6. Jett

My hound sat up as Rylan and Kase returned. He growled as Rylan walked by, and I also found myself growling, not at Rylan but at my insufferable asshole of a hound. The fact that I was stuck in hound form was mortifying. My hound was constantly growling at him, deepening my embarrassment. I didn’t know how to face my pack once I regained control of my hound.

“Do you have to be a complete fucking dick?” I asked my hound. He couldn’t respond, of course. Not verbally, but I could sense his emotions and thoughts, and right now, he didn’t really give a fuck what I thought. He was pissed that we let our mate get away, regardless of the fact that it hadn’t been something that we had control over. For the first couple of weeks after he took over, I spent every waking moment trying to regain control to no avail. Eventually, I gave up, opting to maintain my strength and wait for my window. I thought it had been earlier when Ry and Kase were getting ready to leave to see her, but my hound had pushed me back at the last second.

Kase knelt in front of us, looking into our eyes hopefully as he pulled something from his pocket. He lifted a scrap of fabric to our nose, just out of reach, and the sweetest scent slammed into us. Instantly, I knew that was the scent of our mate, and my hound started howling and lunging against the chains bolted to the wall. My hound turned to bite at the metal cuffs around our back legs before turning back to Kase as he spoke.

“Her name is Evangeline Faithe, and these are her panties. I thought smelling her might help you shift back so you can meet her tomorrow at dinner. What do you think, Jett? Do you want to see her in person? Smell her for yourself?”

“Yes!” I shouted, not that he could hear me. I pushed against my hound’s will, desperate to retake human form. He grew angry and slammed me back into the recesses of his mind, refusing to relinquish control. “Damn you!” I growled angrily. “You’re fucking this up for us, asshole!”

“I guess not,” Kase said disappointedly as he put the panties back in his pocket and stood.

My hound continued to lose his shit and ignored the steak that Rylan tossed at us when he returned to the living room. “Great, now you made him even more obnoxious,” he complained to Kase as he passed him a beer and sat on the couch.

“It was worth a try,” Kase replied.

“Yeah,” Rylan sighed as he stared at me over the beer he sipped.

“What the hell was that back there?” Kase asked as he sat beside him and popped the tab on his beer. “I thought we were going to push her further.”

“We already pushed her to her limit for the night,” Rylan replied. “We don’t want to push her away. She was struggling with what we had told her and her feelings. Evangeline needs time to accept what we told her as truth. Hopefully, she will have done that by the time we take her to dinner tomorrow.”

Eventually, my hound calmed down, and they went to bed. I was just drifting off to sleep when I sensed my hound was up to something. I bolted awake in time to feel us shift partially. What the hell? By the time I realized what was happening and tried to complete the shift, my hound had already slipped my feet from the shackles and shifted back.

“You sly son of a bitch!”

He huffed quietly in amusement as I tried in vain to shift. Stretching lazily and shaking out the kinks from being chained in place for so long, he teleported from the apartment to the street. In our hound form, we were invisible to humans and any other being unless we wanted to be seen. Sniffing the air, he picked up the faint scent of our mate in the distance and teleported in that direction. He continued to hop from place to place until we were close enough to pick up her trail.

I didn’t know what he had planned, but this wasn’t good. If Kase or Rylan didn’t wake up and realize we were gone, my hound might end up really fucking this up for all of us. And there wasn’t a fucking thing that I could do about it. As much as I wanted to see Evangeline again, I didn’t want to see her like this. Not in my feral hound form. If we hurt her, I’d never forgive myself.

We found our way to her building and trotted up the stairs, sticking our heads through the doors on each floor until we found the right one. My hound moved through the walls in search of our mate, and I swear there was a skip in his steps as we got closer. Someone was quite proud of themselves.

I knew the second we had found her apartment because her scent wrapped around us like a warm hug. I felt our invisibility fall as my hound trotted over to her couch and hopped onto it to roll around in her scent like a damn puppy. Fucking hell. Once he felt sufficiently covered in her scent, he crept around the apartment, checking out every nook and cranny before trotting over to the bedroom. He nosed the bedroom door open and stalked slowly toward the bed where our mate slept peacefully.

He took the blanket covering her between his teeth and dragged it off the bed, slowly exposing her naked body to our hungry eyes. Her scent was heady this close to her, and I groaned as we inhaled it. Evangeline was lying on her back, her legs spread open invitingly. I would have thought she was waiting for us if I didn’t know any better.

“We can’t do this!” I yelled as my hound placed two large paws on the end of the bed and began to crawl onto it. Right between her fucking legs.

When he was close enough, he softly nosed between her legs, breathing her in from her core. We shuddered as the scent permeated every cell in our body. Fuck she smelled good. All I wanted to do was lose myself within her. “But not fucking like this,” I shouted again. My hound didn’t pay me any attention as he lapped gently at her pussy. Evangeline stirred, spreading her legs wider, but she didn’t wake.

“Ok, enough! We got a taste. If you fucking let me shift back, we’ll get a hell of a lot more soon enough, but we might scare her off for good if she wakes up to find you between her fucking legs,” I said, attempting to reason with him. I don’t know why I bothered. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t exist.

He continued to lick her, and when Evangeline moaned in her sleep, I was lost. It was the prettiest sound I had ever heard, and all I wanted was for him to make her make it again. When he gingerly began to move over her body, I was jolted back to reality.

Oh no. No, no, no, no. “That’s too far, dude. Too fucking far!”

He continued to ignore me as he flicked his tongue against her nipples. He was doing everything he could to keep her from waking as he lined his cock up, the tip brushing through her folds. Part of me wanted to throw up at the way we were about to violate Evangeline, and part of me wanted to urge him to hurry before she woke up and stopped us. Smugness washed over me from my hound, and just as he began to flex his hips to penetrate her, we were tackled off of her into the shadows.

He fought against our attacker, but it quickly became apparent that we were no match against them. Instinctively, I knew it was Rylan and willed my hound to stop fucking fighting him. Finally, he pinned us to the ground, his teeth digging into our neck almost to the point of breaking the skin. We could see his black eyes with glowing flame-like specks out of the corner of our eye, daring us to try something.

Our eyes shifted to the bed where Evangeline still slept, unaware of the events unfolding around her. Kase stood over her, looked at Rylan, and shook his head before carefully covering her with the blanket again. Rylan shifted, fisted our scruff, and teleported back to our apartment. He pressed us into the floor while Kase reattached the chains. Once I was secure again, they backed off to stare at me. I was ashamed of our actions. My hound, not so much.

“Of all the fucking half-cocked things to do!” Rylan bellowed. “You almost raped our fucking mate! Just because she’s our mate doesn’t mean we have a right to do whatever we want to her body without her fucking consent! The only fucking reason I’m not snapping your fucking neck is because I know Jett, and I know he wouldn’t ever try something like that. But I’m fucking telling you, Jett, if that happens again, I won’t fucking hesitate!”

He stepped forward and wrapped his hand around my hound’s throat, pulling him closer so that they were face to face. My hound was so stunned at his actions after he spent the last month avoiding us that he didn’t know how to respond. He stared deep into our eyes as we struggled to breathe. “Get. Control. Of. Your. Fucking. Hound. Jett!” he shouted in our face. “I’m fucking over this bullshit. If you don’t, I’ll fucking drop you off at Lucifer’s door myself.”

He threw us away from him, and I heard the sheetrock crack as we slammed into the wall. My hound coughed as he struggled to suck oxygen back into our lungs.

Rylan stomped to his room, and Kase sighed and kneeled beside us, massaging our throat to help stimulate our breathing and calm our spasming windpipe. “I hope you realize just how badly you almost fucked everything up,” he said quietly. “If it happens again, I won’t stop him.” Kase stood and went to his room, leaving us alone.

“Are you fucking happy?” I asked. “Was it fucking worth it?”

He had the good sense to feel ashamed of himself, though I could tell that a decent-sized part of him wasn’t sorry for what he had done. Evangeline was our mate, and he was confident it would have worked out. How could it not?

“Because she isn’t our property, and she could choose to reject us,” I replied. “You almost cost us our mate forever.”