Burn For Me (Year of the Dragon) Read online

  Burn For Me

  Burn For Me

  by

  Nikki Winter

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are no to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 Nikki Winter

  Editor: Stephanie Parent

  Cover Art: Shara Azod

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. This is a work of fiction. All references to real places, people, or events are coincidental, and if not coincidental, are used fictitiously. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only. eBooks are NOT transferable. Re-selling, sharing or giving eBooks is a copyright infringement.

  I have popped my proverbial paranormal cherry! Yay me! Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy but can anyone come up with something better? No? I didn’t think so. Save your judgments people! I do believe everyone should be informed for their own safety that Ryker belongs solely to Billy. I know, I know. It seems a bit unfair but…well…Look at the dictator who convinced me to write this. Why did you think fairness would be involved?

  --Nikki

  Burn For Me

  Chapter One

  “Wait till I catch you, I’m beating the shit outta you!” Catori Akita yelled as she chased the fang -- having -- fangy -- undead -- son -- of -- a -- bitch down an alley and he just wouldn’t stop. She was given orders to bring him in alive. Well...as alive as any vamp was expected to be. But he was testing her patience—which was leading to annoyance. Strangely enough, as of late her annoyance was resulting in a deep, abiding rage that had everyone at the unit avoiding her.

  She couldn’t stop it because she didn’t know where it had started. A few months prior she’d turned twenty-five, and since then things had been strange. Okay, stranger than the normal day-to-day for a pyro. When you could psionically control the intensity of flames with your mind and worked for an organization that sent you out to beat the shit out of creepy crawlies every night, your days tended to be as abnormal as possible.

  Catori knew and understood that. What she hated was when she had to buy another pair of goddamned biker boots because she ruined the leather running through shit while catching a perp.

  She was getting tired of chasing the wiry bastard through the alleyways, but she didn’t have much of a choice. So far she’d had a cat latch itself to the back of her head, had to knock a biker unconscious for confusing her with someone who was going to willingly take an ass-whooping, and she’d had two ladies of the night challenge her for “being on their turf.” Oh, and she couldn’t forget the dog that had chased her for two blocks.

  It would’ve been easier to shake if it was big and dumb, but sadly the little shit had been a Pomeranian and mean as hell. The back of her ankles still hurt. Catori could’ve punched it in the face and not felt bad if it weighed more than twelve pounds, but all she’d been able to do was catch it by the scruff of its neck and shot putt it into a trashcan on her way through.

  Some days, she hated her job, but she was about to let all the pent-up aggression loose on the fang-faced son-of-a-bitch she was chasing. Catori didn’t get what was up this week. She’d had to stop two packs wars and a psycho necromancer. Now this bullshit. She’d caught said fang face about to make a nice dining experience out of an unsuspecting teen. Now she had to do the honors of bringing him in.

  Said vamp raised his right hand and flipped her the bird. “Kiss my ass!” he said, running right to a bar, and before Catori could reach him, he was on a bike and speeding away.

  “Shit!” Frustration built as she watched him zoom off. “Goddammit!”

  Catori swung around at the sound of approaching fast-paced steps.

  “You lost him?!”

  She tried desperately to tamp down the growing ire that mounted in her chest at Ryker Anosov’s yell. She was working this particular case with two teammates. Ryker, and a Fae by the name of Jace O’Reilly.

  Jace was a good guy, rarely stepped on her toes.

  “I asked you to wait for my signal! But once again you lost control!” Ryker, on the other hand...tangoed on them.

  “You can stop yelling, Anosov. I hear you just fine.”

  The shifter scowled back. “Then get out of la-la land and do your damn job. This was supposed to be a catch and go.”

  “Anosov, ease up,” Jace coaxed.

  “No, I’m not gonna ‘ease up.’ We had a simple assignment, and if our other captain here could learn to control her temper, maybe it would’ve gone right.”

  Catori felt that familiar knot of annoyance. God help him if it became anger. “Ryker,” she started softly. “I would advise that you put your dick up for a swinging contest later and back up off of me now.”

  “Or. What?” He leaned down in her face.

  She knew her irises had slowly faded to red when everything had a crimson tint. “Or we’ll see if that scaled ass of yours is really as fire resistant as everyone claims.”

  There it was again; that deep, abiding rage that mixed with a disturbingly obscene amount of arousal whenever this particular asshole got near her. Hot. She was so damn hot. It didn’t matter where they were or what they were doing. She. Was. Hot. Not only was she hot, but her skin was tight and itchy. Every rasp of her clothes against it was irritating. But the symptoms didn’t stop there. No. Arousal sparked with the slightest interaction.

  They could simply make eye contact and every erogenous zone on her body would light like a firework. She knew he could smell it every time she got wet, and that shit was embarrassing. His nostrils would flare and his eyes would darken before he’d smirk. Kind of like now.

  A stare-down commenced. Catori knew it’d show weakness if Ryker backed down so he wouldn’t give in easy, but she’d be damned if she was the one to tuck her proverbial tail and walk away. Fuck. That. Catori had to do this dance with the gecko lookalike son of a bitch on almost every mission.

  It was tiring. It was irritating. She was getting extremely sick of the weird feeling he caused. Catori was starting to believe he fought with her on purpose. Just because he knew what it did to her every time he was in her personal space. He needed to either ask to be reassigned or quit. She didn’t give a shit which one, but she damn sure couldn’t take any more of this fucking rollercoaster with him.

  Ryker was always pushing her buttons and testing her, constantly implying that she couldn’t handle their job or the team. It didn’t help that he was one of the main sources of her spiked libido. His light green eyes and curly blond hair, bronzed complexion along with that damned dimpled smile and huge hard body all served to make her whole body feel like she had fire running through her veins.

  Suddenly Catori wasn’t seeing normally. Her vision had changed, her perspective now different. All she could see was body heat in several places.

  “Jesus,” Ryker suddenly whispered; his gaze focused on hers now, awe and a little panic in his eyes. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Catori went to say something, but a hiss came out instead. Okay, that was new.

  Ryker backed up farther while Jace got closer. “Tori?” He called her name, but her gaze was focused squarely on Ryker—on the threat.

  “Tori?” Jace stepped into her line of vision then, and she could see every beat of his heart—it sped up as he looked at her. His voice was sof
t, soothing when he spoke again. “Tori, sweetheart, look at me. That’s right, look at me.”

  Her vision began a slow fade back into normal, and she shook her head to clear it completely.

  “You okay?” Jace asked, amusement written on his face.

  Her eyes narrowed on the Fae. “Did you just Pied Piper me with your special fairyland glamour baritone?”

  A grin peeked out. “Maybe.” He leaned in close and whispered, “But you scared the shit out of Mr. Komodo over there with your freaky Godzilla stare. You got something you wanna tell me, pyro?”

  Catori smirked. “Did it freak you out too, King Oberon?”

  He held his fingers up a few millimeters apart. “About that much. I like my hair. Don’t wanna lose it.”

  Catori rolled her eyes and pushed past him. “I told Cleve I was sorry for that, dammit.”

  She felt Ryker’s stare on her and quickly turned.

  “Boo!”

  When the big bastard jumped back, she got a mild sense of satisfaction, but she had no doubt that it would be crushed soon enough.

  ***

  “Catori, my office! Now!”

  She wasn’t even halfway through the doors of the assembly’s department before Commander Dunham was bellowing. Hearing Ryker chuckle from behind her clued her in on who sold out her fuck-up. She chose not to say anything, just flipped him the bird over her shoulder and marched on.

  The Commander was waiting in his office doorway, face beet red. Oh, she was in for it.

  “You rang?”

  He cocked his head toward the chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”

  Catori’s brows rose. “I’m sorry. Did you get me mixed up with Vinny? Because there is no canine DNA—that I know of—in my bloodline, Commander.”

  He growled, his lip curling, making him look even more like the big angry bear that he was. “I suggest you don’t push me, Akita.”

  She moved past him. “And I suggest you save the dog commands for the dogs.” Taking a seat, she didn’t jump when he slammed the door. “Careful, Commander—by now I’m sure your paycheck is really feeling those door replacements that you have to make every other week.”

  One of his large hands came down on the desk in front of her. Good thing it was reinforced with steel, otherwise it would’ve buckled. “You think this is a fucking game, Akita?! You lost a perp tonight!”

  The yelling was as ineffective and as unnecessary as usual. She opened her mouth to tell him so when the door swung open.

  “Let me deal with her, Dunham.”

  Catori’s stomach sank. She knew that voice, and she damn sure didn’t want to hear it tonight.

  Dunham growled low but walked out just as Commissioner John Akita demanded. It was very rare for someone to disobey a direct order when given by her father.

  She listened to every footstep as he made his way around the desk and sat before her, mouth tight, jaw clenched as he stared at her. “You lost a perp?”

  Sitting back, she shrugged. “He got the drop on me, sir.” One would think the formality would be eliminated between father and daughter when it was just them, but that wasn’t the case. Catori had been calling her father “sir” since she could clearly say the word; since he’d decided that she would be his little soldier someday.

  He smirked as he sat back. “He got the drop on you.” Nodding, he then asked, “Tell me something, Captain. When you train those little snot-nosed fuckers who roll in here with their diapers still wet from the Academy and think they can handle what we do every night, what’s the first rule you teach them?”

  “Sir—”

  “What’s the first rule, Captain?!”

  Catori took a deep breath. “Never let a perp get—”

  “—the drop on you!” her father completed with another bellow. “So tell me, Captain, how it happened tonight?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Her father chuckled but the sound was strained, far from amused. “You don’t know.” He nodded again. “You allowed a murderer to escape your grasp when your one job was to bring him in, bring him to me, and you don’t know.” He clapped his hands. “Well, that solves it all, now doesn’t it?” Leaning up, he placed his hands on the desk. “Is this playtime to you, Catori?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you look at this like some fun game to participate in?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you wanna be a desk jockey? Huh? Pricking your fingertips on piles of paperwork because you don’t know how to head a fucking team?!”

  She felt it again, that familiar burn in her chest. The back of her throat suddenly tasted like brimstone; every breath she took held the scent of smoke. “No. Sir.”

  “Then start fucking acting like it! We do this job for a reason! So motherfuckers like the one you let get away tonight can’t harm anyone else!” Her father stood, paced and stopped before pointing to himself. “I head this operation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But there are higher-ups that even I have to answer to. Feds who look down their noses at me because I do the grunt work, the dirty shit that no one else is willing to do. You know whose ass gets chewed when a fuck-up like this one takes place?”

  Catori bit the inside of her cheek, met his gaze. “Yours, sir?”

  “You’re goddamned right it’s my ass! I didn’t put you on this team because you’re my kid! As a matter of fact, you’re being my kid just makes shit worse! Can you tell me why that is, Captain?”

  “Because when I fuck up it reflects on you.”

  “You’re goddamned right it reflects on me!” He slapped his chest. “Me, Catori! Not Ryker! Not Jace! Not Dunham! And not even you! But me!” He pointed at her. “Get your shit together, Captain.”

  Catori nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Turning his back to her, he waved a hand at the door.

  She got up and headed for it.

  “Catori?”

  Stopping, she didn’t turn around, just waited.

  He paused. “I have to chew you out because if I don’t, if I don’t give you the same shit I would give Ryker or Jace or anyone else, when you get out on the field and it’s time for you to run a play, your blocker will abandon you. They will walk away and leave you with no defense because they feel that your position as quarterback was not earned. Understand?”

  She nodded once. “Yes, sir.”

  Sighing, he said, “Clock out for the night.”

  Instead of replying, she walked out. Jace was waiting nearby. “You okay?”

  Shrugging, she headed for the locker room. “I’ve learned how to let it roll off.” It was true. She and her father had never been close. Catori was used to the yelling, the disapproval. She wasn’t Daddy’s little girl or his princess. For as long as she could remember their household held the construct of a military boot camp. Catori was simply a soldier for John. Everything she did, no matter how perfect, was never enough. The only reason she’d joined the unit was to make herself feel important, useful. Yet she was still a failure to him. She knew it, could see it. He never mentioned her mother, just said she’d died in a house fire.

  For the longest time Catori thought it was her fault. That somehow as a kid she’d caused her mother’s death. John had never persuaded her away from thinking so. And from the way he stared at her some moments, with enough hate to kill someone…

  Jace stepped in front of her, cutting off her dismal train of thought. “That’s not what I asked you, Tori.”

  Catori smirked. “It’s nothing a few beers and a good burger can’t fix, Jace.” It would never be fixed. No matter what she did or how well she did it. John would remain the same. Stoic, emotionless, cold.

  He nodded. “Get your pack and I’ll take you.”

  She headed for the locker room. Ryker stepped in front of her as she got to the door.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Fuck off, lizard boy.” She made her way around him. Ryker followed behind.

  “Tori, I’
m serious.”

  Turning, she said, “And I’m seriously about to set you on fire. Go. Away. You got what you wanted. I got reamed.”

  He watched her closely, green eyes narrowed on her face. “Is that all Akita said to you?”

  Her jaw clenched as she bit out, “Yes.”

  “He didn’t mention your new…uh…discovery?”

  She paused, her own gaze narrowed now. “What discovery?”

  Ryker imitated the noise of the old-school movie Godzilla and pointed to his eyes. “That discovery.”