Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(7)

Bones. They were long bones, cleaned of meat and lying in bunches, pick-up sticks scattered after a large animal like a cow had been consumed. Or . . . perhaps it had been a guard who had gotten himself “fired.”

And they weren’t all she saw. There was a strange, shimmering optical illusion about five feet behind the bars, an iridescent . . .

It was a waterfall. A ten-or fifteen-foot-long waterfall cascaded from a thin slit that zigzagged across the ceiling. Storm runoff, she thought. That had to be the source.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

A shape appeared on the far side of the water, looming. As her heart began to pound, her mouth went dry.

“Show yourself.” She took another step back. “I’m not afraid of you.”

When her shoulder blades banged into something cold and uneven, she realized she’d hit the opposite wall and was reminded that she was trapped in here. The good news was that there was no break that she could see in the lineup of bars, and they were so closely set, nothing big enough to chew those bones could squeeze through them.

Just keep going, she told herself as she brushed at the back of her neck again. The guns had to be farther along—

Ahmare screamed so loudly she flushed bats out of the dark corners.





4




SPRINGTIME HAD COME IN the midst of nuclear winter.

Called forth by an unexpected presence, Duran’s body breached the water that poured into his cell, parting the falling rush, disrupting the chaotic crystal flow. The summer rain was warm as it hit the top of his head and flowed down his long hair, bathing his shoulders and his torso in a respite from the cold that he knew from experience wouldn’t last long.

The chill in the dungeon was like the curse he lived under, pervasive and unrelenting, and he would not have gone near the balmy rush ordinarily. The return to the cold he lived in was harder to bear than any brief relief was worth.

It was better to remain in pain than to have to resettle into it.

But that scent.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, the scent. It beckoned him forward, stripping him of the adaptive reasoning that warned him not to get warm.

On the other side of the water, he didn’t bother to wipe his face of his dripping wet hair. He didn’t need his eyes to worship her. His nose told him all he wanted, needed to know. She was sustenance in the midst of his gnawing starvation. A fire that would not burn him. Air in a place of suffocation.

His instincts told him all of this, instantly and irrevocably.

And then she screamed.

The sound of terror wiped away his trance-like captivation, and as the chill rushed back unto him, a squatter reestablishing domicile in property it did not own, his higher reasoning bootlicked his senses out of the driver’s seat.

Now he focused through the ropes of his hair, his eyes piercing the distance and the bars that separated them.

The torch that she held gave off unsteady light, the orange flames strobing her strong face and neck and shoulders. She was tall for a female, and solidly built, with dark hair that had been pulled back. Her clothes were black, as if she were a huntress in the night, and they were of a style he was unfamiliar with, the windbreaker made of something other than cotton.

With a slap, she covered her open mouth with her palm, ending the sound she’d made, cutting it off like a limb from the whole. Wide, pale eyes framed by dark lashes and brows bounced around him, taking in his naked, muscled body—and his many scars—with a mixture of disgust and horror.

Instantly, Duran was devastated on her behalf. Chalen had sent her down here to be drained dry, a fawn tied to a fixed point in a forest so a monster could survive. So unfair. But there was another reason he mourned.

She was the first of the sacrifices, after however many years of being down here, that he actually wanted.

Chalen had lived up to his promise those eons ago: The conqueror relished the suffering he imparted, feeding off the anger and the agony he caused his prisoner. And he knew that Duran hated the feedings, these females and human women, all invariably prostitutes who had misbehaved, sent down here for their own punishment.

A twofer for the bastard, as it were.

Except . . . this one was healthy. Uncontaminated by disease. And fully aware, too, her faculties undimmed by the servicing of a chemical addiction—

In a rush, his body reacted to her presence and her purpose, hardening, preparing for contact . . . for penetration.

He almost did not recognize the symptoms of desire. No matter, though. He might take her blood because he had to, because he needed to be strong enough to escape when the timing was right. But it would never go further than that, and not just because he enjoyed pissing his captor off.

As someone who had had no dominion over his own body for the eternity he’d been down here, he struggled enough with merely taking a vein that he felt was not his due. He could not contemplate any further violation, even if the women and females thought they wanted him, and so far, all of them had.

Duran stepped up to the bars and waited. When no guards came from behind her to raise the gate, he frowned.

A new kind of torture, he decided. That’s what this has to be.

God only knew what was going to be done to this female, just out of reach but right in front of him. The guards were, as Chalen insisted on pointing out and proving, fully functional, even if they could not speak a word—

The rage that came over him was a surprise because, like any sexual impulse, it was something he hadn’t felt for so very long. After all these years, his temperament had flatlined even as his heart had continued to beat, the unrelenting nature of the physical pain and humiliations such that he was non-reactive for the most part.