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At that moment Sweet Dove turned in Angelica’s direction, confirming her suspicion. Angelica felt a stream of power aimed toward her, and the next thing she knew she made actual eye contact with Sweet Dove, from the past.
She had to warn Reyes, had to get him out of there. Sweet Dove had used Angelica to lure Reyes to her offices through her revisiting vision power.
At that moment the vision terminated so abruptly that Angelica’s neck snapped back. When she returned to herself, she was lying on the floor on top of Reyes. He had a blank look on his face, and she couldn’t reach him telepathically.
The trap had been sprung.
She smelled something sickly sweet in the air, the same thing she’d smelled when she’d been abducted outside the Ocean Club.
She only had one trick left. As her consciousness began to fade, she reached inside her left glove, pulled out one of the Ancestral double blood-chains, and shoved it down Reyes’s T-shirt.
Hands grabbed her shoulders, pulling her away from him.
She heard Engles’s voice from behind her. “You’re mine now, sweetheart. Everything is as it should be. And if you’re good, you’ll know pleasure.”
Her vision began to blur, then fade, and suddenly she was falling.
* * *
Reyes awoke with a burning sensation at his waist he couldn’t pinpoint. His mind felt fuzzy, like it had been messed with, an all-too-familiar sensation from decades ago.
He couldn’t even open his eyes.
He forced himself to concentrate, to gain a sense of where he was. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. One moment he’d had his arm around Angelica, and the next he’d fallen to the carpet in Sweet Dove’s office.
So where was Angelica?
Adrenaline spiked and finally he could open his eyes. Sweet Dove’s preternatural charge flowed through him once more, keeping him chained to the same platform he’d escaped a couple of weeks ago. The smell of old blood and sex returned to him.
He still wore his clothes, though the strange pain at his waist grew stronger, as though something was burning a hole in his skin.
He rolled his head from side to side, trying to force his mind to clear, especially in the face of the reality that the woman he loathed had captured him again.
He had to escape. He had to find Angelica.
Where was she?
He glanced around the room, but she wasn’t there.
He tried to contact her telepathically, but nothing returned.
Then he understood two things: Sweet Dove had removed their single-bonding blood-chains, and she’d given Angelica to Engles.
* * *
Angelica awoke slowly. Her head was killing her, and she felt ready to hurl. She’d felt like this more than once when she’d traveled with altered flight, which meant she’d been moved swiftly from Sweet Dove’s office to her present location.
She lay facedown on something relatively soft, but her left arm was bent at an uncomfortable angle.
“Good, you’re waking up. Are you done vomiting?”
She knew the voice and rubbed her forehead. “Master Engles?”
“Of course.”
He came into view and had a glass in his hand. “Here, drink this. You’ll feel better. Much better.”
She lifted herself up as the glass appeared beneath her nose.
“Drink up, sweetheart. You’ll need this because we’re just about to get started.”
She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “What is it?”
“Something that will enhance the experience.”
Sudden rage flowed through Angelica. Engles had dogged her heels from the first, always after her, always hurting and killing women. She took a sip, rose up, and spat in his face.
He stood up, his eyelids fluttering.
His hands seemed to float away from his body as he pivoted slowly in her direction.
When he opened his round brown eyes to stare at her, he bore a familiar predatory expression.
He rubbed a hand through his thick wavy hair and smiled. “You ready for a fight?”
Angelica’s heart pounded heavily against her rib cage. The man was a sadistic killer and she was caught in his snare with no way to escape.
She had only one hope. She had to somehow contact Reyes, but she had no idea if he was next door or on another continent. She realized as well that Sweet Dove had removed the single-bonding chains. She was no longer connected to Reyes.
She felt the double-chain at her wrist, hidden inside the long black glove. It seemed to be burning as well, maybe because the chains were separated and were never meant to be. Blood-chains always came with a proximity issue.
Engles reached a trembling hand toward her and one by one plucked the cat whiskers from her face. The removal of each stung a little, the barest hint of things to come if Engles had his way with her. Somehow she had to escape, but how?
Suddenly he picked her up, levitated, then began moving swiftly from room to room. When she reached the chamber with the shallow pool and the platform, she knew exactly where she was. This was the place Reyes had tied her down with scarves, where Scorpion had watched her ha**ng s*x with Reyes, and later where Reyes had attacked Engles when he’d tried to insinuate himself into their sex performance.
Engles took her to the table.
“I wanted you here.” His voice was low and hoarse, full of need.
She had only one whisper of a chance to escape.
When he dumped her onto the table, she whisked the double-chain from her glove, then slipped it over her head.
The sudden power that struck her made her scream in agony. Engles jumped away from her, his eyes wide with horror.
She put her hand to her throat and once more the preternatural sensation shot through her, burning every part of her body as though tearing her apart and rebuilding her at the same time.
“Where the hell did you get that? Stupid woman! It’ll kill you.”
“See if I care, you bastard.”
* * *
Pain suddenly shot through Reyes like nothing he’d ever experienced before, not even at Sweet Dove’s hands. He shouted, and the burning sensation at his waist beneath his shirt intensified.
Something was wrong because his captor hadn’t even gotten started with her usual means of torture.
The next moment a wave of anguish flowed through him, something outside himself and it had the flavor of Angelica.
Angelica? He reached for her through the thick rock walls of the torture room.
I’m here. I just put on the Ancestral chain. Engles says it will kill me, but I don’t care. I’d rather die this way.
Despite the fact that he was in physical agony, Reyes fell to a place of vampire stillness. Angelica was going to die within the next few minutes. She’d done the worst thing she could have done: she’d donned one of the double-chains apart from him. But where was the companion chain? Then he knew. He was in pain because the second chain resided inside his shirt at his waist, and Angelica had put it there. But how could he reach it shackled as he was?
