by Woods, Erica
“You little bitch!” Blondie rubbed at the blood pouring from his nose, and a fierce smile curled my lips at the sight. His eyes narrowed. “You think that’s funny?”
“You’ll pay for that.” Sal behind me. Sal putting his arms around my middle and trapping mine at my sides. Sal’s erection grinding into my back.
“And you’ll all die!” A burning, devastating raged flared beneath my skin, turned my bones to molten fire. I thrashed in Sal’s grasp, hissing and snarling and ignoring the pain of his bruising hold. And when Blondie drew near, I lifted both feet off the ground—taking advantage of Sal’s tight grip—and kicked. Vicious satisfaction poured through me when my foot collided with the soft, dangly bits between his legs and he dropped like a stone.
A moment of surprised silence, then Sal squeezing so hard my ribs groaned.
Hank’s flat eyes moved from the male groaning on the ground to me thrashing in Sal’s hold. A thoughtful pause, then he stepped over Blondie and came to a halt so close I could count each one of his burnished eyelashes.
Fear was a rock in my stomach, a vice around my throat.
“You stupid cunt.” No inflection in that voice. No anger. “Humans are all the same. Too stupid to recognize their superiors and too proud to bend before they are broken.” His warm breath burst over my face. Too close. Too close. “Your species is weak and wasteful, yet you’ll all fight for the right to be kings.” He leaned back. “Stop fighting.”
Before I could spit a reply, Hank moved.
Heat exploded in my cheek and my head jerked to the side, neck screaming in protest at the wrenching movement. The sound, the muted thwack of flesh and bone colliding, came as an afterthought, too small for the violence of the backhand.
I hung in Sal’s grip, a loud ringing in my ears.
The pain was . . . shocking. I’d grown used to gentle hands and protective embraces. The casual violence now left me momentarily frozen.
“You are prey,” Hank said, his voice distorted. Wrong. “And prey occasionally needs culling.”
A metallic flavor coated my tongue. I shook my head, trying to silence the ringing and clear the shock.
Wake up! I tried to bring out my monster, watching through my mind’s eye as the dark, shadowy shape lifted what I could only assume was its head and watched me through eyes of pure gold. Help! Fight! Enemies!
It blinked at me while my head pounded and blood dripped from my mouth. The force of the blow must have cut my cheek on my molars.
“I still remember a time when we hunted humans for sport. Their flavor is truly . . . unique.” Hunger burned in Hank’s dark eyes. “Maybe we’ll eat you after.”
After? After what?
“It’s been a while since I’ve had human flesh,” Sal whispered. Then his tongue darted out and flicked over the skin at my neck.
My eyes rolled back and my monster finally woke. I could feel its body, unfurling inside with a deep ache, filling me until my skin prickled and felt like fine mist over my bones. The pain in my cheek dulled to a barely-there throb. My legs grew steadier.
The monster used my eyes to take in the threat, my body to assess the damage, my nose to gather information. It hesitated. Sniffed the air. Hesitated again.
And retreated.
The monster—my monster—curled up with an exhausted sigh, promptly falling into a deep slumber while betrayal dripped tears down my cheeks.
Alone. It left me to endure this alone.
A ragged cry tore from my chest as Hank’s hand glided over my throat. It was weak, nothing like the inhuman roar that thundered on its heels, swallowing mine in an explosion of rage.
The world tilted, and then I was facedown on the ground.
51
Hope
Another ungodly roar rent the air. I spat dirt and scrambled back, slipping, falling, before I crashed into a tree.
I grabbed a branch. Lurched to my feet. Spat more dirt and staggered away from the horrible sound.
Someone grabbed my torn shirt, and while my heart rode up my throat and drenched my mouth with the taste of terror, I spun around with a scream that never sounded.
And froze.
There were no hands, no evil ready to slit my throat, only a thorny growth clutching at the fabric flapping fabric near my waist. But farther behind, in the clearing I’d fled . . .
Carnage.
Whirling between my three tormentors was a blur of movement. A blur that left baying screams and arcs of blood spraying in its wake.
Lucien.
Relief shook my bones and buckled my knees.
He never stopped moving, features obscured by his speed, but it had to be him. No one else could move that quickly, that quietly; no one else fought with such precision and calculated force.
Then the blur stopped, revealing pale, flawless skin; a face carved from marble with sharp angles and cutting edges and blazing eyes that lazily, almost indifferently, swept over the male impaled on his claws.
Something dark and sinister had ravaged Lucien’s beautiful features until they lay shrouded in shadow. He was both a demon’s thirst for vengeance and an angel’s righteous wrath; as exquisite in his beauty as he was deadly in his cruelty.
He looked down at Hank, his clawed hand buried inside the other’s stomach, and smiled.
My breath stuttered out in three rapid exhalations, and my head filled with an airy, dizzying cotton. The ground tilted, the forest spun, my lungs seized.
But I couldn’t look away.
I watched Hank blanch. Thrash. Shred his own flesh in his panicked attempt at fleeing while Lucien tilted his head and . . . kept smiling.
A ripple of . . . something crackled between the bones of my spine. My stomach swerved and jumped, set on a collision that would either destroy or conquer.
How could a smile be that brutal? That savage yet chillingly pleasant?
Blood streamed from Hank’s mouth, and Lucien’s smile widened. Hank collapsed to his knees, and the smile grew sharp. Hank crashed face-first into the cold earth, and the smile swelled and rippled like the ocean breaking open to spit its monsters at the shore.
And when the two remaining lycans tried to flee, that smile became a sinful whisper of violence, a soft seduction of fear, a beguiling promise of a death that could still be quick and painless.
A lie.
It was quick, but not painless. Hank’s stomach was split open, his organs pierced by claws. Blondie’s legs were both broken; one of his hands sliced off at the wrist. He lay unmoving—either unconscious or dead—a body’s length away from Sal, whose skull was cracked like one of Ruarc’s eggs, seeping not yellow yolk but bright red blood sprinkled with pinkish-gray blobs.
Transfixed by the methodical violence, I could only watch as the terrible smile curving Lucien’s lips slowly fell away, replaced by a grim, slashing line.
I shivered.
Lucien’s face . . . His face was a knife. Those cold, glittering eyes were the diamond studded handle, hard and unyielding and just as capable of delivering death as the blade that was his mouth. And when he smiled, that blade stabbed. Eviscerated. It ripped and pierced and cut until his enemies lay slain at his feet.
Dead.
Or dying.
Because of me.
As though he’d heard my thoughts, his gaze cut to mine. Ten thousand seconds stretched and filled the single instant that passed while we stared at each other . . . Until the moment ruptured and Lucien moved. Slowly at first, with a kind of preternatural stillness that preceded a deadly eruption; then faster, gait loose and prowling.
Another shiver rasped up my spine, prickled at my neck.
Muscles rippled below skin as smooth and rigid looking as marble, his lean body moving with the ease of one used to hunting. Stalking. Killing.
When I glanced down at his hands, I gasped at the blood dripping from digits that had only moments ago been buried inside another’s stomach.
“You disobeyed,” he said in a voice of velvet-w
rapped razors. “You were almost killed. Again.” The last word was bit off—an animalistic sound disguised by a veneer of cracking civility.
“I . . .” I edged back, only stopping when rough wood scraped against my bared skin, reminding me of my torn shirt, my discarded vest, the unwanted touches that had briefly eroded my sense of self.
“I, I,” he mocked. Another step and he was looming above me, caging me against the tree by putting his bloody hands at the sides of my trembling face. “One would think a disobedient little female would have words tripping off her tongue in her haste to reassure the male she has worried so.” He cocked his head and lowered his voice until it was a silken purr. “But perhaps the danger thrills you. Perhaps you wish for us to worry.”
“No!” The denial was quick and furious. “I would never want that!” Silently pleading, I stared up at the savagely beautiful male. Had it been only a few hours ago that I wondered what lurked behind his cool facade, what lay beyond the icy wall he’d built with such painstaking care?
“No? You do not wish to test your males? You do not require visible proof of our care, of our protection? Tsk, tsk,” he added when I tried to draw away. The sounds were harsh against the silence surrounding us. “I did not say—” His mouth snapped shut, his eyes narrowed and flashed. “What,” he hissed, “is this?”
“W-what?”
Trapping my chin between his thumb and index finger, his touch a light butterfly kiss, he turned my head. Stared. “Blood.” His nostrils flared. “Your blood.”
Heart racing, I stood so very still.
“No wound.” He gently tilted my face this way and that, voice too quiet. “Not a single scratch, but blood.” He cocked his head, his breathing so soft I barely noticed when it stopped. “Did they hit you?”
“I . . . I cut my cheek on my teeth,” I admitted, leaving him to draw the wrong conclusions. If I told him what had happened, I feared he’d turn back around and rip the heads off the bodies that littered the ground.
One of said bodies groaned.
Not dead, but unconscious?
Lucien snapped his head to the side and hissed, “Quiet!”
The moaning stopped.
“A-are they alive?”
“For now.” He turned back to me, narrowed gaze sweeping me from head to toe, again and again, until finally, he let go of my face. “A quick death is more than they deserve.”
“What do you—”
“I said quiet.” His voice lashed at Hank, a whip made of razors. There was a whimper, and then Lucien was a blur once more. A hissing insult, claws flashing, then . . . silence. No more groans or moans. No more strangers, either, as Lucien dragged them away from the clearing while I stood frozen by the tree where he’d left me, mouth so dry each breath rasped down my throat.
Was he killing them?
Do you care?
I swallowed hard. Lucien shouldn’t become a killer. Not for me—not for anybody.
They didn’t actually hurt me. Not much, anyway.
Lucien had more than punished them for what they’d done. And even if they’d planned to do more, they hadn’t. Killing someone for something they’d intended to do wasn’t right.
And if Lucien hadn’t arrived? What do you think would’ve happened?
Taking a life had consequences. It would claim a piece of Lucien’s soul, wither a part of him—even if he thought himself immune.
“Don’t . . .” My voice broke on the empty clearing, but I knew he’d hear me. “Don’t kill them.”
“They live,” came his cold, cold reply.
Was it my imagination or was there an unspoken ‘for now’ attached?
Before I could agonize any further, Lucien returned. He stalked across the empty clearing, planted a still-bloodied hand on the trunk next to my head, and trapped me between the tree and his body.
“Now . . . No more distractions, no more secrets.” Again, he swept his narrowed gaze over my body before settling on my face. “You will tell me, woman, and tell me now . . . What on earth possessed you to endanger your life like this?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Would I ever stop apologizing? Would I ever have a reason to? “I thought it would be safe. Even Gideon thought—”
“Do not!” Lucien snarled. “Gideon betrayed us. He betrayed you!”
“Oh, Lucien, no,” I whispered, needing to soothe him, assure him his trust hadn’t been broken. He trusted so few people; I knew it would hurt him to think he’d misplaced something so precious. “No one betrayed you. Or me. It’s just hide and seek, and Gideon couldn’t have foreseen this. No one could have known these three would . . .” I swallowed past the lump in my throat and tried to forget their hateful words and the fate I’d almost had to endure. Had Lucien not been there . . . “They broke the rules. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“By god, woman, you could have died!”
Steel hardened his raised voice, and I jerked back, wincing when my head hit the tree.
Lucien stilled, closed his eyes, leaned down until his forehead rested against mine. “You cannot keep doing this, my Hope,” he rasped.
My heart lurched, ached, fluttered.
A warm hand cupped my face, and I couldn’t help but lean into the caress. Lucien hardly ever touched me, but when he did, it felt like my soul came alive and rejoiced. Like it recognized the four men who’d changed my life and had grown to welcome each touch, each caress like it was the lifeblood it needed to stay alive.
“You what? Tell me. Explain why you keep risking your life as though it means nothing.”
The brightness in his eyes startled me. The pain there shamed me. I hung my head and muttered, “I think it’s because I now have a choice. I . . . I try to make the right one, but I always seem to mess it up.”
Too busy staring down at my feet, I didn’t see the change in Lucien, but I felt it. Felt the sudden shift from worried male to battle-ready warrior. From undisciplined emotion to controlled wrath.
Tension radiated from his lean frame, swirled in the air around us until I could taste it at the back of my tongue.
“You now have a choice? You speak as though—” The sound of teeth mashing together interrupted his rigid words. He drew in a shaky breath before trying again. “You speak as though you have lived a very long time without one.”
My eyes flew to his, shaken at what I’d unwittingly revealed. “No, I—” Before I could tell another lie, my throat closed up and I had to blink back tears. No more, I thought. No more lies, no more deflections. “Yes,” I said simply. “You’re right. I did spend a long time without a choice, and maybe that’s why I’m so bad at making them now.”
Despite my even tone, I was choking on tears. And Lucien, the always icy Lucien, took one look at my crumpling face, hissed out a curse, and dragged me against his chest. Strong, capable arms went around my middle before a protective hand cupped the back of my head and urged my face to take refuge in his warm embrace.
It was surprisingly nice. Comfortable. Lucien might have looked like perfection carved from marble, but he was warm, not cold. And though he was hard and firm, his chest was broad, his hands soothing, and he held me with a gentleness I’d never have known to expect.
“I’d like to say you will always have a choice with us, my Hope, but I’m afraid when it comes to your safety we are but archaic males who expect our commands obeyed.” A shudder went through him. “Better to suffer your resentment than bear witness to your death.”
“I don’t resent you. You know this world better than me and I know you just want to keep me safe.” I burrowed closer. Lucien’s crisp, masculine scent rose like a fine mist around me, cocooning me in a blanket of dangerous, protective male. “I’m sorry,” I murmured, my voice muffled by Lucien’s shirt.
“I will forgive you, if you can forgive me.”
“W-what?” I pulled back and craned my neck until I could watch his eyes. The whole time I’d known him, they’d been the only parts of him to hint at the em
otions he kept buried when he wore his mask of cool indifference. But lately . . . lately the occasional feeling expressed itself in other ways.
Like now. With a scowl.
The elegant lines of his face made it impossible for Lucien to be anything other than extraordinarily beautiful. Even with his brow furrowed and his lips a flat line of displeasure, he was still the most gorgeous male I’d ever seen.
Without thinking, I rose on my tiptoes and tried to brush away the lines between his brows with the pads of my fingers. I didn’t like it when he frowned. Whatever darkness haunted him, I wanted to banish it, beat it back until he forgot it had ever existed.
Lucien captured my hand and shocked me by pressing a kiss to the inside of my wrist. “Forgive me,” he said.
Something in my chest gave a hard tug.
“F-for what?”
Heated, throbbing emotions set green eyes ablaze. I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t stop staring into those orbs of winter green that were all of a sudden no longer unreadable but naked. Raw. Exposed.
The world quieted, my pulse a silent, feverish cry.
Our mouths were so close. Close enough that the air carried his taste, that my lips tingled with anticipation. I sighed, tipped my head back, and . . .
“For being blind.”
I blinked, opened my mouth to say . . . what? But again, Lucien surprised me.
He cupped my face, swept his thumb over my lip, expression darkening with something other than pleasure. “For not seeing the treasure in our midst. For lashing out at an innocent, hurting female who did not deserve my ire. For being cruel when cruelty was undeserved.”
Tears pricked, and a lump the size of Ruarc’s fist pressed against my throat. “I forgive you.”
Something flared in his eyes; a smile that was hard and fierce. “You do not. Not truly. And that is my fault.”
The lump swelled several sizes. Hurting. For me. For him. For the forgiveness I wanted to give but couldn’t quite muster. “I did—I do,” I whispered, willing my heart to follow my head. It wasn’t that I was angry or sad or holding a grudge. I was wary. Anxious. Terrified this was some sort of mistake, a temporary loss of his sanity, and tomorrow would see him once again looking at me with nothing but contempt.