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I swallow, as my throat dries.
I can’t help it.
My gaze slides down the front of Lincoln’s tight, silk shirt and then I squirm around, imagining that it could be his cock that’s pierced.
Knowing Lincoln, it is.
Except, then it strikes me that it’s not only Lincoln who’s changed, for example, by bulking up with muscle and gaining an even more dangerous glint in his eyes.
It’s his clothes.
In the past, Lincoln wore worn-out jeans and cheap t-shirts. But now, he’s dressed in a sharp black suit with a silk threaded waistcoat.
It’s expensive.
Where the hell has he got the money for a suit like that?
“I know where they are in my fantasies,” I reply, still trying to put together the puzzle pieces of Lincoln’s changed appearance.
He chuckles.
“I can’t wait to show you the reality. But this one,” he touches his snake earring, “is the most special. It’s the first one that I got. It’s a symbol not of ownership but rather, freedom. Don’t you recognize yourself?”
I stare at the earring in shock. “That’s me?”
“When I was sent away, I wasn’t allowed to take anything with me, even photographs. I was forbidden, on pain of flogging, to mention your name. This was the only way that I could think to have Vito and you with me always. My Snakes. So I wouldn’t be alone.”
My vision is blurry with tears. “I’m sorry. No one would tell us anything, gargoyle. We begged your parents, but they wouldn’t say a word to us. When we kept asking, they told us that they didn’t have a son.”
Lincoln winces. “Ouch. Although, it’d hurt more, if they hadn’t already said it to my face. Your dad found out about our fate bond. Well, one of the triplets overheard us talking about it. Gia, I think. You know that your dad hated how close we’d been for years. He put up with it because I looked out for you at school and he thought that I’d grow up to work at your side as a servant. He reckoned all the talk about bonding was only a teenage phase. But once I stepped above my station enough to talk about fated mates, he did that psycho thing he does.”
“I knew it.” My hands clench into fists.
Suddenly, my chest feels hollow.
How many times did I beg Dad to find out what had happened to Lincoln? To check the local hospitals? To put a report in with the cops?
Yet Dad had known exactly where Lincoln was all along.
“I know that he’s your dad, but Cesare is a special type of Alphahole.” Lincoln pushes his hair out of his eyes. “He gave my parents two choices: Either I knelt and died with a bullet in my head there and then. Neat and tidy. Or they signed me over for a three year program in the Alaskan Beta Bodyguard Training Academy. I didn’t get input on the decision.”
“Shit.”
“Double shit, since for a long moment, I wasn’t sure what they were going to choose. Sometimes, during those three years, I wasn’t sure that they’d picked right either.” Lincoln’s large, silvery-gray eyes become agonized with remembered pain, before he shakes his head. “It’s known as the most brutal program for bodyguards. It lives up to its reputation. You’re broken down to become a tool, a machine, a weapon for the protection of the new pack who employs you. Then you’re taken in to belong to that pack: An unloved servant who is brainwashed to die for them. I exercised in the freezing cold at dawn, survived the harsh conditions, pretended to be broken and rebuilt. All that time, I had you with me, however, in my ring, snake earring, and heart. When you’re fated, you’re never lost. When you’re fated, you’ll always be found again. May I kiss you?”
“You’d better.”
Then Lincoln kisses me for the first time in three years, and I feel found again in the press of his plush lips.
Lincoln’s tongue swipes across the seam of my lips, and I open my mouth to twine his tongue with mine.
I groan, as our tongues wind like a snake mating dance.
He slides his hand into my hair, dragging me impossibly closer into the kiss.
I’ve never forgotten the feel of Lincoln’s lips and the taste of him: our first kiss beneath the blossom of the cherry tree in the schoolyard, anxious and unsure of how our mouths should slot together, only knowing that they did, the one stolen in the darkness of the corridors, where the Beta servants worked on Christmas Day, and the sleepy ones, when we lay side by side in the summer park.
The kiss is powerful with our first love’s memories, and the last three year’s sadness.
