Free Scorpio Sons 4: Chase: (SF/Shifter Romance) by Nhys Glover

Colt and Connor are stronger than me in that regard. I don’t know.
    “I’ll have to consider Connor and Cooper’s situation again, in light of my own reactions. I didn’t know what it felt like... this madness. I observed it, but I couldn’t know the depths it could affect someone. Now I do, now I know what I’m asking of my men... It’s too much.” He paused to think for a moment, his face a mask of weighed-down authority. She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but the wisps of information coming through gave her a glimpse of what these men were willing to do for their duty.
    While she tried to sort out in her mind how she felt about that, Chase started talking again, softly; musingly. “Cooper. His mate is a mole within the Guild. He’s just taken her to London to meet her supposed-grandfather, and is going to have to stand by and let her marry Cameron if this plays out the way we want it to. Again, if Cameron steps out of line even an inch, I hate to think what Coop’ll do. And he was the mildest of us. He fed stray cats, for fuck’s sake. But from the moment he met Amy he was challenging me, breaking rules, and being a general ass. Not his fault. None of it’s the man’s fault.
    “These aren’t human emotions. These aren’t human urges. We’re inhabited by incredibly dangerous, incredibly volatile and unpredictable creatures. And we’ve all handled it, for the most part. Until Mates were thrown into the mix. Then we seem to react like nitro. Jiggle us the wrong way and we explode. That’s what’s happening to me now.”
    Anna had let him say his piece because she needed what ammunition she could find to get her out of this prison. But the more he told her, the more she realised that even if she did escape, Chase would come after her. His cat would make him. The only way she could escape, was to kill again, and the idea of ending this man’s life was more abhorrent than taking her own.
    But to live imprisoned like a slave again. That felt like death to her. Maybe that was the one option she still had open to her then: death. If she died, Chase would be free again. And so would she.
    “I can’t be enslaved again,” she whispered hoarsely.
    He looked down at her, his eyes suddenly seeing her properly for the first time. “This is not slavery, Anna. I’d rather die than enslave you. But you have to understand what’s at stake here. The whole fucking planet is at stake. The men who hurt you. We fight them; every day, we fight them. For millennia, the Résistance secretly fought them, and yet the bastards still won. Now we have a chance to succeed where they failed. At last, we have a chance of saving what’s left of our planet. I can’t let anything get in the way of that!” He leaned in and kissed her cheek again. Anna wished it didn’t feel like a Judas kiss every time he did it. But he was right. Fighting the evil in the world was more important than anything else. Even her freedom.
    “This is all my fault. I was cocky. I thought I had the strength of will to avoid the pull of a Mate. If I’d taken it more seriously, I would have sent someone else. I thought I was immune because I wanted to be immune. And now I’ve tied you to me.
    “At least we can mitigate the damage. Somehow, we can limit the fall-out. What can I do to make staying here with me possible?”
    This question surprised her. Anna wanted to shout at him that nothing could make staying here possible. But that wasn’t true. She would happily give up her life or her freedom if she could save children from the life she was forced to live. If she could save one child from hell. Alyssa had been right. She was being given a chance here to make a real difference, one that went above and beyond her own misery and limitations.
    Could she stand being imprisoned if it gave her the chance to do some good?
    Yes, she could.
    And there were other aspects of this new life that appealed to her; like having a friend in