Octavia's War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  About Octavia’s War

  Praise for Octavia’s War

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The next book in the Destiny’s Trinities series

  About the Author

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Copyright Information

  About Octavia’s War

  This is not Octavia’s war.

  In the deserts of northern Mexico, Octavia has been fighting her own sneaky war against the cartels, while ignoring her growing feelings for Ángel, the son of the cartel’s leader.

  Ángel Garcia hates with a passion his family and the family business. Until he can find a way out of the life he hides how he feels about anything or anyone.

  When Bear Dawson, an American businessman, is executed by Ángel’s crazy brother, Ángel and Octavia are forced to run for their lives into the desert, where they are found by a man called Remmy, who has lived for two hundred years. Remmy tells them of the Grimoré who make Octavia’s war seem puny.

  The bonding has begun….

  This is the sixth book in Tracy Cooper-Posey’s explosive urban fantasy series that reviewers have called sexy, dramatic and dangerous. Grab your copy today!

  Warning: This short MMF vampire romance features two super-hot alpha heroes, multiple sex scenes, including anal sex, MM sexual play, and MMF sex. Do not read this book if frank sexual language and sex scenes offend you.

  No non-humans were harmed except for large numbers of Grimoré, who died with satisfactory squeals…

  This book is part of the Destiny’s Trinities series:

  Book 1.0: Beth’s Acceptance

  Book 2.0: Mia’s Return

  Book 3.0: Sera’s Gift

  Book 3.5: The First Trinity – Novellas 1-3

  Book 4.0: Cora’s Secret

  Book 5.0: Zoe’s Blockade

  Book 6.0: Octavia’s War

  Book 6.5: The Second Trinity – Novellas 4-6

  Book 7.0: Terra's Victory

  A Vampire Ménage Urban Fantasy Romance

  Praise for Octavia’s War

  All Romance eBooks Bestseller

  The power of the trinity is extraordinary.

  If you haven't read a book in this genre before, get this one. It's THAT good!

  The descriptions of the smells, the scenes, and the vampeen and Grimoré make you feel you are right there.

  It isn’t often the sixth in a series captures you as intensely as the first. A strong cast of characters blending into the Trinities storyline makes for that rare happening. No damsels in distress to be found here. This heroine doesn’t need to be saved.

  This story was whoa…TOTALLY AWESOME!!!

  I find this trinity to be the most exciting and interesting of all.

  If you haven't read the series, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

  With each addition to this series you fall more and more invested and almost in love with your favorite “trinity”. Cooper-Posey has such a amazing mind to be able to create and maintain each and every character.

  Chapter One

  The stink was bad. Octavia had smelled that distinctive coppery, ionized stench before and recognized it. Her heart fluttered and something rolled over in her stomach in protest. She was still twenty feet away from the door of the house. There was a gentle breeze lifting the ends of her hair and whispering around the corners of the houses nearby. Those houses were quiet and dark. It was very late and the good citizens of Manuel Benavides were tucked up in bed, very carefully minding their own business.

  The night was otherwise still and silent.

  Too still. Too silent.

  If she could detect the smell of blood from here, then it must be very bad inside.

  Despite making everyone believe she was just a wandering girl from León, Octavia bent and pulled out the knife she kept in her boot and gripped it hard. She would risk being caught with a knife. Right now her instincts were screaming at her.

  Swallowing hard against the mild nausea the smell was causing, she walked up to the door of the house and pushed on it. Not surprisingly, it opened. There was no guard, either. Another bad sign. Garcia always posted guards around any safehouses he was visiting.

  For a distracted moment, she hoped that Garcia himself was one of the people inside, giving off that aroma. Although she wanted to kill him herself, she would be just as happy if someone else had seen to it.

  There was a trail of blood right up to the front door, blending in with the terracotta tiles and staining the white grout between the tiles a dark crimson.

  Octavia stepped over it, her heart accelerating. She examined the blood and listened. The house was as still and silent as the night beyond the door, only there was no breeze in here to dispel the odor. This was a charnel house.

  Moving silently, Octavia went into the front room.

  It was hard to tell how many bodies there were. That was because there were no whole bodies. There were parts.

  She swallowed against the foul taste rising in her mouth and made herself study the blood-splattered room carefully. She had always known that Severo was unbalanced. He got pleasure out of carving people up with his machete. This carnage, though, put him into a different league.

  It actually looked like…. Octavia leaned forward to examine the chest of the man nearest her. It looked as though his chest and belly had been ripped out and his insides yanked out by the handful.

  Octavia swallowed again and looked away. She tried to get her sluggish mind to work. Survival depended on her figuring out what had happened here. The most critical question was why. Severo was clearly a lunatic, only why would he turn on his own family, his own extended brotherhood, in this way? It didn’t make sense.

  Although, not much had made sense to Octavia for the last three days. Not since the gun that had been pointing at Bear had fired.

  She clamped down on the thought and reconsidered the room.

  It wouldn’t do to be caught here. There was no way to explain her presence. Why would Severo’s sometimes-companion and unacknowledged mistress be strolling through the remains of one of his execution sessions?

  There was a whisper of sound. She might not have heard it normally. Every sense she had was racked up to the highest setting.

  She whirled, bringing up the knife.

  A big hand clamped over her mouth, holding in the scream that had emerged.

  Black eyes, deep olive skin, shaved head, square chin and high cheeks dark with growth.

  Ángel Garcia.

  His brows were pulled together, as if he was thinking hard.

  Octavia tried to talk and he lifted a finger up in warning and brought it to his lips.

  He gripped her arm. She hadn’t realized how strong he was. There was no way she could tear her arm out of his hand. It was an iron manacle, holding her where she was standing.

  “Silence,” he whispered in Spanish. “I don’t know who else is watching this place.”

  There was no one watching this house that Octavia would consider an ally. Not anymore. Ángel’s father had seen to that.

  She tried to wrench her face out of his hand. His grip tightened.

  “If I let you go, you’ll scream or yell at me,” he said patiently.

  She brought the knife up. The threat of a blade would move him.

  He let go of her arm and with a move faster than she could follow, wrenched the knife out of her
hand. He pushed it into his jacket pocket. “I’ll give that back to you later, when you’re calmer. Now, if I let go of you, will you stay silent?”

  Octavia nodded. It made sense to keep silent, to not draw the attention of the town upon this scene of horror.

  Ángel removed his hand from her face.

  She rammed her fist into his stomach, without telegraphing the move. It caught him off guard, with little chance to tighten the muscles and her knuckles drove in to a satisfying depth.

  Ángel gave a soft coughing sound. He didn’t bend forward as she was hoping he might, which would give her the opportunity to slam her fist upward in an uppercut that would maybe break his nose.

  The grip he had on her arm tightened. “Come on. Out to the back door. Fresh air will do you good.” He didn’t sound as though her belly punch had affected him much at all.

  He tugged on her arm again, making her step over the blood trail. The bloody passage ran through the middle of the house, from the front to the back door. The back door stood ajar. That was the door Ángel had used to access the house.

  He pushed the door fully open and stepped aside, letting her go first. She didn’t fool herself he was being polite. He didn’t want her behind his back.

  She moved outside into the fresh night. The air was cooler, bathing her face. She took deep breaths, appreciating it.

  There was a small flagstone patio out here, with an old metal table and wire chairs that had once been white and were now yellow with rust and dusty. The cushions that would have once made them pleasant to sit in were long gone. The spiky leaves of Aloe Vera edged the patio.

  Beyond the cactus, there was nothing but rocky hillside, sloping gently up toward the bluffs behind the town. This safe house was on the very edges of Manuel Benavides for a reason. It allowed anyone to come and go without detection.

  Just as Severo had done.

  Ángel pulled her over to the darkest corner where a stunted olive tree provided shadows. It also took them out of sight of the back door.

  “Stop pulling me around,” she complained, keeping her voice down. Now they were away from the carnage, she could think properly. Questions rose. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “I thought you were in Chihuahua with your father?”

  “Funny, that’s where I thought you were. With my brother.” Ángel kept his voice down, too. He pointed back toward the house. “You know who those men were, don’t you?”

  “Your father’s men.” She shrugged.

  Ángel shook his head. “They were the ones who let Bear Dawson slip past and gain access to the compound in Chihuahua.”

  “Enrico had them killed for screwing up?”

  Ángel tilted his head to look at her. “You’re not upset.”

  “Of course I’m fucking upset!”

  He shook his head. “Angry, maybe. The average mistress would have had hysterics, looking at that mess in there.” His thumb jerked back toward the house again. “Instead, you start asking who is responsible.”

  “You don’t think I was involved in this, do you?” Her heart started hurting.

  Ángel crossed his arms, the muscles in the forearms rippling at the movement. “I was supposed to be here, tonight,” he said, his voice low. “I was late.”

  Octavia stared at him. “You were part of this?” she asked, genuinely shocked. “I didn’t think you wanted anything to do with the family business, Ángel.”

  “I don’t,” he said flatly. “More than ever now. I was led to believe it was a card game.”

  “By who?” she asked curiously.

  His eyes narrowed. “Does it matter?”

  Octavia considered. “I guess it doesn’t. You were lured here. You were late. This happened before you got here.” She shivered. “Jesus wept, Ángel. Your father would be the only one who could arrange something like this….”

  Ángel nodded. She saw his chest rise and fall. “I guess I finally pushed over his limits.”

  “Because of the Bear thing?” Octavia had trouble saying it without giving herself away.

  Bear Dawson had been a US businessman living in Chihuahua…or at least, that was what everyone in Enrico Garcia’s family had thought, until Dawson had been caught inside the family compound, at the very doors of the factory itself.

  Garcia had ordered Bear’s beating and interrogation. For three days Bear had said nothing. Not even when Severo got out his machete and started working on him had he said a word.

  Then information had come back from contacts in the States. Dawson was Federal. He was DEA.

  By then, the bloody and silent prisoner was in no condition to be released and left to wander back into Texas.

  The argument had raged for twelve hours. Severo was all for chopping the Fed to pieces and burying the pieces along the banks of the Rio.

  Ángel had been the voice of reason, as always. He had pointed out that killing an American federal official would bring the wrath of the States down upon them. On the other hand, if they delivered him to the border, it would repel any retribution. With the wars against the northern cartels already on the point of bubbling over, they couldn’t afford to start yet another war, this time with an implacable enemy with more resources than every other cartel put together.

  They would be slaughtered to a man if they went ahead.

  Ángel had argued passionately, yet Enrico had listened to Severo, as always. Enrico was a smart man except when it came to his older son. Everyone else could see Severo was unstable.

  “We kill him,” Enrico had declared. “We do not chop him up, Severo. I don’t care how much you want to. We drop the body on the other side of the Rio. It will serve as a message.”

  Severo had not liked that decision. Yet his father was the one man he obeyed to the letter. He had dragged Bear Dawson out into the middle of the compound and shot him in the back of the head with a Glock 17. Octavia had watched it from the window of Severo’s bedroom, her fingers gripping the sill, digging into the paintwork and leaving crescents.

  Thank god the foul psychopath did not like sex after he had killed. He had left her alone since then.

  Discovering that a DEA official had gotten so close to the family’s center of operations had put the fear of God into Enrico Garcia. He had raged that he would find the weakness that had made them so vulnerable and he would eliminate it.

  And now all the men who had been guarding the compound the night Bear Dawson had stolen past them lay in pieces on the handwoven rug in the front room of the house behind them.

  “Why are you here?” Ángel demanded of her.

  “Me?” She let her surprise show. “Enrico asked me to meet him here.”

  “You were lured here, too?” Ángel asked. “Were you also late? Did he give you a time to be here?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” she said slowly. “He tells me where to be. I turn up and wait until he’s done with whatever he’s doing. You know how it goes.”

  “Then, if he didn’t know when you were going to be here, he could come back to finish this.”

  “To finish…us….” she added slowly.

  Ángel nodded.

  Octavia found her mouth curling down. “I never supposed it would ever end happy with the lunatic. Never thought he’d mark me as a target either. Guess I’m the fool.” She shrugged. “I spoke too loudly about not killing the Fed.”

  “Did you?” Ángel’s brow rose.

  She sighed. “You were the only one making sense. Everyone else was all worried about how big their balls were now a Fed had sneaked passed them.” She grimaced. “Idiots,” she added quietly.

  Ángel grinned. It was a quick expression, gone just as fast as it had arrived. “It’s going to take them time to figure out exactly who is in the room, here. We should use it to get as far away as possible.”

  “Run, you mean?”

  “There’s nowhere for us to go except north. Into the States.”

  “Wetback?”

  “Do you have papers t
hat’ll let you cross officially, that won’t tell my brother exactly where you are?”

  Octavia kept her mouth shut. There were a hundred different ways she could answer that and none of them were anything she could say aloud.

  Ángel took her silence as confirmation. “Then we head north east, straight to the border. The Rio is only twenty miles away. We drive as far as we can, then we walk.”

  Octavia considered it. She had been a semi-valuable member of Garcia’s operation because she was the only one who could keep Severo’s excesses to a minimum. Sometimes even she had been unable to control him, because she was a woman. Now Severo had her on his hit list and Ángel, too. His own brother. Her mouth turned down. “I guess my time in Chihuahua is at an end. Okay,” she said softly. “America it is.”

  His kiss came out of nowhere. His big hand curled around her neck and held her steady and his lips pressed against hers. They were hot and soft, yet there was an unyielding firmness behind them that was electrifying. Energy coursed through her, driven by her surprise and more. Nerves sizzled and snapped and her breath evaporated.

  Ángel was a good looking man, which she had noticed in a vague way, the first time she had met him, a year ago. She had not gotten close to him. His liberal politics made him a pariah in the family and only his status as Enrico’s second son gave him any protection. Getting to know him at all would have been dangerous for her, even if she had admired him from a distance.

  She had deliberately not thought of him in any sort of sexual context, only now, suddenly, that was all she could think about. All the moments when she had watched him from the corner of her eye. All the times she had wondered what it might have been like if Ángel had been the one to take her for his own….

  Ángel let her go.

  “What, now your brother is done with me, you’re taking over?” she asked. Her voice was rough, husky with longing.