. He never looked back. Nothing was more important than protecting Gran and Uncle Hershel during the pandemic, so when his office demanded his return from teleworking, Danny became a charter member of the Great Resignation instead. He rebooted the family farm for cottage food production, with astonishing success. Someone to love would complete the new and improved Danny, and sexy math professor, Nick Wise, checks all the right boxes.

He didn’t count on his ex’s appearance in rural West Virginia two years after Paul’s affair ended their relationship, though.

The path forward is clear. Nick is who Danny wants. This life, surrounded by family and old friends, is everything he’s ever needed.

Pity years of introspective pandemic isolation weren’t enough to fully unpack and process insecurities from the old Danny that linger still.

Warning: Post-Covid setting & themes. Masks. Social distancing. Grocery orders substitutions and eating outdoors in February. Personal sacrifice for the safety of high-risk loved ones…In short, heroes.

If you too swapped your cape for compassion and N95s for vulnerable loved ones, I salute you!

May/December, age gap, alpha geek, Daddy, spanking, Valentine’s

24,930 Digital words

Available at Amazon/KU

If you aren’t a KU member and/or don’t get your books from the Zon, I apologize. Truly, I do. I generally release my books wide, but this time, I just couldn’t face creating multiple listings at other vendors, at least not while I was juggling everything else involved in pushing a project through production. Will it go wide later? Probably. More details on what’s been going on with me in the TL;DR preface included in Starting Over, but what I’m able to do depends largely on what my wonky brain can handle. My first priority has to be producing new work/words. I hope to take SO wide as soon as that’s possible, though. In the meantime, if you’re a KU member, you can pick up Starting Over and I moved a couple other of my contemporaries — In the Red and my MMF, Lovely Wicked — into KU too.

Wishing a happy, healthy, and fulfilling 2023 to you all…

Kari

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Alive & Kicking

Wow. I haven’t done this in a while. A really long, loooooooooooong while.

As most of you probably know, I was diagnosed with a recurrence of my breast cancer in early 2019. Scans midway through chemo showed I had a complete pathological response to treatment — no cancer. I was and remain NED (No Evidence of Disease). YAY! Lack of death is always appreciated, LOL. Unless you follow me on twitter, what you probably don’t know is, although chemo kept me alive, it fried my brain. The drugs I was put on to fight cancer the 2nd time were way stronger than what I had the first time through treatment, did a lot more damage to me on a cognitive level. And, just like chemo for my original dx in 2015, that brain fog lingered.

Learning to function on a day-to-day level was my first priority. I still can’t do a lot. Basic things. Essential things. For example, I have to set a timer every time I leave the kitchen when I cook because as soon as I walk out the kitchen door, I forget that I’m cooking. (My short-term memory is effectively non-existent.) I put recipes in acetate sleeves so I can check off ingredients with a dry erase marker as I gather them so I don’t forget I’ve already added salt 2 or 3 times. I have literally hopped into my car and forgotten where I was going and why I needed to be there while driving en route. Long story short, I invested years developing a whole raft of lifehacks to find a way around the parts of my brain that no longer work and what I still can’t do (example, manage my appointments), I rely on hubs.

Learning to write again…That took even longer, but ha, I finally figured that out too.

The file is due on my editor’s desk on the 1st. I don’t have the final for the cover yet, but I signed off on the mockup only yesterday. Formatter is waiting. I’ve kinda figured out how to distribute ARCs? Kinda. Here’s hoping, anyway. In related news, if you want to be part of the review team, give me a yell either in comments or via my email (kari AT karigregg DOT com) and I’ll make sure you get an ARC.

A new story’s coming!

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Available NOW: Two Fates

Finally! A new book, a new book, hooray!

Y’all know I like to explore and move inside different shifter worlds. This time, I decided to play with the fated mate trope. What if a shifter had more than one fated mate? How would that work? And how would that shifter’s pack deal with each couple?

Two Fates was a hell of a lot of fun to write and I hope you’ll like it too!

Jamie and Ian recognized they were destined mates as teenagers. Heedless of their pack’s objections, they loved fully and recklessly. When Ian perished in a senseless accident a decade later, Jamie’s grief was so consuming he almost died too, but in the years since, Jamie learned to cope. Though his heart is empty, he finds purpose in teaching shifter craft to pack whelps and carving bone to offer for trade. His is a quiet life, his peace hard-won. The pack seer’s alarming prophecy at Jamie’s birth assured Jamie he would love again, but what he shared with Ian…That magic only happens once.

Kenneth—pack newcomer and presumptive alpha—disagrees. Instinct led him to Kentucky after Ian’s death tore Jamie’s world apart. While Kenneth would’ve done anything to spare Jamie the agony of Ian’s loss, Kenneth will also never deny what drove him to Burnt Fork in the first place: Jamie is his destined mate.

Can one man have two fates? The pack lore Jamie teaches suggests that is possible, but Jamie alone must decide if finding the courage to love again is a blessing…or his curse.

57,696 Digital Words

Two Fates is available at:

Amazon

Payhip (use code 25OFF at checkout to get a 25% discount)

Kobo

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords.

For reasons that escape me, I can’t make this stupid website work right, so read the excerpt below? LOL

Happy Reading!

Kari

Chapter One

Jamie knifed soundlessly through the woods on two legs rather than four. Heart thudding in excitement and fear that his escape might be cut short, he didn’t take chances. He’d left most of the pack at his parents’ den in the forest behind him. They’d stop him if they knew he’d slipped away. They’d already moved heaven and earth to keep him from Ian. They’d track Jamie less readily in his human skin, though. He watched his step to avoid rustling leaves or snapping stray twigs. Now that he’d entered the towering rock and stony juts of granite along the border with Bitter Creek, at least the ground was too stark and sterile to crackle underfoot.

Pulse pounding in his ears, Jamie peered through the shadows of craggy mountainside. He paused to sniff the air though Ian almost certainly had retreated into his human skin to evade the pack as well.

Ian had to be close. Jamie’s nerves wouldn’t jitter as wildly if he wasn’t.

Minding shards of stone that carpeted the pass between Burnt Fork and Bitter Creek, Jamie pushed forward. His muscles burned as the ground sloped stubbornly up.

His best friend, confidant…his everything had to be nearby. Ian had fled to this patch of unforgiving rock since they were boys, any time he needed freedom from the pressures of the pack. Jamie had run there, too. That their parents would have tanned both their backsides for breaching the border with Bitter Creek had hardly mattered. The other pack hadn’t attacked or punished them for playing in the rocks, had they? The rugged pass was populated by vipers and a big cat or two that frightened away game. No one else came here. Which was why, when Jamie had overhead his mother speaking of Ian’s disappearance after they’d been separated, Jamie knew exactly where to meet him.

Days apart had stretched one into another with the weight and crushing emptiness of lifetimes. Jamie had rarely been without Ian, his best friend never far from his side since they’d been pups. How could their parents be so cruel?

Jamie’s hands trembled as he hauled himself up a cluster of boulders. If Ian wasn’t hiding among the rocks, Jamie didn’t know what he’d do. Continue searching. Keep hoping. He’d die before he returned to his parents’ den alone and defeated. A future without Ian’s laughter was that unthinkable.

He nearly jolted out of his bones when a tall shadow sprang from a ledge high above him, the figure landing in a loose crouch inches ahead of Jamie on the trail. Joy lit him up as his frantic gaze took in a familiar dark head, the broad shoulders he knew well bared of a shirt, those long-muscled legs—”Ian!”

“What are you doing here?” He caught Jamie against him when Jamie shot toward him. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“I had to find you.” Jamie grinned at Ian’s stunned eyes. “As soon as I realized what was happening.”

“The ripening.” Ian’s lush lips tightened. He glared at Jamie. “You weren’t supposed to answer by ripening too.”

The bottom fell out of Jamie’s stomach. “You—” When his breath caught, freezing the words in his mouth, he shook his head and tried again. “You don’t want me?”

“Want you? Of course, I want you.” Lifting a shaky hand to cradle Jamie’s head in his palm, Ian shuddered. “Why do you think I ran? Your scent on them alone was driving me crazy.”

Jamie soaked up the affection in Ian’s caress, comforted by that if not Ian’s reply. “But why? Why did they separate us? Why did you let them?”

Ian’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re too young.”

“Bullshit.” Foul temper stirring, Jamie jerked away, though not far. His wounded pride won only scant inches. Neither he nor Ian would be able to tolerate even a small distance between them after having been denied touch for days. Not once they each smelled the other’s sweat…and arousal. “If my body ripened in response to yours, I’m mature enough to mate.” Jamie scowled at Ian. “Besides, I’m all of what? Five hours younger than you?”

“Months.” Ian’s mouth quirked. “Five months.” As if he couldn’t stand not holding him close, Ian yanked Jamie against him. “We are both too young then. The earliest mating this pack has seen in a generation.”

“That didn’t stop my mother. Or Da.” Who had mated at fifteen. At least, at sixteen, he and Ian were older than his parents when they’d mated. “Why are you being difficult?”

“It was different for them.” Ian rested his cheek on Jamie’s shoulder. “There are extenuating circumstances for us.”

Jamie stiffened, dread balling his gut. “My mother was wrong.”

“She’s never wrong.”

Jamie looked into Ian’s eyes—sad and sparking with the same fear Jamie had lived with since he sensed his body ripening for his mate. “My heart beat like a war drum before I saw you because your scent is overwhelming,” Jamie said. “Not because you weren’t careful. You were, but I’m attuned to you now. I could track you for miles.” Jamie grabbed Ian’s wrist and spread Ian’s hand, palm down and fingers splayed, over the center of Jamie’s chest. “I’m shaking. You are too. You feel it as fiercely as I do.”

“I’m no alpha wolf.” Ian stared at his hand, fingers curling next to the nub of Jamie’s pert nipple, but he didn’t rip that hand away. “I’m not the mate our seer saw for you.”

The pain of that, the truth in it, shook Jamie to his core, but he stroked Ian’s forearm. “The quickening doesn’t lie. We’ve known we would be together since we were small because the Goddess showed us that we belong to each other. Our physical ripening only confirmed what we’ve felt since we were young.” Fierce wonder and joy flooded him. “We are destined to mate.”

Ian leaned in, pressing against Jamie, both of their hands trapped between them. “Do you think this isn’t killing me? That I don’t want—” His shoulders jerked, a startled but desperate laugh tearing from him. “Everything! I want everything and I want it with you.” He skated a kiss over Jamie’s temple. “I’ve loved you since the moment you were born.”

“Every minute of every hour of every day,” Jamie vowed, wallowing in this as he never could have before. Not while the pack seer—his mother—had sworn Jamie would mate with the next alpha. He wasn’t allowed to have these feelings for Ian because, according to prophecy, Jamie was fated for another. “Don’t you see? We can be together now. You ripened and my wolf answered by rising within me. You sensed it first, but without you these past days, my ripening intensified. None can deny it, not even my mother: we are fated.”

“I knew it since we were boys. No ripening need ever tell me what I felt plainly in my bones.” Ian rubbed his cheek over Jamie’s. “My destiny is you,” he said, voice breaking. “It’s always been you.”

Grief shredded Jamie, the pain still fresh and bleeding. “Then why?” he asked around the knot of hurt lodged in his throat. “Why did you run? Why let them separate us?”

“Doesn’t matter anymore.” Ian freed his trapped hands only to wrap his arms around Jamie who sighed blissfully at the press of Ian’s skin against his own. “I’m not strong enough to let you go again.” Ian’s beloved dark eyes deepened like the shadowy corners of this forbidding and forbidden mountain pass. “Come with me?”

“Anywhere,” Jamie answered and meant it.

Ian didn’t lead him far. Jamie knew he wouldn’t. He’d explored the narrow paths made from jutting stone alongside Ian since they were boys. They both knew the way. Their sanctuary wasn’t a cave. These hills had none, the rock dense and impenetrable. Instead, boulders and shards of granite assembled in tumbling formations that left tunnel-like gaps and hidden enclosures. Ian and Jamie had claimed one of these crevices as their own years ago, furtively dragging a tattered blanket and other supplies as they could. Not food. They couldn’t risk attracting the mountain cats that hunted the high peaks, but they enjoyed all the other comforts boys who had grown to young men could desire, including wood for the tiny campfire Ian immediately set to light. A sheet of rock had fallen in one corner of the cramped space to provide crude shelter and a storage area protected by the elements for the few items they’d secreted there, but otherwise, the reds and yellows of the setting sun painted the sky above them. As boys, the rock walls had felt spacious, a luxury, but neither Jamie nor Ian had grown small or runty. Even without trying, they rubbed shoulders these days.

“The smoke will dissipate in the rocks,” Ian said, jabbing at the kindling with a stick. “No one on either side of the border will notice us.”

That Ian mentioned the risk of discovery that the fire represented, which they’d known was safe since they were both ten, told Jamie that Ian was as nervous as he was. Maybe more. The man he’d loved these many years still smiled into the campfire, his rangy body coiled in a bunch of lean muscle and golden skin, but his shoulders squared, tension defining his strong legs and torso. Jamie licked his lips, anticipation humming through him, but he still turned to fumble with the threadbare quilt that would cushion their mating den, nonplussed for a moment to realize his mother had provided their bed by discarding the precious though worn fabric many, many summers ago.

He jumped at Ian’s grip on his arm, which ended Jamie’s skittish fussing. “We don’t have to do anything.” Ian had circled the fire while Jamie had been distracted and stood behind Jamie now, Ian’s breath hot on Jamie’s neck. “If we ripened for each other once under the sway of the moon, we’ll ripen again for the next full moon.”

“We may never get another chance.” Jamie quivered. “They’ll part us if we don’t mate.” He stared at their makeshift bed. “Anything to fulfill their cursed prophecy.”

“The prophecy is yours, not theirs.” Ian’s grasp transitioned from holding Jamie fast to a caress that heated Jamie’s blood. Ian’s fingers traced the pulse throbbing at Jamie’s wrist. “And it’s no curse.”

“Isn’t it?” Jamie swallowed around the lump in his throat, his wild fear and uncertainty gnawing at him with razor-sharp teeth despite the sweet allure of Ian’s touch. “How could you still want me, knowing…” He trailed off, unable to voice the betrayal his mother’s prediction had implied.

Ian released Jamie, only to envelop him in strong arms and nudge him around to face him. “No, Jamie. It’s not a curse.” When Jamie buried his nose in the crook of Ian’s neck, Ian lifted a hand to nudge Jamie’s chin and Jamie’s anxious gaze rose to meet Ian’s. The steadfast resolve that glittered in Ian’s stare melted Jamie’s trepidation. “What the seer saw for you is a blessing. I know you’ll be all right, no matter what.”

Jamie had no such assurances. “But Ian—”

“Do you love me?”

Everything Jamie knew of love, Ian had taught him and before the night was over, Ian and Jamie both would learn still more. “I’ve loved you so long, I know nothing else. I never want to.”

One corner of Ian’s sly mouth tipped up. Enough for Jamie’s stomach to flip because, together since pups, he could read his friend like a book. Ian’s helpless moue reflected Ian’s grim acceptance that Jamie wouldn’t be allowed the luxury of knowing only the love of a single mate, but before Jamie could form his instant protest, Ian angled his jaw and brought their mouths together.

Jamie trembled anew.

Glorious. Ian’s kiss amazed Jamie, the softness of lips Jamie had only dreamed of sampling a dizzy wonder to him. Ian didn’t open his mouth. Though Jamie welcomed him, Ian didn’t slide his tongue inside as Jamie needed. Still, Jamie tasted salt and copper, the game upon which Ian had feasted in his absence from the pack’s guard. His scent had intoxicated Jamie since Ian’s ripening had begun, earthy sweat mixed with the tang of fresh pine that surrounded his family’s den and cornflower that thrived in abundance throughout Burnt Fork. More than that, though. He smelled of spices Jamie had never sniffed before that made him yearn. The wafting savor of Ian had maddened him before, when only traces of Ian’s scent had clung to other pack members. This close? Jamie was enthralled by him. He steeped his senses recklessly and fully in the fragrance of his mate while Ian frustratingly gentled him with this, their first kiss.

Jamie growled.

Ian chuckled. “Patience.”

“I want you.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry to prove our parents wrong.” Ian nipped at Jamie’s tingling lower lip. “We’ll only seal the bond once. I need to…” He bit down harder, the small jab of pain wringing a moan from Jamie. “…wallow in you. In us.”

“I wasn’t thinking of our parents or the pack.” Jamie’s senses zinged riotously at the brush of their lips. “I wasn’t thinking at all.”

“Good.” Ian lapped at Jamie’s mouth, setting Jamie on fire with arousal and consuming need. Ian dragged his fingertips up the bumps of Jamie’s spine. When Jamie trembled, Ian returned to tormenting Jamie’s mouth, his tongue tasting Jamie’s lips and his sharp teeth making him sensitive. Jamie ached. “Perfect.”

Maybe. What Ian did to him certainly enraptured him, as though his best friend had found in their days apart some raw and feral magic in the rocky crags to bewitch and bewilder him. Jamie needed more. “Kiss me?”

“I am.” Smiling, Ian slid his tongue inside the eager welcome of Jamie’s mouth, anyway. Jamie felt the slow dance of Ian’s possession from the soles of his feet to the tips of his hair, into the marrow of his bones. “Say it,” Ian ordered him, then kissed Jamie into silence as though Ian couldn’t resist the slide of their twining tongues, either. “Say it,” he tried again, his breath coming faster.

 Jamie shot his fingers into Ian’s hair, urging his mouth closer. “I want you,” he complained when Ian refused him.

“I want you too, more than anything.” Ian groaned at Jamie’s answering snarl of desire. “Tell me. I need to hear it.”

Realization finally dawned inside Jamie and his tugging fingers gentled. Rather than demanding, Jamie soothed. Because Ian, deep down, was as scared as Jamie was. Jamie couldn’t stop the flood of tenderness that filled him for his mate, didn’t even try. “I love you, Ian.” As soon as he gave Ian what he’d asked, tension poured from Ian’s body, flush against Jamie’s, in a rush of loosening muscle and helpless shivers. “My heart is yours. My body is yours. Into your care, I give everything I am and ever will be.”

“As I receive, I gift unto you,” Ian responded. Jamie felt Ian’s heart, crashing violently against his ribcage, pounding against Jamie’s skin. “Forever, my love.”

Jamie fingered Ian’s hair, dark as sin, rich and silky. The words of the vow fell from his lips with unsurprising ease. “Forever, my life and the work of my hands.”

Ian shook, his grasp on Jamie like iron bands. “Forever, my spirit.”

“By the fruit of our bodies, we two become one,” they recited in unison, Jamie staring into Ian’s wide unblinking eyes. “This, I pledge as my eternal troth.”

They were just words. Ancient promises, but only words nonetheless. Jamie’s mother and Mack, their pack trainer, had repeatedly drilled into each pup and maturing whelp that the words meant nothing without the quickening that identified mates and the physical ripening that proved the blessing of the Goddess. The vow was meaningless without the pure intent of their hearts. Pack elders like his mother swore there was no magic in the words themselves.

They were wrong.

Every wonder and dazzling perplexity of the power held in check by the wolf inside Jamie screamed to urgent attention. His hearing sharpened, the riot of sounds from the scritching crawl of insects across gritty rock to birdsong in the woods beyond the pass a ringing clamor in his ears. The dimming light of the setting sun brightened with an explosion of color and only now could Jamie see and appreciate flecks of secret obsidian in the midnight of Ian’s eyes. Scent, too, swamped him, Ian’s smell but also his own, the two scents mixing until neither was distinguishable independent of the other.

Words were the oldest magic.

As was touch.

Wherever Jamie pressed against Ian tingled as senses dormant within Jamie awakened to greet his mate. His blood seemed to flow hotter but oddly thicker in his veins. The tickle of Ian’s chest hair beaded Jamie’s nipples. Even the blending of their sweat was an enchanting bouquet to him. “Ian?”

Chest heaving, Ian scraped his cheek across Jamie’s, nuzzling him in dazed but affectionate awe. “I feel it too.”

A trill of fear sprinted through Jamie the fraction of a second his heartbeat took to synchronize with Ian’s, with his mate’s. Then it was done. He sensed Ian’s joy as readily as his own, shared his astonishment. The love that had unfurled in Jamie as he’d ripened for his mate flowed into Ian and returned, carrying the promise of Ian’s love for him as well. The vow hadn’t lied. Together, they were stronger and steadier.

Their mating hadn’t required the loss of virginity and spilling semen, nor the exchange of bites. Jamie craved Ian inside him more than ever, longed for his mate’s teeth in his shoulder or mayhap his nape. That wasn’t strictly necessary, though. Their vow alone had united them. They were one.

Because Ian was as intimate in his heart and mind as Jamie’s own soul, burning wet gathered in Jamie’s eyes. His horror, anticipatory pain, and grief strengthened his grip on Ian who was and had always been the center of his world. “What are we going to do?” Jamie asked when he could breathe again.

The fire crackled quietly behind Ian. The distant birds twittered, as though already joining in their future sorrow.

Ian pushed Jamie down to the worn blanket of their mating bed, settling his hips between Jamie’s spread thighs. He braced on his elbows above Jamie and smiled at him. “What will we do? Love each other.” Ian bent down. His kiss rocked Jamie, the chaotic tumult of what Ian had guessed drowning in the beauty of what they created together. Ian’s devotion, his ardor and adoration of Jamie was a balm to Jamie’s wounded heart, but Ian also inflamed him. The silky hardness of Ian’s cock settling against Jamie’s groin stirred him, reigniting the passion that terrified grief could not tear asunder, not when Ian was warm and alive in Jamie’s arms, not while Ian was still Jamie’s to treasure. “Love me,” Ian said, grinding his hips into Jamie’s. Their cocks brushed and Jamie gritted his teeth, though he could not smother his moan. “Just love me.”

“Forever,” Jamie swore and arched his back to thrust his hips too, pleased when Ian groaned out his pleasure and need.

“Today,” Ian corrected on a harsh pant. “I may not have tomorrow. Love me today.”

“For as long as I can.”

Even as they writhed together, Ian pulling Jamie’s orgasm from him—the first of many—and spilling across Jamie’s stomach, before either of them had the presence of mind to exchange bites marking them as mates, and later, after Ian had thrust inside Jamie and Ian had accepted Jamie into his body too, even then, Jamie knew it wouldn’t be enough.

They’d mated with an intensity that could never be denied as anything less than fate, no matter the doomed foolishness of their families and the pack that had struggled to keep them apart.

For Ian, though, the clock ticked.

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My No Good Very Bad News

There’s really no way to sugar-coat this so…My breast cancer is back. Mine is a regional recurrence, having returned in a lymph node near my original cancer. My CT was stable, no evidence of it spreading so far, thank God. I will start chemo soon and meet with the surgeon too. I have a chance and I’m not giving up. I beat it once. I can beat it again. I can try.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times—I, not my circumstances, determine my happiness. Right now, life is good. I’m not in any pain. I’m tired, but I can still do the things I loved before this diagnosis. I don’t expect that to change until chemo sinks its claws into me. Then, yeah, life will become actively terrible, but cancer teaches you to live in the now. My today is pretty good. Tomorrow—which none of us are guaranteed anyway—will take care of itself. On the bright side, this ain’t my first rodeo. I know what I’m in for, how I’m likely to respond to treatment, and what I can do to cope.

What does all this mean going forward?

I was finishing a book when things went wrong for me (again) and it’s in production now, ought to be releasing in the next few days. (Many, many heartfelt thanks to everyone on my production team who moved me to the head of line so I could get this book out before chemo addles my brains, LOL.) Two Fates will probably be my last book for a long, long while. Chemobrain hit hard and fast last time so I anticipate my brain turning to pudding very soon. The odds I’ll be able to continue working while I’m in treatment are slim to nonexistent. At least I can get Two Fates out first.

Prayers, positive thoughts/energy are always welcome and appreciated. My husband and children, understandably, are taking this pretty hard. Pray for them too. If you’ve a mind, send me a pm if you see me online or email if you don’t to check on me from time to time—You’d be surprised how much a simple “thinking of you” gives an otherwise hideous day a boost.

And book recommendations! I need them lots. I don’t know if you guys know this, but when you’re in chemo, each treatment is like 5-7 hours. No kidding. Which says nothing of each treatment’s bad day (judging by prior experience, likely to be my day 3) when I don’t do much if at all possible. I need good books to help keep me occupied. Scifi titles you’ve loved would be great, but also fantasy and paranormal—shifters, vamps, and anything dystopian, really. Also mysteries. KU, non-KU, either is fine. If it’s any rule of measure on my likes and preferences, I’m currently reading Megan Derr’s Midnight from her Dance with the Devil series as well as rereading Twisted Hilarity’s The Last Pure Human and I’m enjoying both immensely. Wait, bad example. Neither one of those are KU books. Whatever. You know what I mean.

Otherwise… Don’t give up on me. My oncologist is cautiously optimistic. I’m not done yet. I’m going to fight this and live my best life while I do. Because fuck cancer, that’s why.

All my love,

Kari

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The Last Emperor — Available NOW!

The tribes were his to lose…and theirs to regain.

History taught that rebels executed the imperial family, including young Prince Nika Marisek, and hid the bodies in an unmarked grave. History was wrong.

Decades later, yarn shop owner Nick Goode reclaimed his identity to see his long-dead family decently buried. He’ll do whatever he must to persuade elders who now rule the tribes…even offer to abdicate. Some, however, seek to capitalize on Nick’s survival. Who better to drag the tribes from corruption into freedoms the rebellion had promised if not the prince who became one of the peasantry in exile?

Arit hates politics. When Elder Benjic, his estranged sire, shows up with the celebrity prince to fulfill a pre-war mating pact, Arit refuses. He craves strength on strength, the challenge of an alpha mating another alpha. A damaged omega who knits won’t do. Arit will guide them on an adventure tour exploring their wolf instincts; that’s his job. But that’s all he’ll do.

Except Nick isn’t an omega. He isn’t damaged. And if he seduces Arit to win Benjic’s support, Nick won’t give up his throne, either. He’ll risk everything to realize the ideals of the rebellion…and end his fate as the tribes’ last emperor.

CONTENT WARNING:  palace intrigues, mpreg themes, shifter knotting, and two stubborn alphas who must learn to work together to save an empire

63,389 Digital Words

*

I swore I’d get this out by the end of the year and I’m a woman of my word, LOL.

Scroll below for a sample!

Available at:
Amazon
Smashwords
and PayHip

Coming soon to Kobo, Barnes & Nobles, and other vendors!

Wait — What’s PayHip?

PayHip is a way to save YOU money by purchasing my books directly from me (credit/debit card transactions handled through Swipe) and side-loading or emailing your books directly to your device. Use coupon code 25OFF at checkout on my PayHip page on any and all of my indie and reissued books to get those titles 25% off. So, for The Last Emperor, instead of paying $4.99, you’ll pay $3.74 with the coupon which will save you more than a buck and you’ll be able to download all three formats of each book (mobi/prc, epub, and pdf) you buy via my PayHip page too. Once you’ve downloaded the files you want, just email those files to your ereader or transfer them from your computer to your ereader via USB cable.

Happy Reading!

Kari

Prologue

After a gentle nudge from Averlee, Nika blinked awake to the steady plink plink plink of rain pelting the window next to his pallet. “Into your traveling clothes. Quickly,” she said, already turning to attend to Nika’s brothers and sisters in the attic set aside as the nursery when they’d arrived at Barton House three moons ago. “The rebels are evacuating us.”

Again?

Muzzy-headed and yawning, Nika pushed down his blanket and scrabbled into the linen shirt, blue velvet breeches, military-style vest, and overcoat designated as his traveling costume when the rebels had overrun the palace what felt like several lifetimes ago. He didn’t think about the richly appointed rooms he’d enjoyed as a son of the emperor anymore, nor remember the plentiful and succulent meats upon which he’d feasted, or recall the warmth he’d taken for granted as a child of royalty.

No guards stood at the door to watch them dress and hurry them along, but he nevertheless schooled his features to give no indication of the jewels hidden in the lining of this particular set of clothes. His sisters Lyssandra and Catterin carried most of their secret wealth, rows of diamonds hugging the stays of their corsets thanks to Averlee’s clever stitches, but their parents had distributed the treasure saved from the revolution among each of their nine children in case the rebels separated the imperial family, either to ransom hostages or for their “protection.” Nika had watched Averlee sew a necklace dripping emeralds into the seam of his vest as rebel forces had approached the palace. The weight of his father’s imperial signet ring had been disguised behind decorative buttons on Nika’s coat.

Once he’d laced his boots, he helped Averlee with his youngest sister Elba who, at only two winters, still cried a lot. Nika wiped her tears and urged her with furtive whispers, “Listen. Do you hear the booms? That isn’t thunder from the storm. Be brave, El. The White Army is near.”

Soldiers flung open the attic door, and with bayonets glinting in the dim light, screamed demands for haste, which only intensified Elba’s cries to hysterical sobbing. They grabbed Catterin by the biceps and shoved her down the stairs. Their time to dress for the evacuation at an end, Nika snatched Elba’s shoes from the floor. He followed Averlee’s swooshing skirts to the exit. More rebels guided them to the lower floors of Barton House, forbidden to the emperor’s children the past two moons.

“The stone walls of the kitchen will provide some shelter from artillery,” one of the soldiers said, “until the transport truck arrives.”

“Toly is ill. May we have a chair for him?” The empress nodded to Nika’s eldest brother and heir to the empire despite the leg deformity that made running impossible and walking difficult under the best of circumstances. Although their healer had remained with the imperial family through the revolution and captivity, Toly had been deprived of medicines and proper exercise, so Healer Kott carried him.

The soldier sneered. “I’ll fetch a throne worthy of the crown prince.”

The floor under Nika’s boots vibrated with the shelling from the White Army, which must be close. The barrage blending with cracks of thunder resonated in his sensitive ears, but the humming engine of an approaching truck did not. Nika crouched and slipped Elba’s stockingless feet into her shoes while the nanny held her. His task finished, he stood and started at a heavy hand settling on his shoulder. “Thank you, Nika. You’re so good with your sister.” His father smiled at him, then met the gaze of Averlee struggling to retain her hold on Elba who squirmed. “Give the baby to him. She won’t be easy until she’s under Nika’s care, and you’ll be free to tend the other children.”

Fortunately, Elba was by all standards a runt. Nika grunted when he accepted her weight from their nanny, but with his sister’s thin arms snaking around his neck and her legs encircling his hips despite her voluminous skirts, Nika managed with only a momentary stumble. Still, Nika wouldn’t be able to carry Elba long. She’d grown that much during the war. Nika closed his eyes, concentrating on Elba’s sweet baby smell as her tears wet his neck. He prayed the fighting would end soon, that his smallest sister would learn life outside imprisonment. At eight summers, Nika had acquired a wealth of memories to rely on and carry him through the horror of this war, but Elba had still been nursing from their mother’s breasts when rebels had stormed the Winter Palace to seize them.

The soldier returned with a cushioned chair for Toly. “A throne to die in.” He waved at it with an exaggerated flourish.

His family had acclimated to such petty cruelties, however, and could not be provoked by rebel contempt. Father thanked the soldier while Nika’s mother settled Toly more comfortably.

“Shh, it’s all right,” Nika murmured into the pink shell of Elba’s ear when her arms tightened around him. “The truck is coming. We’ll leave soon.”

To where, Nika didn’t know or especially care. He doubted his parents did either, but one prison was the same as the next in Nika’s experience. He was just grateful winter storms had ended and torrential rain rather than pelting snow washed against the kitchen windows. Keeping Elba warm during the harsh cold season hadn’t been easy.

“You. Stand next to the chair,” the rebel said to Nika’s father. He pointed at Mother. “And you beside him. No one need linger in the rainy wet before climbing into the transport truck if you’ve formed an orderly line.”

Soldiers directed Healer Kott to stand behind the chair, in position so he and Father could carry Toly in it.  Rebels shoved Nika’s older sisters and another brother to one side of the chair. Averlee was remanded to the opposite side to help the youngest children, including Nika and Elba.

Once they were arranged to the rebels’ satisfaction, the soldiers withdrew to the arched doorway of the massive kitchen.

Even then, alarm didn’t bloom in Nika’s chest.

The truck would pull into the yard and to the kitchen door, out of view of curious peasants on the street. Rebels would lead them out one by one. Once his family had scrambled into the truck bed, soldiers would drive through the night until they reached the next house selected as their gaol. Nika knew the routine, having endured evacuation from approaching battle twice already.

Fear didn’t explode inside Nika until one of the soldiers stepped forward and said, “Eton Marisek, because of your crimes against the tribes and because your supporters continue to wage war against the people, you have been sentenced to death.”

Stunned terror froze Nika in place.

His father’s spine shot straight as he whipped around to face his accuser. He gasped. “What?”

“You are to be executed immediately.” The soldier barked at the others, “Ready!”

Each lifted a gun from the folds of their military coats and aimed at Nika’s parents, at his brothers and sisters. At him. Staring at the rebel pointing a revolver at he and Elba, Nika gulped. Fright flooded him, supplanting his shock.

They weren’t supposed to die. Father had sworn they were valuable pawns to the rebels, bargaining chips in negotiations with the White Army and its order of nobles. Mother’s family—salted among the monarchies of neighboring lands—would also pay a considerable sum for her safe return and for ransoming her children. A new government would emerge from the revolution, yes, one composed of both the aristocracy and rebels if war propaganda was to be believed. The revolution called for a representative council to lead the tribes rather than an emperor. Nika’s father would never rule again. His family wouldn’t. Until now, only rabble in the capitol had wanted the imperial family dead, though.

Nika was seventh in line to the throne—he didn’t understand politics and had never been taught such matters. He’d known he would one day marry to strengthen alliances for the empire, but with an excess of older brothers and sisters to govern territories under the leadership of the crown, his parents had deemed training Nika unnecessary. When he reached adulthood, they expected him to marry and vanish into the countryside of his husband’s tribe afterwards. Mostly, his family had been preparing him for his future by tutoring him in the arts.

Except Nika would not survive to adulthood. No political marriage awaited him. No more piano lessons, painting with the masters, or analyzing poetry. He’d die with his family in this kitchen.

He angled his body to shield Elba’s with his own.

The soldiers cocked their weapons.

His mother screamed.

“Fire!”

~ * ~ * ~

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Half a Million Dead Cannibals — Available (Again) NOW

All that’s keeping Riley from the man he’s falling in love with are the ruins of a city filled with half a million dead cannibals.

Strangers, Riley and Graham sheltered together in a basement storage unit when the zombie outbreak slammed into the world three months ago. They lived through the first blast of the plague, but they may not last much longer among survivors scrambling for dwindling resources. They agree to hike from the city and to the safety of the mountains. They didn’t count on the storm they hoped would cover their exit developing into a Nor’easter, though, and they sure didn’t think their visibility would shrink so badly that they’d hike into the leading edge of a zombie swarm, either. In the chaos of escaping the ravenous horde, they are separated, with Graham racing toward feral dog packs to the east and Riley sprinting to hostile survivors hunting them to the west.

Nobody said finding and keeping a quality guy (alive) during the apocalypse would be easy.

Note: This is a previously published work.

26,782 words

Just in time for the Halloween season, Half a Million Dead Cannibals is finally available again at Amazon, Smashwords, and Payhip (remember to use code 25OFF to get 25% off the purchase price at Payhip!) and is processing at Nook, Kobo, iBooks, and other vendors so should be available very soon.

Even better, I’m participating in a zombie fun run on October 21st to raise money for breast cancer awareness. If you buy a copy of Dead Cannibals by the 21st, I’ll add whatever the math tells me I’ll make from the sale to my check for the race. So get your spooky on and support a great cause!

Hoping you and yours have a scarylicious Halloween…and happy reading!

Kari

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One Last Try ~ Available NOW!

Oh happy day, a new book!

When Nox was fourteen, his brother Joth murdered a their older brother, their mother, and a human girl. Nox survived, but the attack wrecked his womb. Shattered, Nox rejected the pack who fumbled helping a barren, grief-stricken omega cope. He built a new purpose for himself as a master craftsman. Mating? No thanks. He’s better off alone.

Humans studied Joth in prison until his father’s death ended the weekly visits. Joth demands Nox in their father’s stead in exchange for resuming therapy and tests… thereby risking the destruction of Nox’s carefully ordered world. Again.

The pack drafts alpha fixer Dio to untangle the mess. One sniff of the wary omega convinces him Nox is his mate. New medical treatments offer a slim possibility Nox could bear children, but if the past years taught shifters anything, it is an omega’s value is greater than his fertility. Reconciling Nox with his pack is more important. Laying to rest the ghosts haunting Nox is too. Learning to trust? Vital.

Dio just needs to coax Nox into one last try.

Content Warning: Omega mpreg and fertility themes, dubious consent, shifter knotting, an omega who rejects labels, and a bewildered alpha who wouldn’t have it any other way.

43,915 digital words

Scroll below for a sample!

Available at:
Amazon
Smashwords
and PayHip

Coming soon to Kobo, Barnes & Nobles, and other vendors!

Wait — What’s PayHip?

PayHip is a way to save YOU money by purchasing my books directly from me (credit/debit card transactions handled through Swipe) and side-loading or emailing your books directly to your device. Use coupon code 25OFF at checkout on my PayHip page on any and all of my indie and reissued books to get those titles 25% off. So, for One Last Try, instead of paying $3.99, you’ll pay $2.99 with the coupon which will save you a buck and you’ll be able to download all three formats of each book (mobi/prc, epub, and pdf) you buy via my PayHip page too. Once you’ve downloaded the files you want, just email those files to your ereader or transfer them from your computer to your ereader via USB cable.

Happy Reading!

Kari

Chapter One

Six months later…

“You grew up.”

My brother’s voice had deepened during his years of incarceration. Gaze lowered to the metal table, I shivered at the mix of strangeness and familiarity. Part of me rejoiced. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Joth since we were boys, but despite what he’d done, the wolf inside me stirred with excitement at a reunion with my kin, any kin. The rest of me knew better, and I kept my attention the fuck down, my numb fingers grasping the telephone humans had provided as our means of communication. A thick pane of reinforced glass separated us, one I’d been assured could not be pierced by the claws of a shifted wolf and, in separate rooms, he couldn’t smell me through the overbearing prison aroma of cleaners and sweat. I was safe. Completely safe.

I shuddered anyway.

Joth chuckled at this visible sign of weakness. “You always were the runt of the litter. A year older than me, but still the smallest.” His chair squeaked, and when I cautiously peeked, he’d leaned forward, his massive body edging closer to the reinforced glass window. Only the barriers humans had erected prevented him from looming over me. “You grew, though.” He flashed a smile full of teeth. “So did I.”

When my heartbeat fluttered, I hoped the telephone wasn’t sensitive enough for him to hear it. I glanced at the video camera filming my side of the visiting room, hardly comforted by the flashing green light that told me the humans were recording and monitoring us closely.

“Won’t you look at me, Nox?”

I couldn’t. I sensed the humans and my alpha urging me to raise my stare from the table, to do as my brother bade me. When our father died, Joth had suspended the test regime and counselling that human authorities had instituted to study him. Humans were such contrary creatures. Their laws prevented the gathering of evidence and otherwise assessing a murderous shifter without the shifter’s permission. Joth had denied them that for months. No taped transcripts with human psychiatrists, no MRIs. Nothing.

“You can look at me, you know. I won’t hurt you.”

Oh, how I wished that was true.

Fingers tightening on the telephone, I stiffened my spine and forced my stare up. From the identical metal table on the other side of the visiting room window. To the faded blue chambray shirt our father had provided so Joth wouldn’t have to wear prison orange. Pulse racing, I looked from his chest to his thick forearms, ropy with muscle under a dense coat of dark wiry hair. Black, like our father’s. It contrasted the pallor of his skin, the hand gripping his telephone receiver unnaturally pale. I squirmed in my plastic chair, a jolt of anxious dread shooting through me at this reminder my brother rarely saw the sun. Steeling my resolve, I peered under my lashes at the broad stretch of his shoulders, then at the white glare of his undershirt peeping from the vee of his shirt at his throat. Pride at my audacity swelled my chest upon reaching the stubbled column of his neck—he hadn’t bothered to shave for my visit. But neither his patience nor my determination could prod my gaze higher. I could not meet the stare of an alpha, even one as disgraced and stripped of power as my brother.

“You have Mom’s blue eyes,” Joth said, his voice a low purr of satisfaction. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten that.”

I didn’t know how he could have forgotten it, either. Whereas he and Kinessa had taken their dark coloring and muscular bulk in both human and shifted form from our father, I’d resembled our mother from the first—blond, lean, and surprisingly agile. Not nimble enough to evade attack when it had come, but I was physically as much an omega as she’d been.

Joth tapped his fingers on the table, drawing my wary attention back to him. “Dad brought pictures a few years ago.” He sighed. “The warden let me see them eventually, but you didn’t directly face the camera.”

If our father had taken pictures of me, he’d done it without my knowledge, but that didn’t surprise me. We’d been ghosts, he and I. We’d shared the same address, but while Dad had haunted the house, I’d built a den in an outlying shed. We hadn’t talked. We’d barely noticed each other. I hadn’t realized our father remembered I existed until the freeway wreck had claimed his life on my twentieth birthday. Some believed it an accident, but I knew better. He’d waited to join his mate and his oldest son in death until pack law would deem me an adult and not a single day more.

I gulped, swallowing down a knot of grief. “I’m surprised the humans allowed pictures of me.” I resembled my dead mother. A lot.

“They wanted to assess how I responded.” Shrugging, Joth relaxed into his chair. “It was a test.”

Foreboding tensed my shoulders. “Did you pass?”

“I have no idea. They don’t tell me much.” Joth blew out a long breath. “I didn’t shift, though. Or cry.” He straightened in his seat. “I was happy to see you grown up. At least I knew you were hale and healthy. Dr. Bennet calls that a positive sign.” When I glanced up, Joth smiled at me. “I’m glad I didn’t rape you.”

My stomach flipped.

I jerked my gaze down so fast my head took a dizzy spin. Sick terror flooded me and the muscles in my body clenched in alarm as fight or flight endorphins dumped into me. Only my tight clasp on the telephone receiver anchored me in place. Human authorities and my alpha had sent me into the visiting room for this, insights and information they’d hoped I might pry free.

“Oh?” I said through numb lips. “No one told me you’d considered rape.”

“Of course they didn’t tell you.” Joth pressed his lips into a thin line. “I couldn’t admit it to anyone. You were a kid.”

He’d been one too, my brother a year younger than me. My belly twisted at the painful realization my then thirteen-year-old brother had… had…  “Why?” I asked the monster who was my brother.

“Why didn’t I tell them before? Or why didn’t I rape you?” he prompted.

When I glanced up, his brow furrowed. “Either,” I said. “Both.”

“I didn’t lie about killing the little girl. Or murdering Mom and Kinessa. Knowing humans would lock me up for the rest of my life, I confessed. I don’t hide from what I did.” He shook his head, ruefully. “I’m glad I didn’t rape you, though. I think I would’ve regretted that.”

 

Humans escorted Joth from his side of the visiting room later. My stomach churned, acid burning the track of my throat while they shackled him for the walk back to his cell. He winked. Smiled. Then, he vanished through the metal door.

The hour with him had passed quickly. My brother could be charming when he wanted, and he’d made a concerted effort to draw me out after revealing the bombshell detail of my endangered virginity the day of the murders. With his message—warning?—delivered, he’d invested the rest of our hour together mining my memories of happier times. With an ease that astounded me, a laughing Joth reminded me about the persistent stench of Kinessa’s farts lingering in the bedroom we three boys had shared. He spoke of pancake Sundays, our frequent camping trips, and past holiday mornings too.

After the murders, I hadn’t wanted to remember. Thinking about Mom, Dad, and my brothers had hurt me deeper and more grievously than the coma Joth’s blow to my skull had induced. Our father, for instance, had stepped up as coach when we’d enrolled in little league. Comparing those sunny afternoons with him at the ballpark to the dark tormented shell of a man Dad became short years later ripped open festering wounds I’d hoped had scarred over.

By the time humans strode through the door to return my brother to his isolation cell, a smile had curved my lips despite the pain, though.

Grief was a funny thing.

Still as marble, I waited in the uncomfy plastic chair on my side of the visiting room until my escort slipped to my side and, with a hand at my elbow, urged me to stand. She led me through the labyrinth of security checkpoints to the prison parking lot where a black Cherokee idled. My escort passed a flash drive to the driver through the window while I opened the rear passenger door to climb inside. As soon as I safely buckled into my seat, the driver gunned the gas. The vehicle shot forward like a rocket.

Little unsettled shifters more intensely than cages.

“All right?” the driver called over his shoulder as he steered to the main road.

I met his gaze in the rearview mirror and nodded.

My tense nerves unraveled as the scenery changed from city to suburbs, then to the green fertile woodlands promising home wasn’t far. The stress squeezing my chest loosened, allowing me to draw my first easy breath in what felt like decades.

Though he must surely scent my distress, the driver ignored me. He was only my guard, a beta selected to ensure I made the trip to and from Westfield Correctional Institute without incident. I didn’t know his name. One of the shifters the new alpha had brought with him when he’d assumed leadership of the pack, I guessed, though I’d kept away from my kind for so long he might’ve been someone I’d known before, now unrecognizable as an adult. The information hadn’t been offered and I hadn’t asked.

My heartbeat thudded loud in my ears when the Cherokee passed the road to my den without slowing and instead continued toward the center of the pack’s territory. Anxiety screamed inside me until I realized the new alpha would expect a report of the visit. Him, I’d met. Farron, my old alpha, had brought his replacement to my den before my father had died. Surprisingly young, even for a temporary fixer, Dio had towered over me, but when he’d spoken, his voice had been gentle, his words kind. He’d smelled of the pine forests of his previous pack and the bitter coffee he’d drunk while travelling on the road. He’d brushed his bent fingers across my cheek before taking his leave and accepted my submission to him as new alpha with only an acknowledging dip of his chin.

Dio was a hard man. He’d sent me to Westfield, but I’d seen his soft center, experienced it when he took care with me in the crude workshop shed, which was also my den.

We pulled up to a log cabin only a few hundred yards past the white farmhouse from which Farron had run the pack when he’d led as alpha. Once we’d parked, I unlatched my seat belt and hopped from the vehicle without prodding, curiosity overriding my caution. The pack had built the cabin after I ran with them as a boy, the absence of fresh wood scent, sawdust, and construction debris proving the place wasn’t newly constructed. A lot had changed, so many new things to see. I didn’t often desire or notice the world outside my den and didn’t venture far from it as either a man or my wolf, but the new homestead of the pack piqued my interest. I didn’t jolt at the driver’s hand splaying at the base of my spine to urge me to the porch steps, my senses too preoccupied with birdsong, buzzing insects, and the riot of fanciful colors in flowerbeds edging the front walk. My fingers curled at my sides upon spotting a swing hanging from the porch rafters, some horrible contraption manufactured from cheap labor and cheaper wood. The porch swing was serviceable, but hardly the mark of an alpha with a craftsman at his disposal.

Dio had assumed leadership of the pack months ago. Why hadn’t he ordered me to build a swing?

After the driver ushered me through the front door, I scowled at the bench lining the wall inside next. I sank onto it when my driver gently pushed my shoulder down. Irritation bloomed when the bench rocked, balance awry with my added weight.

“Stay here.” The driver marched through a doorway, deeper into the house, while I recalled the dozens of benches I had already built as trade goods for my pack. I was no lazybones, nor slacker leeching off the charity of the others. I worked hard and, after six years of practice, with skill too. I knew the pieces of furniture I made fetched a pretty price in the towns. Farron had told me.

I glared at the knotty wood. Clearly, this bench was unacceptable.

“Heya, Nox. You remember me, right? Asa?”

I jumped, startled from my disgruntled distraction and then blinked, uncomprehending, at Asa. We’d been close as boys, teammates in Little League and frequently assigned as camp buddies in scouts. He’d shot up several inches since and filled out with dense muscle. His hair was darker, his face leaner. When I pushed to my feet, instead of standing chin to chin, I tilted mine up to gape at him. He’d grown that much.

“I know you.”

“We were best friends. I knew you’d remember.” Smiling, Asa waved at the empty doorway. “It’s okay, I swear. C’mon, follow me.”

I’d left my only surviving kin, a brother who was a notorious mass murderer, in a human prison. Demonstrably, nothing was okay, but I shuffled toward Asa anyway. He led me into a great room. My nerves prickled at the trio of shifters gathered around a laptop on a desk on the other side of the wide space. The warm steady cadence of Joth’s voice reached my sensitive ears despite the low volume. Panic streaked through me, making me tremble until I spotted the flash drive sticking out of a USB port on the machine. I didn’t own a computer or any other digital device, but I remembered what technology was capable of when I’d attended Chester Run Middle School with Asa what felt like twenty lifetimes ago. My own quiet voice responding “I don’t know” to my brother confirmed Dio and his betas watched a recording from the prison. I managed to breathe again.

Stupid with relief, I followed Asa to a pair of wingback chairs placed before a fireplace in the corner innermost to the cabin. I sank gratefully into one of the chairs at Asa’s nudge.

“Wait here.” His mouth quirked into a sad smile. He lifted his hand from my elbow to card the hair at the top of my head. I usually kept it tied back and away from my face with scraps of string, but before climbing into the Cherokee for the drive to Westfield, the taller beta now screening the video of the visit had dressed me for the occasion. Gone were the gray sweatpants and flannel shirt my old alpha had brought for me when I’d outgrown the clothing I’d worn as a fourteen-year-old. Blue jeans now hugged my hips, ass, and thighs. A white cotton T-shirt and hoodie had replaced the flannel. New sneakers had been swapped in place of my sturdy work boots. The beta had shaved off the wild scruff of my beard as well. I’d expected a haircut too, my first since the murders, but other than yanking it free of my ponytail, he’d left my hair alone.

Considering how tenderly Asa petted me, maybe my hair at least had passed muster. I hadn’t bothered to ask then and didn’t now either. I simply basked in the heat of the fire, staring at the flickering yellows and oranges while Asa’s fingers stroked me. I tuned out the sounds of my visit with Joth—I was good at wiping my mind clean—and my bones soon melted under his touch. I forgot everything. The video. My brother. The antiseptic smell of the prison underlaced with the pungent stink of urine and despair. The new shoes pinching my toes inside glaring white socks I’d pulled up my calves that morning. The fire’s warmth and the casual hand in my hair felt wonderful, almost drugging me. My eyelids grew heavier. I might have fallen asleep had the recording not ended and Dio strode from the desk to crouch at my feet, his stare sweeping my lax form. He brushed my knee and I spread my legs, making room for him to edge nearer. His arms twined at my neck, a jerk of his chin ordering Asa away before plowing his fingers into my hair in his stead. His hand fisted, holding me fast as he leaned into me, brushing his cheeks over mine to mark with his fresh pine scent.

“You did well,” he said on a throaty growl. “Very well.”

I shuddered, my dick plumping inside scratchy denim at his praise.

“Seeing you pried loose a fresh detail about the murders. The human authorities are excited at this development.” He drew back, his nostrils flaring. He stared at me, his eyes as black as sin while he lowered one hand from my hair to pluck at the button at my fly. “I’m impressed.”

When my arms moved restlessly, Dio glanced at Asa still standing above me. “Get out.”

“No.” When I glanced behind me, Asa crossed his arms. “If he wants me to go, he’ll have to tell me himself. I won’t leave him.”

Shock exploded inside me. One of the pack daring to defy the order of the new alpha? On my behalf? I wasn’t alone. Maybe… maybe I never had been.

Capitulation became easier then. “It’s fine, Asa.” I drew my wrists over my head, anchoring my hands to the tall back of the chair. I froze in place. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?” He regarded me with steady dark eyes, brow raised quizzically. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

I shook my head. “Go.”

“Yell if you need help.” With a disapproving glare at Dio, Asa pivoted and marched away.

“Asa is a loyal friend. And a good man,” Dio said, but the scritch of my zipper lowering reverberated through me, catching my breath. Farron had never wanted me for this, and truthfully, I didn’t tolerate the company of others. Maise, another school friend, stopped at my den at each full moon to load the furniture I’d built as my offering to the pack. She distributed the pieces to other shifters or shipped it for sale in the human towns. I didn’t know or care which. All that had mattered to me was the lamp oil Maise left in trade and the supplies she brought to aid my work. I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t touch me. I made myself scarce, darting into the woods in my wolf form as soon as I heard the rumble of a truck engine as Maise bounced down the rutted driveway of my father’s house. I’d watched her from the shelter of the trees more than once. Maise was as small as I was and an omega too, a mated omega no less. She wouldn’t hurt me, but even her company, I could not bear. I’d occasionally put up with talking to Farron, but only because he was my alpha, so I had to.

Farron had stepped down as leader, though. Now, there was Dio.

Smothering the urge to squirm in my seat, I schooled my heart to stop racing and my limbs to cease shaking. I gasped as Dio spread the fly of my jeans wide and tunneled his hand inside. Strong hot fingers wrapped around my cock and squeezed, dizzying me. My lips parted on shallow pants as he drew my dick from the stiff denim, my length growing when his grasp tightened. He gave me several lazy pumps.

Dio didn’t smile. He didn’t try to soothe me with silly words or kiss me.

Instead, he bent over my crotch and kissed my cock.

My back bowed. A whimper climbed up my throat. I couldn’t have prevented my body’s reflexive response to Dio’s gentle attention to the head of my dick if my life had depended on it. Fortunately for me, my new alpha seemed well versed in controlling unruly omegas. He swallowed my dick down in one deliberate and greedy gulp. The wet heat of his mouth staggered me, the skillful dance of his tongue along the length when he bobbed magical and consuming. Tingling pleasure concentrated at my groin, swamping me. I groaned in equal parts joy and sorrow. His growl, smothered by my dick in his mouth, vibrated up my cock in unsubtle warning.

I couldn’t think.

I couldn’t breathe.

The trill of his tongue enraptured me. I whined, moaned helplessly. Every lick was beautiful agony, the pressure on my cock as he sucked shattering. I reveled in the sensations he wrought in me and hated it. Hated him for this callous seduction and despised myself for surrendering to him.

But of course, I submitted. What else could I do? I could no more resist the siren’s call of his talented mouth working my dick than withstand the regular flux of air into my lungs that demanded I continue this life of wrongness, of brokenness and misery. Still, I longed for the orgasm Dio built within me, gathering at the base of my spine. I yearned for release, struggled against it. Fought for it.

I cried out when he tore his wonderful mouth from my cock. Dazed, drunk on pleasure, I stared at his red swollen lips as he jacked me once, twice…

The world splintered. My muscles clenched. My vision grayed. My dick spurted, wet and thick. My alpha stripped my defiance from me as readily as he drained semen from my aching balls. I could only hold on for the ride. Sated, defeated, I collapsed into the chair.

Dangerous and magnetic, Dio studied the wreck he’d made of me. He didn’t smile or gloat. I wished for the proud curve of his lips because at least a grin might signal his own appetites appeased, but I didn’t lie to myself. I hid all the time. From what I’d lost and what I was, especially from those who claimed to love me, but I didn’t lie.

Still, my stomach jittered when Dio shuffled back from between my legs. I yelped when he grabbed and turned me in the chair so that my face pushed into the cushions and my ass tilted high. I trembled as Dio stripped my jeans down my thighs, baring me for whatever he desired. I expected him to fuck me. Being bedded by an alpha was my fate, after all. Before my brother had ruined me, before he’d destroyed our family, my future and my role in my pack had been set. This was what I had been knit in my mother’s womb to do. My terror was irrelevant. My weakness and rebellion didn’t matter. Dio had been brought into the pack as a fixer and among the many failures that required addressing was the stubborn virginity of a damaged omega: me. After half a year of the new alpha leaving me alone, I’d thought—hoped—Dio shared as much sexual interest in me as Farron had, but demonstrably, I’d been mistaken.

Despite my frightened wail, I didn’t feel the spongy tip of my alpha’s cock pushing against my hole. Dio pried my ass cheeks wide to expose the vulnerable part of me that would be his, but he didn’t open me for his dick.

He spread my crack for his tongue.

Wet. Hot. Slippery and agile, the tip danced over my hole, the warmth of his breath when he chuckled fanning my ring as it clenched. I shouldn’t have wondered at his laugh. As an alpha in his prime, he probably knew my body better than I did, but the frightened keening that climbed from my throat stuttered to a shocked gasp at his mouth on me, kissing me, sucking me there. The satisfaction that had dissolved me into a gluey puddle sparked with new hunger, pleasure whirling with the lap of Dio’s tongue on my hole. Wanton arousal tore through me, nigh painful in intensity. Dangling between my legs, my flagging dick stirred.

Horrified, I moaned out my anguish, but I still widened my thighs as much as I could, which wasn’t a lot, trapped as I was in denim. Dio’s control over me was absolute. He enticed my response with gentle nips and voracious suckling at my ring. Darting licks lit me up and obliterated everything else. My senses narrowed. My thoughts scattered. He taught me to want, to give in to him, and my blood heated with wicked delights I had never imagined. I pushed my greedy ass back to his mouth for more and whimpered brokenly with each avid swirl of his tongue.

So lost was I in my debauchery, I hardly cared when Dio finally withdrew his face from my ass because, though I mourned the loss of his sinful mouth, I knew what would come next and needed it.

He draped his body over mine, the warm silk of his skin astonishing me. I arched my back to welcome the stab of his dick in my crack and cried out when he slid from my hole in a heavy layer of spit.

“Shh,” he murmured on a throaty snarl, his grip on my hips a steadying vise sure to leave bruises. “Shh.”

I hushed, inhaling a lusty breath of air as his ass pumped, bringing his glorious dick to my opening again. This time, he pushed and with a painful snap, the head of his cock lodged inside me. I stiffened beneath him, a shocked yelp slipping from me. The intrusion didn’t hurt much. My alpha had roused me too expertly, softening my ass for his dick. The stretch burned a little, though, the sweetest of stings. I clenched my fingers and bit my lip as the sense of fullness intensified with every inch he pushed into me. He simply overwhelmed me. The musk of his lust teased my nostrils while his teeth sank into my nape. I welcomed the hurt as eagerly as my ass sucked his dick into my body. I wanted the taking and my chest heaved at the first gulp he stole of my blood.

He growled, ferocious and husky with menace, as the bulge of his knot pressed to my already stuffed hole. The spinning in my head and feral glee in my heart urged me to relax, to accept. I feared the knot he slowly shoved past my ring but not as fiercely as I desired that part of him. I shuddered with my relief when my ring snapped around the swelling, holding him captive inside my ass as certainly as his iron grasp on my hip and his teeth stabbing into my neck.

With me locked in place, Dio’s taut muscles unbunched. He’d tied me. I wasn’t going anywhere. Neither one of us would until he’d emptied inside me. Fixer or not, Dio was an alpha through and through. He lowered his hand to my desperate cock. He laughed into my bloodied nape as he fondled me. Orgasm would open my womb to him and to the seed that would soon race up his iron-hard dick.

Jaw clenched, ass tingling, I held out as long as I could, as much because I never wanted such pleasure to end as from my blind terror at the impossibility of Dio breeding me. Helpless, hopeless, I could not resist the deft skill of his stroking fingers. Tears I refused to shed burning my eyes, I spilled for him. Semen jetted from my dick to paint the floor and the chair in sticky ropes.

With my womb now opened, my alpha released the clench of his teeth in my neck and tossed his head back, howling as my tightening ass wrung his seed from his body. Moist heat flooded me as his cock pulsed, shooting his semen deep. The strength of my climax triggered his and best stacked the stingy odds of planting his pup within me.

Tired, sweaty, I moaned at his cum spurting into me. Filling me.

I blearily wondered how long it would take to confirm my brother’s claws had left me barren six years ago. Either way, the life I’d known was over. Again. I would never be the same.

My virginity was gone and the omega wolf inside me finally ran free.

*

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