With that, the panel slid back into place on a resounding thunch and she was locked in.
The torch’s hiss was much louder now, and as she moved it from side to side to assess where she was, its heat warmed her face. More glistening walls. More rats on the floor—
Off in the distance, she heard falling water—like a river?
Walking forward, she was careful where she put her feet. The light from the flame did not carry far, the darkness consuming the illumination as a meal long denied. Shadows thrown from such an uneven, flickering source made it seem as though insects were crawling all over the corridor. Maybe they were.
As her neck prickled, she reached up and brushed at it. The sound of the falling water got louder, a rushing torrent.
The corner came without warning, a wall seeming to jump out at her, and she stopped short so she didn’t slam into the stone. Reorienting herself, she pivoted to the right and kept going.
The first of the iron bars came thirty feet farther on. The lengths were set into the ceiling and the floor, locked in with mortar and stone, and instinct made her stay more than an arm’s length back from them.
It was a cell. Like you would see in a zoo.
And something was in there.
Stopping, she swung the torch in a wide arc. What she wanted to see were racks of guns. Bins of bullets. Halters to strap weapons onto the body.
That was what she was looking for.
The rushing water was so loud, it drowned out—
Torches mounted on the walls exploded into flame, and she jumped with a shout. Wheeling toward the bars, she waved her own light source around, trying to see into the cell. Slivers of something shockingly white caught her eye down on the floor.
Bones. They were long bones, cleaned of meat and lying in bunches, pick-up sticks scattered after a large animal like a cow had been consumed. Or . . . perhaps it had been a guard who had gotten himself “fired.”
And they weren’t all she saw. There was a strange, shimmering optical illusion about five feet behind the bars, an iridescent . . .
It was a waterfall. A ten- or fifteen-foot-long waterfall cascaded from a thin slit that zigzagged across the ceiling. Storm runoff, she thought. That had to be the source.
“Who’s there?” she demanded.
A shape appeared on the far side of the water, looming. As her heart began to pound, her mouth went dry.
“Show yourself.” She took another step back. “I’m not afraid of you.”
When her shoulder blades banged into something cold and uneven, she realized she’d hit the opposite wall and was reminded that she was trapped in here. The good news was that there was no break that she could see in the lineup of bars, and they were so closely set, nothing big enough to chew those bones could squeeze through them.
Just keep going, she told herself as she brushed at the back of her neck again. The guns had to be farther along—
Ahmare screamed so loudly she flushed bats out of the dark corners.
4
SPRINGTIME HAD COME IN the midst of nuclear winter.
Called forth by an unexpected presence, Duran’s body breached the water that poured into his cell, parting the falling rush, disrupting the chaotic crystal flow. The summer rain was warm as it hit the top of his head and flowed down his long hair, bathing his shoulders and his torso in a respite from the cold that he knew from experience wouldn’t last long.
The chill in the dungeon was like the curse he lived under, pervasive and unrelenting, and he would not have gone near the balmy rush ordinarily. The return to the cold he lived in was harder to bear than any brief relief was worth.
It was better to remain in pain than to have to resettle into it.
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.
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.