But that scent.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, the scent. It beckoned him forward, stripping him of the adaptive reasoning that warned him not to get warm.
On the other side of the water, he didn’t bother to wipe his face of his dripping wet hair. He didn’t need his eyes to worship her. His nose told him all he wanted, needed to know. She was sustenance in the midst of his gnawing starvation. A fire that would not burn him. Air in a place of suffocation.
His instincts told him all of this, instantly and irrevocably.
And then she screamed.
The sound of terror wiped away his trance-like captivation, and as the chill rushed back unto him, a squatter reestablishing domicile in property it did not own, his higher reasoning bootlicked his senses out of the driver’s seat.
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.