by J. R. Ward
Now he focused through the ropes of his hair, his eyes piercing the distance and the bars that separated them.
The torch that she held gave off unsteady light, the orange flames strobing her strong face and neck and shoulders. She was tall for a female, and solidly built, with dark hair that had been pulled back. Her clothes were black, as if she were a huntress in the night, and they were of a style he was unfamiliar with, the windbreaker made of something other than cotton.
With a slap, she covered her open mouth with her palm, ending the sound she’d made, cutting it off like a limb from the whole. Wide, pale eyes framed by dark lashes and brows bounced around him, taking in his naked, muscled body—and his many scars—with a mixture of disgust and horror.
Instantly, Duran was devastated on her behalf. Chalen had sent her down here to be drained dry, a fawn tied to a fixed point in a forest so a monster could survive. So unfair. But there was another reason he mourned.
She was the first of the sacrifices, after however many years of being down here, that he actually wanted.
Chalen had lived up to his promise those eons ago: The conqueror relished the suffering he imparted, feeding off the anger and the agony he caused his prisoner. And he knew that Duran hated the feedings, these females and human women, all invariably prostitutes who had misbehaved, sent down here for their own punishment.
A twofer for the bastard, as it were.
Except . . . this one was healthy. Uncontaminated by disease. And fully aware, too, her faculties undimmed by the servicing of a chemical addiction—
In a rush, his body reacted to her presence and her purpose, hardening, preparing for contact . . . for penetration.
He almost did not recognize the symptoms of desire. No matter, though. He might take her blood because he had to, because he needed to be strong enough to escape when the timing was right. But it would never go further than that, and not just because he enjoyed pissing his captor off.
As someone who had had no dominion over his own body for the eternity he’d been down here, he struggled enough with merely taking a vein that he felt was not his due. He could not contemplate any further violation, even if the women and females thought they wanted him, and so far, all of them had.
Duran stepped up to the bars and waited. When no guards came from behind her to raise the gate, he frowned.
A new kind of torture, he decided. That’s what this has to be.
God only knew what was going to be done to this female, just out of reach but right in front of him. The guards were, as Chalen insisted on pointing out and proving, fully functional, even if they could not speak a word—
The rage that came over him was a surprise because, like any sexual impulse, it was something he hadn’t felt for so very long. After all these years, his temperament had flatlined even as his heart had continued to beat, the unrelenting nature of the physical pain and humiliations such that he was non-reactive for the most part.
Endurance, rooted in his revenge, had been his only emotion.
Not so now.
This female was not like the others, for a number of reasons. And because of that, Duran felt a protective rage overtake him.
The kind that could easily murder.
5
AHMARE TRIED TO TAKE another step back, forgetting that she was already up against the stones of the wall. The heavily bearded male in the cell was what she had thought Chalen was going to be, a massive, battle-scarred animal with long waves of wet, dark hair falling past his heavy pectorals, his arms corded with muscle, his legs long and bulging with power. Through the bars that separated them, his blue eyes glowed with menace and his mouth parted as if it were just a matter of seconds before her blood was on his tongue.
And he was naked.
Dear God, the only thing on him was a blinking collar around his thick throat—
As a scent of dark spices reached her nose, it was a shock to like the way he smelled. Given all that menace, stale sweat and the fresh flesh of his victims seemed more up his alley, yet instead, she found herself breathing deep, her body kindling in a way she couldn’t understand.
And did not appreciate.
When his nostrils flared, she knew he was scenting her right back, and the purr he released made her think of the sounds lions made.
“Where are the guards,” he said in a low growl.
“I’m here for the guns,” Ahmare shot back over the fall of the water. “There are no guards.”
She forced strength into her voice and kept her eyes on his, even as her heart pounded and her mind spun. She needed to get moving. There was no going back where she’d come from, and surely somewhere past this barely leashed fighter was the weapon Chalen had told her he would give her.
She needed to get it and find the way back to her car—also figure out where in the hell she was going.
“Guns?” the male said.
“Weapons. I don’t know, I’m assuming it’s a gun.”
Why was she wasting time talking to him? she asked herself. But she knew the answer to that. She couldn’t look away from him. In another circumstance, in a parallel universe where she wasn’t in some dungeon and he wasn’t in a cage like a zoo animal . . . she would have been captivated by him.
Not just because of his body or even those eyes. It was the raw power that poured out of him.
The male’s brows dropped even lower and he came closer to the bars. Water dripped off every part of him, his body gleaming in the open flames of the torches, and she wished she didn’t notice his skin shifting over all that muscle. Still, there was something undeniably sensual in the way his body moved . . . a promise that he could take the very male-est part of himself and do very worthwhile things with it—
“I’ve got to be out of my mind,” she muttered.
“They let you come down here by yourself?” He looked up and around, as if he were searching for something in the ceiling or perhaps beyond those bars. “Did you escape?”
“I’m looking for a weapon. Chalen told me there was a weapon down here I could use, and when I find it, I’m out of here.”
When he reached forward, she jerked back and banged her shoulder into the stone again—but he was only gripping one of the bars, his fist three times the size of her own as he tested it with a clank.
“So you are not for me?” he said.
“God, no.”
The male looked both evil and erotic as he stared out at her with his bearded chin tilted down, the blue of his eyes flashing under those brows. “That is a relief.”
A relief? What the hell was wrong with her exactly—
Okay, she’d clearly lost her mind. Shaking her head, Ahmare started walking again, staying close to the wall, out of reach.
Just in case.
“What else did he tell you?” The male’s speech was accented with the Old Country. “Tell me exactly.”
“I don’t have time for talk.”
She held her torch out, trying to will the appearance of racks of weapons from the darkness.
“Yes, you do.” He tracked her like the caged predator he was, following on the other side of those bars. “What else?”
Ahmare stopped again. There was something on the wall, hanging from a hook by a lanyard. Closing the torch in, it appeared to be a handheld device of some kind, palm-sized with a single button on it. A detonator? Was this the weapon?
Fucking Chalen.
She took whatever it was off by its cord and was shocked by its heavy weight—
The rattling was loud and she wheeled around. A center portion of the cell was rising up, the dozen or so bars disappearing into the stone ceiling.
The male stepped free. And was even more enormous now that there was nothing between them.
She put her torch forward. “Don’t come any closer. Stay back.”
Throwing out her free hand, she grabbed for another torch in its wall bracket, that object swinging on its lanyard and hitting the wall—
The
male grunted and grabbed for the blinking collar at his throat as his knees buckled and he went down to the stone floor in a heap. Rolling onto his side, he curled in and struggled to breathe, his head cranking back, a grimace of pain distorting his features.
Ahmare looked at the black box. Then focused on that collar as his clawed fingers dug into it—
From up ahead, there was another loud clank, and more chains traveling through gears. Fresh air, unexpected and sweet in the nose, rolled through the corridor, evidence that a passageway out of the dungeon had been revealed and was not far.
The male went limp, though he continued to pant.
She glanced at the black box on the lanyard. Looked again at the male at her feet. In a low voice, she said, “I am looking for Chalen’s beloved. Do you know where she is?”
“Yes,” came the grunted reply.
Closing her eyes, she prayed for some other logic to rescue her from the conclusion she was arriving at. “Sonofabitch.”
“What else did Chalen tell you,” the male rasped.
Ahmare turned toward the prevailing, humid breeze. “He told me I have to go get his beloved or he’s going to kill my brother. And apparently you’re the one who’s going to take me to his female and help me get her back here. So come on, get up. I don’t have much time.”
She put the lanyard on her wrist and wound its length around her hand until she could palm the device and put her thumb on the trigger.
The male’s eyes struggled to focus on her. They were unbelievably pale now, the irises tiny as if even the dull illumination from the torches strained his retinas like brilliant moonlight.
Maybe that collar held more than just an electrical charge, she thought as she watched it blink.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “We’ve got to hurry.”
As the male pushed his hands into the hard floor, she almost went over to help him, but she didn’t want to get too close, even with that collar of his.
He was enormous as he rose to his full height.
“You go ahead of me.” She pointed with the torch. “So I know exactly where you are.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you thought you could. We both know that I can drop you like a bag of sand.”
“What did he tell you?” the male said like an incantation.
“Not here. We don’t talk here.” She motioned around. “I’ll bet you he’s watching us somehow and he can probably hear us. I have a vehicle outside. I hope like hell we can find it.”
A gust from the storm carried more moist July air down into the dungeon.
“Go,” she ordered.
After a moment, the male walked forward, and she maintained a distance between them as the floor began to rise. She told herself she measured every shift of his muscle, swing of his arm, stride of his leg, for signs he was going to wheel around and attack her. But that wasn’t the only reason she was watching him.
His body was still wet. Still glistening. Still full of deadly promise—
Not now, she told her damn libido. After three years of not noticing anything of the opposite sex, now was absolutely, positively not the time to get back on that train. And he was not the right male, at any rate. And goddamn it, she was not that kind of a female—
The male had an ass that went on for days.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays.
Your brother is going to die, she told herself, if you screw this up or get killed because you let your guard down around this male.
That grim reality was all she needed to refocus, and twenty yards down, they finished their gradual ascent at a plank bridge that was lowered across the moat.
Lightning flashed, the illumination ricocheting along the wet stone walls like a stray bullet, and the male covered his head, ducking as if he expected to be struck, the muscles all over his back clenching hard. And that was when she noticed that his legs were trembling so badly, she doubted he could walk.
Ahmare came up beside him. “It’s okay. You’re . . . okay.”
The male reared away from her, covering his face with his forearms as if he were going to be struck by something. That was when she noticed the fresh wounds on him. They were down both arms in a series of crisscrosses, as if he’d been lashed protecting himself within the last twelve hours.
When nothing hit him, he slowly lowered his guard. He was breathing hard, his eyes glassy and fixated as he clearly struggled with what was reality and what might be some horrible forthcoming trauma.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ahmare said roughly.
Strange to speak his own words back to him. Stranger still to realize she meant them.
The male looked at the bridge with obvious wariness, as if he were unsure whether what awaited him on the far side was a worse hell than the one he’d been in. But he started moving, his bare feet careful over the wooden planks. She stuck with him, keeping his pace, the rain lashing at them, getting him wetter and her damp through her windbreaker.
Halfway across the moat, another strike of lightning zigzagged across the sky, and that was when she saw her Explorer over by the main entrance. The bridge she’d first used was tucked up tight, not that she had any present interest in doubling back on Chalen.
“That’s my ride.”
Abruptly, the male stopped and didn’t go any further. “I can’t . . .”
He seemed overwhelmed to the point of shutdown, the storm, the qualified freedom, the whatever-else-was-going-on-for-him clearly jamming up his brain.
She looked at the trigger box in her hand. “If you don’t keep walking, I’m going to have to use this.”
He didn’t bother glancing over at what she was talking about, and she hated to threaten him. All she knew was she had to get him into her Explorer, and she sure as hell wasn’t strong enough to pull a fireman’s carry on him.
She needed to save her brother, and Chalen had given her a weapon.
As well as a map, evidently.
6
DURAN’S PRAYER FOR AN escape had been answered . . . just not in a way he could have predicted. Here he was, out from behind those bars and nearly free of Chalen’s hellhole, released from his imprisonment—and yet, as the female reminded him of the power she had over him, he realized what liberty he had was not his own.
He had begged for an escape. Had repeated some version of “Dearest Virgin Scribe, let me get out of here” so many times that only the variations of personal sacrifice he had been willing to offer in exchange for his release were greater in number.
So it made no fucking sense that he was on the verge of liberation . . . and yet stuck on this plank bridge where he stood, staring up at the angry heavens through rain that was like getting pelted with marbles, the chorus line of ragged, jagged, loosey-goosey lightning overhead just looking for a place to land.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of the storm.
He had lived through worse than electrocution. Hell, they’d even used a car battery on him once.
No, the problem was his brain’s ability to process the size of the sky, the scope of the land, the breadth of time. Actually, that last one was the worst.
Down in that dungeon, he’d had no way of knowing whether it was night or day, and so he had lost track of weeks, months . . . years. How long had it been? For godsakes, the shape of that car she told him was hers was like nothing he had ever seen before—just like her clothes. And his ignorance was terrifying in a way he could not explain.
“What year is it?” he croaked.
The female said something, and he waited for the syllables to sink in and make sense. Meanwhile, she shifted her weight back and forth like she was plotting the precise course of her footfalls across the puddled courtyard.
“Please,” she said, “don’t make me use this.”
He looked at what she held up to him. It was the trigger to his restraint collar, the one the guards used on him when they had to enter the cell.
&n
bsp; Unlike those voice-box-less males, she clearly did not want to shock him, and he had to give her credit for that. She would do it if he made her, however. Something about her brother . . . and the beloved—
All at once, focus returned to him.
Nothing like revenge as an existential palate cleanser.
Yes, he thought. He would take her to the beloved. What happened after that, however, was going to be up to him, not Chalen.
Duran’s body moved before he ordered it to, his arms and legs breaking out into a run, his bare feet slapping across the planks before splashing through puddles and pounding over slick rocks. The car he did not recognize as a car came up to him, not the other way around, some distortion of reality shredding the dimensions of the courtyard and drawing the hunk of gas-driven metal right into his face.
There was a chunking sound and the interior lights came on.
“Get in the back.” The female opened the rear door for him. “Get in.”
Duran dove into the interior, his wet skin sliding on leather until his head jammed into the opposite door, a jarring halt to his momentum. Tucking his legs up, the female shut him in and jumped behind the wheel.
They were off in a blink, and he braced a foot and a hand to keep himself from becoming a fish in the bottom of a boat.
Herky-jerky, back and forth, and then a roar as she gunned them down some kind of coast-is-clear. The vibration of the engine and the bumps in whatever road she put them on traveled through the padded seat and into his body, magnifying aches he knew he had and some that were surprises.
And then came the nausea.
He hadn’t expected that. He’d never been one to get carsick.
Closing his eyes, he sat up and breathed through his mouth as if maybe the air moving up and down the highway of his throat was the kind of traffic that vomit couldn’t break into.
Bad idea with the lids down. He opened things and looked through the shoulders of the front seats to the female driving.
She had one arm outstretched, her hand not so much locked on the steering wheel’s curve as welded to it. Idiotically, he had a thought that he hoped her other hand was on the trigger to his collar. He wanted her to protect herself against all threats, including the one presented by an unknown naked male in her back seat who might just eat her.
