by RS Black
Her voice was melodic, but deep-throated. The sound of it washed through him. He swallowed hard.
Out in the hall he heard the footsteps of the changing out of the guards. There was no time for him to delay; he needed to get her to the infirmary before someone became suspicious.
“Wrap your arm around my neck.”
She licked her lips. “I have no strength left. I’m not sure I could stand.”
Orion didn’t stop to reason, didn’t stop to think that if he was seen cradling her down the hall it would make others stare and wonder. He was a guard. But he was also a wolf, and shifters thought not with their brains or even their hearts, but were guided solely by instinct.
Scooping her up, he stood and for a moment his body trembled. Not because of her weight, which was so slight as to be laughable, but because her curves were softer than he’d have thought possible. Her hair smelled of the air and winds.
“Pull your wings in,” he grunted.
She looked at him for so long that he thought maybe she might be peering into his soul. He’d never noticed the dots of silver that flecked through her irises like stardust.
Her wings wrapped slowly around her, brushing against his arms like the softest down.
“My name,” she said, “is Arabella.”
~*~
Two days later
Jackson shoved a crumpled sheet of paper into Orion’s chest at the mess hall as he sat eating his nightly ration of protein, his silver-gray eyes gleaming like liquid mercury.
“Bird’s needed in the infirmary. Guess who gets to take the bitch down tonight?”
Frowning, Orion made a grab for the paper, scanning it with a confused shake of his head. “What?”
His heart was beating furiously, and sweat dotted the back of his neck, making his skin prickle. For two days he’d been wanting to see her. For two days he’d wondered obsessively. What were they doing to her now? How badly broken was she this time?
But he’d been unable to find a legitimate reason to ask it, so he’d been forced to stay away. Forced to endure the agony of unanswered questions in silence.
“You gonna tell me you didn’t plan this? What the hell’s going on, Rion? And you best tell me truth, boy, ’cause I can smell out a lie now.” His nostrils flared.
Orion sat the sheet down and shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask for this detail to be a permanent thing.”
Leaning over him, planting his hand flat on the table, Jackson whispered into Orion’s ear, “I better not find out you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doin’, whelp. Or so help me I’ll smash every damn bone in your body before your turn.”
A hint of a growl laced the threat. Any damages earned before the turn would be permanently locked into their immortality. The threat wasn’t an idle one.
Locking his jaw, Orion stood and stared down at his mate with a frosty-eyed glare. “I wasn’t behind this, Jack, and I don’t give a fuck”—he shoved Jackson out of his space—“if you don’t believe it.”
They held their ground for several tense seconds, before Jackson finally smirked. “There’s some fire in you, boy. Well, whatever this is, it sure ain’t no holiday, so get your ass down there, get her in, get her out, and then come see me. There’s some silver that needs polishing.”
Squelching his groan, Orion turned, grabbed his half-eaten tray, dumped it, and went to Arabella.
Fuck.
He shouldn’t call her by that name.
Hell, he shouldn’t even think of her by that name.
Jackson was right to be wary. Orion was dancing with fire here, he knew it, but he wasn’t sure how to stop it.
He found her sitting in the middle of the floor, her legs crossed in front of her. Nude as always, but this time, she wasn’t covered in blood. Her lioness eyes snared his and he couldn’t help but drag her scent deep into his lungs, so that it coated not just his airways, but every fiber of every inch of him.
“Orion,” she said in her melodic voice that he’d dreamt of for the past two nights.
Clenching his jaw, he shook his head. “You’ve called me by my Christian name, you ain’t got no right, Ara—” He cut himself off, refusing to go further.
She bit her bottom lip, and her wings rubbed the sides of her arms almost as if she needed to feel their touch for comfort. “Say it.”
He refused, merely looked at her. “You mind telling me why I’m here?”
“Because you gave me apples. And you were kind to me the other day. It’s been many a moon since I’ve known that kindness.”
Blowing out a heavy breath, as if trying to expel her scent from him, he shook his head. “It was my job.”
“That’s more than a man doing his job. Is it wrong of me to crave kindness?”
Yes.
She was an abomination.
A monster.
She needed to be exterminated, her and all her kind that ruled the skies.
“I didn’t put me here. My boss sure as hell didn’t put me here, so who did?” He knew she knew; he could see the truth twinkling in her eyes.
“I gave them what they wanted.”
He narrowed his eyes. “And that was?”
“Answers.”
“That why you’re not bloody tonight?”
He leaned against the bars, hearing the footsteps behind them but not giving a damn. Because for right now it was just the two of them, alone in this cell, and he’d hungered for this.
Damn his soul to hell for wanting it as he did.
She shrugged a bony shoulder. “I gave them answers with a condition.”
“And that was?”
For a moment her eyes dropped to the ground and he suffered a moment of panic, needing to see her looking at him, needing the connection between them. The intensity of it, that somehow, someway, she was...his.
“You,” she whispered shyly, then looked back up at him with a heated intensity that he felt crawl all through him.
He grunted.
~*~
1 month later
Orion walked inside the cage, whistling a tune. He’d managed to sneak out a candy bar tonight. Arabella was finally putting on weight. They weren’t beating her anymore and every night he got to walk her to the infirmary. It wasn’t much, their time together, but he looked forward to it more and more with each dawn that passed.
She lay unconscious on the ground, a hand over her eyes, blood pooled around her. Panic gripped him by the throat.
Orion scooped her up and ran to the infirmary, shoving anyone out of his way who tried to block his path.
“Fix her!” he roared the moment he stepped into the room.
The female doctor turned around with a gasp of surprise. Sitting on her bench was one of his own. A female shifter with a gaping wound in her thigh from hip to kneecap.
“Orion”—the doctor shoved a sweaty strand of hair out of her eyes, leaving a small smear of blood on her forehead—“I’m with a patient. The creature is just going to have to wait.”
The yawning void of blackness consumed his mind, the beast inside him (dormant until his turn) flickering to life for a brief moment. Casting his eyes down before any of them could see what he felt, he grunted and marched back out the door, into another vacant room.
Laying her down on a cot, he turned and picked up whatever he could find to clean her up.
Hyperion warriors could heal from any wound. All they needed was blood to do so. But serfs were as weak as humans. It was why it was necessary to bring her to the infirmary after every interrogation.
“Hold on, Bella,” he murmured, scrambling around, grabbing cotton balls, sterile bandages, and any ointment he could get his hands on.
Orion wasn’t well versed in mortal medicine. Even unturned as he still was, wolves healed differently. Their physiological makeup was entirely different from other supernatural creatures out there.
Arms full, he turned back to her to see her eyes now open and liquid with pain.
&nbs
p; She was trembling too. Probably from shock.
Dumping what he held, he reached over her for a stack of laundered sheets, yanked one off and opened it with a flick of his wrist, laying it gently across her lap.
“What are you doing, Rion? You shouldn’t be here.”
He clenched his jaw and reached for a sterile bandage and alcohol, dumping half the contents on the bandage before pressing it to the worst wound stretched across her abdomen.
Buckling beneath him, she hissed, latching onto his wrist with a surprising grip for one so obviously weak.
“I’m sorry.” He locked his jaw.
She was right. He shouldn’t be doing this. Shouldn’t be cleaning her up, helping her out. He shouldn’t be doing any of it.
Wiping up the tacky blood as best he could, he rubbed a minty-smelling ointment across her belly that broke her skin out in a wash of goose bumps.
Shuddering, she closed her eyes, but didn’t speak to him further.
Orion worked in silence, methodically cleaning every square inch of her upper torso. Let the doctor wonder why—he didn’t care. Not tonight.
Tonight he could barely keep his temper in check. Could barely remember the tightrope he walked where Bella was concerned.
After what felt like an eternity of silence, she stopped him. Not with words. Not with strength. But with a tender touch.
She traced the line of his finger.
Her touch as soft as her feathers.
“What did they do to you?” His voice was a heated whisper.
“What they always do to me,” she whispered right back. “But tonight I didn’t crack, and I think that displeased them greatly.”
He nodded. Orion was going to walk away. Was going to pull his hand back, turn around and leave this room and never come back to her.
He reached for her face. Framed her cheek in his rough palm. “They never touch your face.”
A small smile stretched her lips for a fraction of a second. But it was enough to make him feel as though he’d just stared into the sun.
Orion had never craved the sun, not the way he craved the moon. He craved it now. Craved the skies. Craved the air.
“Rion, I—”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the candy bar he’d stolen and shoved it at her. “Take this.”
Then, turning on his heel, he walked out the door without a backward glance.
~*~
2 months later
“What does it mean!”
The words were barely out of the shifter’s mouth when the whip cracked across her spine. Arabella howled, doubling over, but the iron chains cuffed to her legs held her fast, making escape impossible.
Gasping for breath, there wasn’t a word she could make. Her voice was blistered from three days of screaming.
They’d kept her in this room, torturing her just enough to keep her conscious and responsive, but showing no other mercy besides.
If she’d not been who she was, they’d have broken her by now.
Hanging her head to her chest she knew it would take nothing for her to pass out. But the battle to fight grew daily within her.
She’d give them nothing.
“It obviously means nothing,” General Keaton murmured in disgust. “Release her back to her cell.”
“General, I urge you to reconsider,” her tormentor growled. He had the deep voice of a fully turned shifter. “Given more time I know she will break.”
They’d moved to the back of the dungeon, whispering low between themselves, thinking she could not hear. That she truly was nothing more than a serf. A weakling. Little more than a human with wings.
She licked her blunt canines because the gums had begun to ache recently; her skin felt wretched too. She wanted not just to scratch at herself, but shred at herself. Rip the rune off and be freed of the cursed limitations. Her fingers twitched.
Arabella wondered about her own shifter and what he might be thinking. Was he worried for her at all? Did he know where she was being held?
She swallowed painfully, throat parched and in desperate need of moisture. She had only a few weeks left, if she was lucky.
Her rune faded more and more each day; soon they’d know her for what she really was, and any chance her people had would be ruined. She needed to step up her seduction of Orion.
But even as she thought it she suffered a flare of guilt she immediately had to squelch.
Biting down on her back molars, she pretended not to care what the general and the tormentor spoke of.
“There is no more time. You had three days to give me my answers. Too much more and she will break and that we do not want.”
“Why do you protect her?”
Her nostrils flared. If Keaton was anything, he was no protector. They had history, she and he. Mortal he might be, but he was the true monster in this room, and they all three knew it.
“Do not mistake desire for protection, Charles. The Triad will possess the Hyperion race, and she will be mine.”
Arabella’s flesh crawled to hear Keaton’s declaration.
She fought not to flinch when his fingers gripped her chin in a brutal hold. It wasn’t hard to appear as though she were moving in and out of consciousness. There wasn’t an inch of her that did not scream in pain.
“Know this, little bird”—he spat on her face as he talked—“you will break for me.” Then, flinging her chin away in disgust, he wiped down the blood from his hands, brushed his hands down his crisp—yet bloodstained—military shirt, and did an abrupt about-face, marching out of the room with head held high.
Arabella remembered nothing after being tossed back into her cell like trash. It could have been hours later, or even days, when she heard his voice. Orion wasn’t like most of the other guards. He’d not yet turned. He was athletic, but trim. His brown hair was short and tidy. His eyes were a rich blue that never failed to remind her of home. His jaw clenched as he studied her, and she longed to brush her finger down the cleft in his chin.
“What did they do to you, little bird?”
And when he said that vile name, she no longer hated it the way she did when Keaton had said it. No longer wanted to rip his bowels out and feast on them. Her lashes fluttered and she swallowed painfully.
His fingers were tender as they explored the line of her rune.
If he asked, she’d tell him.
What the tormentor had failed to do with violence, Orion could do with just a tender touch. As pained as she felt, she trembled beneath his warmth.
But Orion didn’t ask.
Though he saw, as the others did, that her supposed tattoo faded more with each day, and certainly it was more than odd, he didn’t ask.
He simply scooped her into his arms, turned, and walked her down to medic.
Arabella knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong to wrap her arms around his neck and rest her ear against his heart, but she did it anyway.
Her days were numbered and there seemed little point in pretending otherwise.
~*~
Two weeks later
She was desperately weak. Her skin was no longer luminescent. Even her hair was pale. Keaton walked past her room every day, and Orion wanted to rip the man’s throat out when he did.
Instead he had to stand at attention, watch as the bastard touched her, hissed into her ear that she would not die because she was his.
Arabella never fought. Not like she once did.
She simply lay on the ground with her hair splayed upon the floor, and the marking Orion had once thought a tattoo was now nearly faded.
They no longer beat her. No longer tortured her for information.
As much as the General didn’t want to admit it aloud, Orion could read the truth of it in his dark eyes whenever he thought no one was looking. She was dying.
Her food rations had increased. They’d given her a firm mattress to lie upon, and several thick blankets. Orion had even persuaded the General two days ago to move her to a cell with
windows so that she could gaze upon her beloved sky in the hopes that she’d regain her spirit, her fight, but none of it seemed to be working.
The first level of the compound was less restricted than the torture floors. Up here the rooms were more dorm-like than anything. There were desks. Pictures of nature hanging on the walls. She was even free to roam the compound’s gardens for an hour a day, under strict supervision.
Of course she had to do it while being shackled by a pair of cuffs that negated her ability to fly. And for a bird such as her, the restriction must have felt more like Hell than an actual taste of Heaven. To be so close to freedom, and to have it denied her. Orion flexed his jaw.
Keaton walked out of the room then, slamming the door behind him. He moved into Orion’s line of sight, holding a finger beneath his nose, and trembling with a violence of rage that Orion himself felt in his own soul.
“If she dies, I will hold you personally responsible.” He tapped that finger into Orion’s chest, making him grunt out a sharp breath.
Keaton’s eyes were wild, his hair hanging in his eyes, lanky and smelling of days of sweat. The General was normally tidy and military crisp, but not right now; now he was nothing more than a man losing his treasured toy.
“I’ve done all you’ve asked,” Orion growled, squashing his impulse to grip the General around his scrawny neck and snap it in half.
To do so would be a declaration of war between the Triad and his people, a battle Orion could not afford. Not yet. Not now.
Keaton curled his nose. “Such a great disappointment you are, soldier. Why haven’t you shifted yet? Has the call not come upon you? You are worthless to me without the turn.”
He clenched his molars, counting to three in his head before responding. “It ain’t yet my time, but it will come.”
“See that it does, or so help me”—he grabbed hold of Orion’s collar, yanking him in close—“you will suffer worse than she ever did. Take her for a walk,” he snarled, then shoved Orion into the door and walked toward the elevators.
Orion stood for a moment longer, watching as the General moved inside the silver doors, as he disappeared, and waiting another minute longer until he felt more in control of his emotions.
