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“I’ll see that he’s bathed.” The vampire turned and headed back into the main camp to round up her forces.
When Lily went inside her tent, she quickly stripped off her clothes. She moved into her makeshift camp shower, wondering if she’d ever feel clean again. As she soaped up, she shuddered at her memory of Adrien, that she’d found the enemy beautiful, that she’d desired a vampire.
The thought felt unholy as she scrubbed from head to foot.
She would order her clothes burned, especially since they had Adrien’s blood on them. She wanted no visceral memory of her time here if she could possibly help it.
Although the water was just barely warm, even after the staff added hot water to the tank, she stood beneath the shower and shampooed her hair, scrubbed her skin raw, and only quit when she couldn’t smell the cave any longer.
Afterward she wrapped herself up in a thick robe and reviewed the latest email from Kiernan. Her first step was simple: bind Adrien with the matching chain, then take him back to his Paris apartment to get prepped for the mission. Once he was ready, she was to contact Kiernan, who wanted to know every step of her progress.
Sighing heavily, she opened a small case to her right and removed a chain that matched her own, made up of the same small dark loops. Her chain vibrated as she slipped the second chain over her head.
In the box was something else, something to help her remember why she was binding herself to a vampire. She picked up a small piece of cloth, taken from Josh’s shirt, stained with his blood.
As she towel-dried her hair, she heard a thumping on the path outside. A dozen men hurried by, barely shadows in the dark. Two of them hauled a huge stainless-steel tub, which got dumped unceremoniously not far from her tent. Those men raced back up the path in the direction of the cavern.
She heard shouting in the distance.
What the hell was going on?
She moved to the tent doorway and held her robe closed. Other staff arrived and began filling the tub, some with cold water, some carrying buckets that steamed, but all those heads were also turned in the direction of the cave.
She listened hard.
About fifteen seconds later she heard Adrien’s voice. He was shouting, then roaring, then nothing, at least from him.
When the shouting of the guards didn’t abate, Lily got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and slid into a clean pair of loafers.
She left her tent and hurried back up the path. By the time she reached the group at the opening to the cave, she realized that the guards were firing Tasers into Adrien, laughing as his prone body jerked in the dust. He moaned each time he was hit.
“What the hell are you doing?” she called out. “I need him.”
The men, all paled-out vampire Indians, turned to her, eyes as vicious as the women’s.
“He gave us trouble,” the tallest man said, swatting at a fly near his head. He glared at Lily.
A lie, of course. The manacles Adrien wore held a preternatural charge and kept him from doing more than shuffling, just as he had in the cave during her vision.
When she glanced down at him, he craned his neck to look up at her.
Meeting his hostile gaze, her own rage flared, not just at him, but at the collective nature of the vampires around her, without decency of any kind. So typical, in her opinion, that they would torture a prisoner like this, one of their own.
“Take him to the bath,” she said quietly. She wanted out of here as soon as possible, and the only way out was to get the vampire clean then bound to her with the second chain.
It took six men to lift that much muscle and haul Adrien back down the path to the large metal tub, now full of steaming water.
Once he was in the oversized bath, his knees pulled up to make him fit, she set them at the task of scrubbing the grime off him. Fortunately, he passed out. She ordered the water changed two more times.
When at last he was clean, she removed the bonding chain from her neck and carefully placed it over Adrien’s head, working it past his thick hair that touched his shoulders, until it rested against the back of his neck and dipped down in front to his collarbone.
A vibration passed from her chain to his. Her heart beat hard in her chest, as though trying to break free. She took deep breaths. A strange tingling moved through her body, from her head, flowing in waves down to her feet then back up as the chain made the connection she’d been told would happen.
The connection solidified and she placed her hand on Adrien’s chest over the chain. She sensed so many things about him all at the same time: his rage, his physical agony, and his desire to keep his world safe.
She looked up at the guard. “Get these manacles off. Now.”
The guard set to work, using a special tool to pound out the bolts that locked the manacles in place. Once both sets were gone, she sent the guard away.
With the blood-chain in place, Adrien wouldn’t be able to move but a few feet away from her.
Oh, God, she was now bound to a vampire.
But her reasons, yes, her reasons were worth anything that happened from this point forward.
CHAPTER 2
Adrien hurt deep into his body, as though the electricity from the Tasers had taken the recent torture and driven it into his bones. He’d finally left the cavern for the first time in a year, and though he had been completely incapacitated with manacles and chains, the guards had still fired half a dozen Tasers at him repeatedly.
His fellow vampires.
The guards weren’t even humans.
As his consciousness returned, he realized he sat in a tub of warm water that felt damn good on his aching, whipped body. He couldn’t imagine what he smelled like. After that many months in a closed environment, he’d lost the ability to smell what had essentially become a cesspool.
His neck hurt. His head rested on the thin metal lip of the tub but he couldn’t seem to do anything about it, probably because of the semi-paralysis that still kept him immobile. Damn, those Tasers had hurt.
He drew in a deep breath and recognized the human scent from earlier, from the one determined to get the extinction weapon.
He shifted in her direction and stared at her from beneath hooded lids. She knelt beside the tub, watching him. He’d been without sex for a year, and without a decent draught of blood. The woman would serve his needs just fine.
His nostrils flared as he smelled her sex and her blood, both scents beating at his body, firing his appetites.
“Adrien, can you hear me?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“My name is Lily. Lily Haven. I’ve already put the bonding chain on you. Can you feel it?”
