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“Not so loud now, huh?” the man who’d opened the container called over his shoulder.
I hated him.
We filed single file behind him and he occasionally yelled threats, names like cunt or whore. He probably thought it made him powerful, but there wasn’t any power in threatening women who had nothing, who were scared, who’d been tormented.
I recognized where we were now—the docks, just a few blocks down from Anteros’s warehouse, and where the Wolves had met their demise. I furrowed my brow trying to piece it all together. I’d actually gotten a glimpse of someone briefly and recognized him from The Catacombs, so I knew we’d been taken by Lucia’s men, but we were outside of Anteros’s warehouse. It didn’t make sense.
There was one other man with us, and he used the barrel of his gun to poke into our backs, to keep us moving. He was awful too, sneering and rude.
It was freezing outside, and they didn’t give us any new clothes. Loose gravel crunched painfully beneath my feet. That mixed with the light snowfall meant my feet were red and burning badly. I was still covered in Gabby and the man from the gas station’s blood, and I desperately needed a shower. The other women were like me—hair a ratted mess and smelling awful.
“Have you done this before?” I asked Leanna when we stopped a few yards away from a big freight boat loaded with containers. Shadows stuttered across our path, broken only by fiery orange lights.
“No,” Leanna whispered. “No, this is new.” I had to crane my neck as far as it would go to see the top of the huge vessel. This wasn’t goin
g to end well. No sooner had I thought that then one of the men grabbed a girl and dragged her away by her blonde hair.
“No, please,” she said, reaching for her ratty tresses, and I realized it was the same girl who’d yelled at Leanna.
“Tucker,” warned the man who’d opened the container.
“They’re gonna be whores anyway,” Tucker, sneered. When he spoke, his lip curved in a smile that made my stomach curl. His lips were dry, cracking and bleeding. “May as well sample the product before it gets spoiled.” I was frozen, wanting to do something as they argued with each other about whether or not to rape us.
“The boat’s not even ready to leave,” Tucker argued. “C’mon Lee, stop being such a fuckin’ pussy. You could get yourself a virgin, they’d never know.” Lee’s, eyes traveled to Leann, growing calculating, predatory.
She backed into me and I gripped her forearms to steady her. Lee reached out to Leanna but his arm froze midair, a sound stopping him.
“What was that?” Lee asked, whipping his thin neck around.
“I didn’t hear shit,” Tucker snapped. Jeans at his ankles, he bent the blonde girl over a stack of wood pallets. We all had to watch. Silent. Afraid that if we said nothing we were letting it happen, but afraid they would turn to us if we spoke. Tears cleared a fresh path down her dirty cheeks, but she made no sound. I couldn’t look away. It was different than the time the men exited the velvet curtain. This time I felt if I looked away, it would be saying what they did to her was okay.
Lee turned from Tucker to us, clearly debating what Tucker had said. Suddenly he snatched Leanna from the line and pulled her toward the darker part of the docks, where the conflagration of lamps ended. I reached for her wrist.
She was being sucked into shadow, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
The blonde girl screamed and I looked in horror to find Tucker had wound his hands around her neck. Just as he was about to do something irreparable to her, he was pulled off and thrown to a stack of crates. I couldn’t help the gasp that escaped me.
Anteros.
I was speechless as he emerged from the shadows, and so were the men—for about two seconds. Then Lee dropped Leanna’s wrist and lifted his gun with a shaky hand. If Anteros was worried, he didn’t let on. Anteros grabbed Tucker off the crates just as Lee fired, using him as a shield. Bullets penetrated Tucker’s chest, one, two, three—so many I couldn’t keep track. They ripped the man’s chest apart until he was shreds of meat. When Lee had to reload, Anteros tossed the useless, bloody Tucker to the ground and went for Lee. Before Lee could get his ammo ready, Anteros slammed his weapon against his nose. Blood spurted in all directions as Lee wailed.
A gun bulged against Anteros’s shirt and knowing him, I was certain he had a knife. He used none of those items. He tore into Lee, fists colliding with his jaw, his nose, his eyes. He absolutely ripped Lee apart. All the women covered their eyes, but I was mesmerized. When he finished, Anteros was covered in red up to his elbows, as if he’d dipped his arms into a bucket of paint.
An icy winter wind blew through the air, whipping Anteros’s shiny black locks in all directions. His eyes gleamed murder. I’d thought I’d seen Anteros angry, but he was transformed—a devil delivering retribution.
He hadn’t looked at me the entire time and when he finally did, his bluegreen gaze was filled with madness. Blood splattered across his body, the spots gleaming like rubies under the fiery light. The last time I’d seen him, I told him never to find me again. I told him to stay away, to either let me go or kill me. I wondered if he’d decided to end me after all.
He stalked toward me, eyes on fire. One arm gripped my waist, the other swung under my legs, and he lifted me with a purpose I didn’t dare defy. I opened my mouth to say something as he carried me away. What would happen to the other girls? We couldn’t just leave them.
Yet I knew there was no way to escape him. I was a fool for thinking I ever could.
I was afraid to move, afraid to breathe. I’d thought I knew him as the Beast. I’d thought I knew what the word meant in regard to him, but he was completely transformed. Fingers painful in their grip, jaw so clenched the muscles on his neck corded, everything rigid to the point of snapping—he was no longer man, but completely animal.
His hair was messy and he hadn’t bothered to push it out of his eyes. In a trance, I gently brushed the strands away. His eyes flashed to mine—hot, filled with a blaze of hell. I paused midair. What the fuck am I doing? Still, I pushed his hair behind his ear, needing to soothe some of his tension, feeling it as my own. My hand slid to caress the side of his face down to his beard and his stare returned forward. When I pulled my fingers back, the tips were stained red.
We wove in and out of giant shipping containers as he avoided Lucia’s men deftly, darkness our friend. He held me like I would disappear at any moment. I should have been terrified—Lucia’s men crawled around the docks like beetles—but Anteros was so sure of himself. I trusted that, at least. I trusted him to save me. In this world, he’d always done that.
We came to the warehouse—the warehouse where he’d first saved me from his Wolves and tethered me in the darkness. We didn’t enter through the front door because soldiers guarded it. They were lazy, though. One was asleep and the other was smoking a cigarette, playing on his phone.
