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They rushed us like wolves, all of them mounted and armed. I did everything I could to keep us in the saddle, but my mare was too fucking spooked to control. She half-reared once and we stayed on, but as a big male stallion, wild eyes and snorting, rushed her from the flank, she reared up even higher, sending both me and Valeria flying backwards.

I broke her fall, and we landed hard together on the frozen forest floor. The bare branches spun above me and I blinked off the pain in my head. But before I could even sit up, before I could think what the fuck to do next, I saw the face I most detested, staring down at me from above.

Petre.

His men might be drugged and drunk out of their minds, but he wasn’t. In his eyes I saw that cold clarity that I’d seen so often—way the fuck more dangerous than any liquor or drug.

He smiled down at us and cracked his knuckles. The first time I’d ever seen him look like that I was five, when he’d been fighting me for that goddamned fishing pole. When the hook had gotten lodged right below my eye, he’d looked at me exactly like he was looking at us now.

Pure fucking evil.

I glanced around at his men and saw that they’d be no help to me now. They might’ve been on my side during that poker game and during our scuffle the next day, but that was before he’d pumped them full of their drugs of choice. Now, they were his dogs and he was their master, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to break through that wall.

Fuck.

Petre grabbed a hold of Valeria, yanking her off me. As I fought to stand up, with the forest still spinning, she went at him with everything she had—clawing and screaming, kicking and elbowing, but one of his human hounds stunned her with a sucker punch to the temple that quieted her screams and disoriented her enough for them to restrain her even more.

“You motherfucker,” I said, launching myself at my brother from behind.

But before I could even get a solid punch in, one of his hounds came at me from behind my periphery, body slamming me hard back into the forest floor and pinning me down with a boot on my throat.

Petre seized Valeria by the hair and hauled her off toward his horse. There wasn’t a fucking chance, not a fucking chance, I was letting him take her from me now. I snatched my hunting knife out of my boot and plunged it into the meatiest part of the calf of the man pinning me down.

But as I did, nothing happened. Nothing at all.

It was fucking surreal, like being in a nightmare. There was my knife, buried up to the hilt in his calf. But he was so high, so fucked up on some new drug my brother must have concocted for just this purpose, that he hadn’t even flinched. Instead, he stared down at the trickling wound like it belonged to someone else completely.

Fascinated. Mesmerized.

“What the fuck?” I said, plunging my knife into a different place, with the exact same reaction.

My brother laughed a little, a slippery little hush from his nose that sounded more reptilian than human.

“Black henbane,” he said. “And a little something else. I have to keep some secrets, you know. I put it in that disgusting fucking Turkish coffee they like. Magic, isn’t it?”

Fucking horrifying is what it was. They were like wild animals without the sense that an animal should have. I landed a brutal kick to the balls of the one holding me down, and lunged for Valeria. But I’d hardly gotten to my feet before two other men seized me, one of them punching me in the throat, and the other giving me a boot heel to the kidneys that made me roar with pain.

Doubled up though I was, I rolled back towards my brother so that I didn’t lose sight of Valeria. My brother and another of his men slung her over the back of Petre’s saddle. Her hands were still bound from the bindings I’d tied, and Petre made short work of tying her feet. Then he turned to me, looked me right in the eye, and gave her a hard smack on the ass. She screamed and tried hard to wriggle free, but I knew she was in a race against herself. In a matter of seconds, she passed out cold.

As she went quiet and still, I saw the distinct look of disappointment on Petre’s face, as if her fear and screams were more than half the fun of this for him.

Monster.

Still with his hand on her ass—the ass that belonged to me—Petre said, “I know you stuck your dick in her. But I’m willing to sacrifice raping the virgin in order to get the title that marrying the whore will give me.”

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