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With nothing but her rage, his scent still in her nostrils, and her profound and spiraling fear.
You’re in such deep shit, Stace.
How had she come to be in this place? How hadanyof this been allowed to happen?
“Scanlon.” She spat the name, her voice a savage hiss. “Fuckingprick.”
Then she heard it. Somewhere far off, above her—the door.
“Shit.”
The dark was bad enough. But somehow being deprived of even the symbolic protection of shielding herself with her hands was… so much worse. She yanked at her bonds nonetheless, grunting at the frustration and the dull ache at her wrists, the steel of the cuffs long having abraded the skin there.
The risers of the staircase down to the basement creaked, and she almost screamed, the sound jarring, terrifying. For an instant she had the crazed notion that it would have been better to have that cursed hood back over her head.
The scent of him reached her nostrils again, and she recoiled from it, the chains of her harness clanging on something metallic. But her reaction was not one of disgust.
It was something quite different indeed.
You can’t be doing this. This is not happening, Stacy.
But the truth… was the truth.
Then the sound of the steps changed, the creaking of the wood ceasing. The pressure of his body—for she knew instinctively it was a male—on the air had her skin prickling, the tiny hairs on her forearms standing on end.
The growl, when it came, was clearly canine, but there was another note to it, something almost… alien.
In her mind’s eye, she’d already constructed a terrifying image of whomever it was standing somewhere in the basement with her. It was the alpha, clearly. But she imagined him in his wolf form, huge, snarling.
Hungry.
It hadn’t occurred to her until that very moment that it was of course possible that the women handed over in those cursed “auctions” might have had a rather darker fate befall them than merely being kept as captive brood mares by a clan of ravenous lycanthropes.
What if they were simply killed? Devoured immediately? It wasn’t unknown, of course, and in fact two decades prior there had been an infamous series of killings in the human portion of the area formerly known as the Dakotas that had ultimately been tracked down as being the depredations of a wolf serial killer.
Wolf Nation had been charged with determining what was to be done with the depraved maniac—he’d exclusively preyed on humans—and he’d been handed over to their captivity. There’d been a terrible uproar about it; many humans wanted him tried and executed in the UNAC courts. The official story was that the killer met justice at the hands of the Wolf Nation. But the killer’s fate was entirely unknown to all but a few members of UNAC law enforcement. What the general public didn’t know was that he’d been promptly exiled, and set loose in an area known to be haunted by rogue vampires—who immediately pursued and murdered in ghastly fashion the erstwhile serial killer.
(Stasia)
This time she did cry out, the fright of the word sounding in her head making her stumble backward until the hated chain of her cuffs bit into her inflamed wrists, drawing her up short, the links clattering against the steel bar she’d been locked to.
“How… how do you know that name?”
The chuckle was rich with both satisfaction and menace. She hated it immediately, and yet it made her womb tighten, her nipples hard and at attention already. “I know plenty about you already, Stacy.”
“That’sagentto you—and any of the other fleabags you have slinking around this place.”
Way to be diplomatic, Stace.
“There will be a time where impertinence like that will earn you a hard spanking and an even harder fucking.”
Her breath caught in her throat at that, but she’d be damned if she was going to let on that he had any effect at all on her, save for disgust and contempt.
“I’m an agent of UNAC law enforcement, not one of your groupie whores. What do they call them again?”
“Rabbits…”
A chill ran down her spine as she realized the voice was much closer now, the gravelly timbre of it almost a physical caress down her skin, like the whisper of a zephyr of breeze—only far,farmore portentous.
