Needing To Breathe

The trip home was like nothing I thought it would be. I was expecting to join the mile-high club with all of my men around me, rejoicing in the fact that they were all alive.

Hell, I was even willing to hold off on the airplane stuff as long as I could have an entire week in bed with all of them.

I needed to get their deaths out of my mind… I needed proof that they were alive.

And yet… none of that happened.

Instead, Greyson, Levi, and Dom all flew home on the military transport, and I haven't seen or heard from them since.

Yeah… talking about playing right into my anxiety.

And while Nicholas and Michael had been by my side the entire time since we got back from the Amazon rainforest, Viktor and Sasha had been away dealing with the deaths of two of their mercenary teams and finding out what they could about the latest threat.

Mathew was up to his eyeballs in yet another serial killer that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

The media had dubbed the killer Jack 2.0 because he started off by going after prostitutes and brutally slaying them before leaving their bodies in the streets to be found. They were determined to be strangled first before their throats were cut, and then the bodies were mutilated.

There were no counter-forensic measures taken, nothing that spoke of a meticulous killer.

In fact, it was determined that the alleys in which the women were found were the primary murder scene, which meant that the person doing the killing was doing it out in public when anyone could just walk by and catch them in the act.

But no one ever did.

It was brutal and bloody, and the police had absolutely nothing to go on.

This meant that yet another one of my mates wasn't cuddling with me, watching the reruns of Supernatural. And that show definitely wasn't as good with a demon and an angel complaining every five minutes about what they were watching.

"You know, a salt ring does jack all but season our food," smirked Nicholas as his hand continued to play in my hair. "I get the premise. Salt is a pure substance, but no demon in their right mind is going to be contained in a circle of it."

"Tell me about it," grumbled Michael as his eyes narrowed at the TV. "If it were that easy to kill you guys, we'd be getting the humans to do it for the past few hundred years."

"I'm done," I said, staring at the screen in front of me. I was only half paying attention to the conversation going on over top of my head as I cuddled in Nicholas' arms while Michael sat beside us, my feet on his lap.

"Did you want me to change it to a different episode? Or a different series? This Twilight one looks interesting," smirked Nicholas, holding up the DVD case for the popular series.

It normally relaxed me and made me laugh when I watched the different paranormal shows that modern culture had. A lot of things were so far off base that it sucked me out of reality and into a completely different world.

But I only had two out of eight men around me and a new enemy that I knew nothing about. At least with Mother and her cults, I knew what to expect and when to expect it to happen. I went by their timeline, but it was familiar, a schedule that I understood. They also never touched anyone else in my life.

However, now it just felt that I had been hanging in limbo, waiting for the axe to fall and not knowing who it was going to hit. I could take my own death in a stride, but this is one of the first times since Nicholas had died that someone I loved had been taken away from me.

True, I got them back, but that didn't change the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.

No. I needed to take a breath and plan. But the only way I was going to breathe was to have all of my men around.

"What? No," I said, finally answering Nicholas' question. Vampires and demons were currently high on my shit list, present company excluded, and even watching one that sparkled in the sunlight wasn't ludicrous enough to snap me out of my mood.

Which was a pity since I had a thing for the wolves.

"I need everyone together. I am going to call a family meeting and figure out where we all stand and see what our next step is going to be," I explained, looking up at Nicholas as he brushed a strand of my hair off of my face.

"Butterfly, it's okay to be stressed and anxious that your mates aren't around right now," he said, speaking softly like he was worried about my reaction. "It is a natural reaction to the bond being cemented on both sides. You finally acknowledged us as being yours, and now instinct is demanding a time to strengthen the bond. It's normal, but times have changed, and it's no longer possible to spend weeks locked away with your mate."

"You know," I replied, exceptionally slowly. "It almost sounds like you are telling me to calm down and that I am overreacting."

I blinked at the man, the demon that was once my brother and now something entirely different to me, waiting for what he was going to say next.

"Abort!" interjected Michael as he started to massage my calves. "It's been thousands of years since I was last in this realm, and even I know that telling a woman to relax and calm down or that she is overreacting is nothing short of you begging for death. If she needs all of us around, then we are going to get everyone around."

As of that moment, as all the stress and tension were released from my body, I realized one thing.

Michael was definitely a new favorite.