Natalia forced a paltry smile; it was the best she could do. Santos had already apologized a dozen times, and it was certainly too late to take it back. “I understand,” she murmured, tightening her self-protective grasp around her knees and leaning into the cocoon for comfort.
His keen, watchful gaze followed the motion unerringly. He sighed, lifted his hand, and crooked two fingers in a beckoning motion. “Come to me, Natalia.”
She shuddered. “No, not yet. I’m comfortable here.”
His eyes swept over her bare feet; traced the upward contours of the pale-blue silk nightgown; paused to survey her hands, her quivering shoulders, and the vein in her neck that was surely convulsing from all the nervous swallowing; and finally settled on her uncertain features. He crooked his fingers again. “Come,” he repeated.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Natalia…” His commanding tone softened. “You cannot hide forever.”
She chuckled then, the sound absent of humor. “Perhaps not, but I think I’ll hide just a little longer.”
He reached out and slid the palm of his hand along the underside of her once-broken ankle, up her calf, and along her hamstring, circling to the top of her thigh. “Let go of your legs and come to me.”
The weight of his hand, resting someplace so intimate, was almost too much to bear.
Too close.
Too suggestive.
Too entitled and possessive.
“Santos—”
“Shh.” He placed both hands over hers and pried them away from her body. And then he grasped the underside of both legs and tugged her gently forward. As her body slid toward him, he rested his palms on either side of her waist and hoisted her effortlessly onto his lap—her legs fell naturally around him, and her bottom settled against his pelvis.
Natalia gasped.
“Shh,” he repeated, encircling her with his arms and holding her tightly against him. “Nothing sexual, Natalia. Just let me hold you…surround you…envelop you. Nestle into my heart, sweet girl. I’m here. Always here. We will get through this together.”
Her heartbeat became a frantic rhythm…
Every atom in her body wanted to protest—and bolt.
Her thighs quivered. Her palms began to sweat. And she held her breath for several seconds, trying to detect any hint of arousal—there were only so many new experiences a girl could embrace in forty-eight hours! And while the thought of finally, eventually—inevitably—making love to Santos consumed the vast majority of Natalia’s thoughts, she couldn’t handle it right now.
“Trust me, Natalia,” he whispered in her ear, his breath as warm as a summer breeze and just as gentle. “I am not a monster, nor am I that selfish. I only wish to hold you, to comfort you, if you’ll let me.”
Natalia felt the truth of his words even more than she heard them.
She felt it in his tender touch. She sensed it in his matching heartbeat. She felt the power of his spirit—and his aura—radiate all around her like the two of them were sharing one cosmic mind, one will, one soul. Like their union was already consummated, somewhere deeper than flesh and bone. And she allowed herself to sink into that feeling…that knowing…as she laid her head against his shoulder and unwittingly nuzzled his neck.
A deep, sultry, nearly inaudible purr rumbled in the vampire’s throat, and Natalia settled into the sound like an ambient, tranquil vibration, lulling her to sleep. She didn’t sleep, however; she just gave herself over to his warmth.
And true to his word, Santos Olaru held her…and held her…and held her, until there was nothing in the world—at least for now—than a tender, compassionate vampire and his cautious but compliant destiny.
Oskar Vadovsky seethed and seethed, pacing like a caged, wild animal in his dimly lit, underground quarters, deep in the bowels of the Dark Ones’ Colony.
He was sexually frustrated.
He was deeply humiliated.
And every cell in his dark, vampiric body ached to lash out at someone…or something.
By all the dark lords, he had wasted so much time genuflecting to that pampered princess and generally kissing her ass, all with the promise that he would one day have her—brutalize her, enjoy her, make use of her body to spawn the Colony’s most perfect offspring—and now, all those plans had failed.
Crumbled to dust like a castle built from sand.
And Oskar demanded satisfaction—both for his aching groin and his embittered heart.
Bottom line: Luca had promised something he couldn’t deliver—who cares if it wasn’t the billionaire’s fault—and Natalia had been this close to receiving Oskar’s most brutal attention, taking every sadistic inch of his hate, enduring a pain and savagery that would have satisfied Oskar’s most depraved appetite and black-hearted instincts for years, when a gods-forsaken warrior in the house of Jadon had stepped in and interrupted the blissful act.
Fine.
What was done was done.
But Natalia also needed to pay: She needed to suffer—indefinitely—for years and years. She needed to carry the weight of anguish, guilt, and horror on her slender shoulders, as well as her sexy back, compliments of her former fiancé.
And there was only one way to make that happen.
Oskar wasn’t a fool, and he had no intentions of biting the hand that fed him. Yet and still, he could still punish the Giovanni pair without harming the Colony’s self-interests. With Achilles Zahora at his side, the vampires would enter The Fortress and violate, mutilate, and creatively slay every living, breathing female in the northern quadrant: Luca’s high-end call girls, living on “Easy Street.”
There would be nothing easy about it.
He would leave “Death Row” alone—those females could still be purchased by the house of Jaegar in the future, and similarly, he wouldn’t touch the eastern or western wings: Prepubescent girls were just not his thing. They didn’t put up a worthwhile fight, and they broke too quickly and easily—while the low-end prostitutes were beneath his ministrations: too ugly, too fat, too skinny, too smelly, too polluted by the drug-tainted seed of human men. Besides, they wouldn’t cost Luca nearly enough money.
The high-end bitches were the way to go.
Oh yes, the whores as well as Luca’s beloved, badass guards—wholesale slaughter was definitely on the menu. And when Oskar left a note attached to the front door of The Fortress, letting Luca know the reason for the massacre—his precious Natalia had been a tainted disappointment; the engagement was off; and this was Oskar’s payback—there’d be nothing the slave-trader could do but cry. Oh, he’d stew for a while, perhaps plot some misguided revenge, but at the end of the day, he would swallow his pride, accept the loss, and give Oskar a very wide berth. He would bow down to the vampire, despite his ignorance of Oskar’s species, like the inferior, human trash he was.
And he would lose millions and millions of dollars in inventory and assets…
And as for Natalia?
She would be overcome with guilt.
All those deaths…all those bodies…she would carry the shame in her heart forever.
And then, once Oskar was satisfied, both sexually and emotionally, he could turn his attention back to life in the Colony—he would eventually find another woman, an even more appropriate human sacrifice, and life, as it always did, would go on.
But for now, he needed to alert Achilles—get ready for the slaughter of a lifetime—the time to strike was while the iron was hot, and Oskar was hot right now.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gwendolyn Hamilton awakened with a start, her shoulders aching from the hard, metal-framed cot, her senses becoming instantly alert.
Something wasn’t right—she could feel it all the way to her bones.
Instincts kicking in, she rolled off the abrasive canvas onto the hard, dirt floor and crawled on her belly to the edge of her cell, peeking through the iron bars: There was a dense, glutinous fog—as dark as the night, as eerie as skeletal fingers??
?snaking along the row of cages. The word snaking came to mind because the fog moved like an electric eel through murky water: gliding, meandering, coasting down the hall. A lump formed in Gwen’s throat, and her trachea constricted. But she didn’t gasp or cry out—she didn’t dare. Her cell was the last along the row, the furthest from the fog, and the closest to the communal restroom.
She needed to remain silent…and think.
Her heart began to beat a frantic cacophony in her chest, and that’s when she heard the bone-chilling echo—click, click, click—all the cages unlocking at once: plug after plug rotating in sharp synchronization, tumbler after tumbler falling into place, lock after lock releasing.
Someone had just opened all the cages.
But why?
Who would do that?
The guards typically let one woman out at a time, whether to take her to a John or allow her to use the restroom. They never opened all the cages at the same time.
Gwen’s first impulse was to get up and run, yet something in her mind screamed, Stop!
Don’t do it.
It was almost as if the unlocked cages were intentional—a row of dangling carrots—and that unholy fog was just waiting to see who would reach out and grab one.
Gwen blinked several times, trying to get a grip on her wild imagination. Fog didn’t think. It didn’t hunt or plot. So why were the hairs on the back of her neck standing up? And why was she suddenly so cold?
Swallowing her terror, she strained her neck to peek further down the hall, toward the end of the row, and it took her a second to comprehend what she was seeing: The tail of the fog had entered Laura’s cage; the head had snaked into Tia’s. Laura’s ankles jerked; Tia’s hair stood on end; and Gwen’s eyes shot back and forth in a panic. Something—or someone—was tugging on Laura’s legs, snapping her ankles, and slithering between her thighs. Something just shredded her pajamas!
And Tia?
Holy shit!
This wasn’t possible…
She was being raised in the air by her hair, dragged upward along the bars of her cell like a convict caught in a hangman’s noose. Her neck began to bleed. Her chest and her thighs followed suit. Shuddering, Gwen thought about the human arteries—the carotid, the pulmonary, and the femoral—as Tia’s blood spurted out, as if from a geyser, creating a crimson waterfall. Her back struck the wall of the cell, again and again…and again, her arms and legs flopping like a rag doll’s.
And then Gwen saw the outline of a man, a monstrously tall slayer with chin-length, black-and-red banded hair, and a bare, bronzed, muscular back. He was cut like an inhuman statue, and his bulging upper right bicep was encircled by a horrifying tattoo. From this far away, Gwen might not have made out the Black Mamba, except the serpent’s red eyes began to glow, and for a moment, it looked like it raised its head from the giant’s body, snaked out its tongue, and flashed its fangs before retreating back into the bicep.
Back into the man.
Back into the fog.
Gwen pressed her palm over her mouth to stifle a scream. She back-crawled away from the bars, dug the nails of her free hand into the earthen floor, and trembled uncontrollably. Laura and Tia were being assaulted and murdered…mutilated and drained…by something inside of the fog.
Where the hell were the guards?
Where the hell was The Reaper?
Paralyzed with fear and unable to see what was happening, Gwen clenched her eyes shut and listened. Laura’s inhuman groans. Tia’s last gasp of breath. Women were coming awake now, and the entire northern wing was filling with terror: bloodcurdling screams, cage doors opening, bodies being slammed back into their cells, bones cracking as they splintered against cement walls.
Gwen was running out of time.
If she didn’t make a move right now, if she didn’t shake off her fear and act, it would be too late—she was only six or seven cages away from dying a brutal death.
Forcing her eyes back open, she tuned into every conceivable sound, paying closest attention to the grunts and snarls rising out of that evil fog. Clawing at the dirt in her cell, she stripped out of her pajamas, then coated her hair and covered her back with the soil before crawling on her belly, as noiselessly as possible, to the door of her cage.
Several grunts—she tapped the iron, allowing the door to glide open an inch.
A prolonged moan—she pushed it further, holding her breath as the metal creaked.
Agonizing screams, two more women being assaulted—she shimmied through the open doorway and crawled like a lizard to the end of the hall.
The moment she rounded the corner, she shot to her feet and took off running: arms pumping, heart pounding, lungs burning like magma in her chest. Don’t look back! she repeated like a mantra. Run, Gwen, just run!
She darted into the communal restroom, zigzagged between the dingy shower walls, and climbed atop a slippery ledge to reach up and remove the shower vent. Then somewhere in the distance, a fist barreled into a stomach; an open palm thundered against a captive’s face; and a series of piteous, ear-piercing screams followed, causing Gwen to lose her balance.
Her bare feet teetered on the border of the ledge, and she tumbled to the ground.
The metal vent hit the shower floor with a clang, causing a large commotion, and she landed right on top of it at an unnatural, sideways angle, slicing her right hip against the rim of the metal. She pressed her palm to her mouth to stifle a scream, even as she moaned in pain. Then she dipped the pads of her fingers into the soiled blood, checked the size and depth of the gash, and grit her teeth as she got back up.
The ledge was even slicker now.
Her blood was coating the tiles.
And she scrambled wildly—slipping again and again—before she secured a steady perch.
Reaching up to grasp both sides of the opening in the shower ceiling, she struggled to hoist herself up, and that’s when she saw the cover of the vent, still stained with blood, lying on the shower floor. “No, no, no-no-no!” she whimpered, staring helplessly at the metal cover.
They would find it.
It would find it.
Those things in the fog would see the blood beneath the opening in the ceiling, and they’d know exactly where she was.
Bitter tears stung her eyes, and her entire body shook as she glared at that stupid, stupid vent and tried to make up her mind: The man, the one she had seen in the fog—he would never fit into the vent. He could never crawl inside such narrow ductwork, but then, what the fuck was that misty shit anyway, and how were they moving in and out of it?
What the hell were those supernatural creatures?
And could they follow her as vapor?
“Impossible,” she murmured, but something in her heart knew that it wasn’t.
Choking back her sobs, she listened more attentively—the screams were coming closer; the carnage was growing louder; there were…there were…footsteps coming toward the bathroom stalls.
Oh god, oh god, oh god!
She released her grasp on the ceiling, jumped off the ledge, and cringed as a sharp, piercing pain shot through her ankles the moment her feet struck the tiles. The pain traveled upward, blasting her knees, and she fell forward, slamming her hands against the drain—but she didn’t utter a whimper. She didn’t have time for self-pity. She turned the valve on the shower, placed her hands beneath the spray, and feverishly pumped a dollop of soap out of a nearby dispenser, instinctively knowing she had to mask the scent: the scent of her sweat, the scent of her body, the scent of the dirt from her cell…but most of all, the scent of her blood.
Gwen used the palms of her hands to scrub the vent, the shower floor, and the ledge with the soap. She used the soles of her feet to whisk the grime down the drain, and then she snatched a thin white towel off a nearby hook and climbed back onto the ledge, wiping everything behind her as she backtracked. It wasn’t completely dry, but it didn’t scream “recently wet.”
Last, but not least, she tossed the w
et, soiled towel into the opening in the ceiling, patted the vent cover dry, and reached for a loop she had tied around the inside of the metal a couple of weeks before. She twisted the loop around her foot, careful to coil it twice: in and out, around her big toe, and over the ball of her foot. As she sped through the familiar motions, she thanked the angels in heaven that she had seen fit to rip a strip from her pajamas and create the vent loop earlier. Now, she could only pray that her next series of motions were embedded in her muscle memory.
The door to the restroom creaked open.
A swirl of fog began to snake along the tile floor…
And Gwen scrambled to get moving.
She hoisted herself into the ceiling, drawing everything inside except her anchored foot, and then she rotated her body, squeezed her shoulders together, and reached down through her legs to unloop her toes. She tugged on the vent, pulling it up just as the moist, dank scent of fog began to envelop the shower…
Holy shit.
Holy…shit…
Holding her breath, her body quaking, she held the vent in place by the loop.
And then there was a virtual explosion of gunfire, bullets ricocheting off the bathroom walls, and she heard a furious string of guttural curses as one of the guards entered the women’s restroom.
Gwen took the chaos as her cue.
She tightened the vent, made sure it was secure, and began to shimmy backward through the ductwork until she reached the widest point in the opening—a tunnel she had dug for just this purpose—and flipped her body around in order to crawl the rest of the way, facing forward.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Santos!” Natalia whispered. “Something’s going on.”
The Master Warrior opened his eyes and rested his hand on Natalia’s hip. His destiny had been sleeping soundly beside him, their bodies in a spooning position, when her newfound, superior hearing had woken her up.
Santos had already heard the alarms. “I hear it, angel—where is it coming from?”