I sink my teeth into the neck of the red bead, blood gushing into my mouth as I tear off a hunk of flesh and spit it aside.
Barging through the open doorway, I wrap my chains around someone’s throat, the dense choking sounds music to my ears. Though the satisfyingpopof his neck breaking really tops it off.
Reallyhas me dancing despite my pesky restraints.
Another face caves—this one a victim of my thrusting elbow. A femur snaps beneath my boot as I use my shackle like a hammer, cracking someone’s skull open, then whip around and repeat the trick on another creeping up behind me.
I set my sights on the stumpy key bearer jingling every time he shuffles behind one of his comrades, using them as a meat shield.
You’re mine, shit stain.
Another snapped neck before I snatch the bearer’s mask, exposing a red-dappled cheek I claw my nails into, about to rip off his face when something hard collides with my temple.
The blow of pain is blinding but temporary, eased by a cold dark that swarms from all angles.
I drop like a rock.
Iwake with an icy roar coiled on the back of my tongue, wrestling it into submission as I slash my gaze around. Take in the sturdy stone table before me—long and stretched left—heavy with a mix of rusty pitchers, ornate plates piled with food, and dozens of crooked, broken, or tarnished candelabras. Each holds pillars of weepy wax tipped with writhing flames. Collectively, they cast the table in a threatening orange glow, raging against the cold, oppressive dark of the feasting cavern I know too well.
Voiding my rabid fear, I work to clear the remaining fog from my brain, squinting through the forest of flames that know the taste of my skin. Home my focus on the presence I sense across the table, looking straight into volcanic eyes blazing beneath a pinched, sweat-dappled brow—
The candle before me sputters with my frosty, whimpered exhale.
Kaan.
Creators, no …
I scour the chains wrapped around his body and the dense stone chair he’s bound against. Chains thicker than his biceps—like the ones used to hold dragons down while they’re bled into the ground—etched in glowing runes that seem to flicker with every flex of his bulging muscles.
My desperate gaze stills on the puncture wounds in his arms that look like they’ve been dug through, then messily stitched up. Whips to the deep gash in his head and the dried blood smeared down the side of his bruised and beaten face, his mouth stuffed with a gag that’s a black strike across his profile.
My gaze lifts, heart shredding into a mess of fleshy tatters at the softness in his eyes. Desperate fear directed at me.
I snarl, wrestling the shackles cinching my wrists together behind my chair’s stony backrest—the cold cuffs so tight they chafe. I try to kick my feet, but they’re equally shackled, tethered to the ground.
Fuck.
I open my mouth to tell Kaan that we’ll find a way out—that I’ve gotten free before, so it’spossible—whena chill crawls up my spine, lifting the hairs on my nape.
My very essence recoils, squirming into a tightly muscled knot. Kaan’s eyes are no longer soft and vulnerable, but lit with blistering rage, directed on the male I sense at my back.
The Scavenger King.
Conductor of my slumber-terrors.
His menacing presence heckles every nerve ending, like Clode in the gravity of a hungry flame. Too familiar with his sadistic lust for shrinking his prey.
I want to scream. Tell Kaan to present calm and composed and give himnothingto hunt. But I can’t even hook his attention, nor can I bring myself to move—so stiff in the heckling atmosphere of the male who knows every weak seam in my soul.
Wholoosenedthe threads to make them so.
Reaching around me, Arkyn sets a tarnished plate on the table, exposing me to a view of his hand—wiry. Gnawed on.
Capable of horrific things.
My heart labors as I look at it; watch him spin the plate until it’s exactly where he intends it to be.
“Ahh, there you are.” Arkyn’s voice sizzles my nerves so much it’s an effort not to flinch, bile surging as the back of his hand strokes the line of my jaw—Kaan’s muffled sounds heaving with intensity. “How nice of you to wake for me.”
