Taming the Fire by Sydney Croft

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    He'd been with ACRO for four years—had been pulled out of the military at twenty-eight, after hearing about the agency from an unidentified source who called to tell him that there were others like him. That he could have a home and continue to help people. That he didn't have to hide his skills all the time.
    It had been an invitation he'd resisted, up until two Convincers—also excedos—had come to get him and bring him in by force. From that day on he'd literally never spoken his given family name again—that was locked up tightly with the ACRO files, along with everything else from his past. He'd been on his own for so long that even the military, with its camaraderie, hadn't been able to spark him away from his loneliness. Which was why he'd embraced MP work once he realized the isolation didn't lend itself to making connections. He wasn't supposed to connect with the prisoners anyway, and the other MPs typically burned out after a few years working the prison scene and moved on to combat duty.
    No family, few friends and a gift of freakish strength that kept him from even the simplest of relationships that didn't include control.
    He'd never known his father and Trance always wondered just how big a piece of his own genetic puzzle the man really was—imagined, when he was still a very young boy, that his father would walk back into his life and fix everything. It never happened and he spent a lot of time vacillating between hating the man and wishing to hell he could find him. In fact, he'd asked the ACRO people to look into tracking his father down, but so far they'd had no luck.
    Growing up, he used to tell people that his dad was a secret agent—a powerful man who helped the world. Of course, he got the irony in the fact that today he himself was a secret agent who helped the world.
    Trance's mom was only sixteen when she'd had him—she refused to say anything more about his father than to call him the bastard who left me . He was only ten years old when she died of a drug overdose. He'd been sure that somehow his father would know this, would finally come forward to claim him.
    He didn't and Trance, having been deserted by both parents, was moved around from cousin to aunt to other distant relatives, mainly because he always seemed to get into trouble without meaning to. At the time, he didn't know—or understand—his own strength. Being the new kid at school, he'd always end up in fights.
    For as long as he could remember, women couldn't get enough of him, and for a while, he contented himself with the D/s scene. As much as it entailed trust, it also allowed him to keep most women at arm's length.
    Now he was inviting one inside. Literally, inside.
    He ripped at the scratches on his chest again, not allowing the skin around them to pucker and close. A thin line of blood seeped out and he tried to regain his composure and remember where he'd hidden the tranq gun Kira had given him before he'd left for London.
    In case the beast comes out .
    According to ACRO's intel, Rik couldn't control the beast once it had emerged. It would attack and feed on anything and everything in its path. That's what made her such a danger to society. It was also why ACRO wanted to try to harness that power. In the right hands, Rik was an asset.
    But with that damned collar on, she was a loose cannon. And she was headed directly to his lair.
    The problem was, he'd been warned not to use the tranq on her unless she was already chained—with her chains, the ones she no doubt had at her apartment, the ones that she would use to control herself when the beast attempted to come out. Since Rik was one of a kind, the vets and docs at ACRO had no idea if the tranq would work at all, and they wanted safety measures in place.
    Which was why Trance was at once predator and prey.
    His muscles tensed and he stretched them out, felt where he'd been bound hard earlier. And although he knew the knock at his door would be coming, it still