by Logan Fox
But then he reached behind him, fumbled for her arm, and drew her close to him.
Still, without taking his eyes from whatever he saw, Seth put his lips to her ear.
“Quiet.”
Then he maneuvered her to the right, away from the den.
They were headed for the east wing of the Fox Pit. She’d never been down here, but it was laid out in a mirror image of the west wing. Even the doors were spaced at the same intervals.
Her heart was thudding painfully against her rib cage. She looked over her shoulder, scouring the dark library for a clue of what Seth had seen to make him detour. Was it his wife? But that didn’t make sense — he wouldn’t be that worried about her seeing them together, would he? Was it Tanner?
The scent of cherry blossoms filled the air. Pearl looked ahead, giving her head a small shake at the sight of the cherry tree. It could have been a replica of the one on the other side of the villa.
Obviously, there had to be differences. The branches couldn’t branch in exactly the same angles. Surely the blossoms weren’t similarly grouped.
But it was eerily similar.
Pearl tore away her gaze and stared up at Seth.
“Who was it?” she whispered.
Seth just shook his head. “You’ll have to stay here tonight.”
She blinked at him. “Here?”
He tugged her down the stairs after him. She tried to pull back, but his grip around her hand was as inexorable as gravity. Stumbling into the den after him, Pearl threw a hurried glance around.
Silent, empty. These foxes must all be in bed already.
Except… grunting, moaning sounds of passion came from one of the doors. Seth didn’t seem to notice — he led her to the furthest door on the right. It smelled of roses inside. Pearl jerked back, a flash of memory assaulting her mind at that vivid scent.
“Come!” Seth tugged, hard.
Her foot caught against something — clothing, a towel, a sheet — and she grabbed onto his shirt to keep her footing. He turned around, scooped her up, and swung around.
The bed squeaked when he dropped her onto it.
“Seth, what the hell—” was all she got out before an enormous hand stifled the rest of her words.
“Ssh, kitten.” Seth’s breath rifled the hairs on her cheek. “Quiet.”
So she lay, stiff and panting like a race horse, on someone’s bed in the middle of a pitch-black room as Seth waited for something.
For what, she couldn’t fathom.
His eyes… they’d been wide. Not frightened. Just… alert. Aware.
Of what? Of who?
Frustrated tears were working their way into her eyes. She couldn’t stay here! How was she supposed to slip out if Seth kept her here? Would she even be able to find her way out from the right wing?
Tina. Maybe the girl was here. She could help, right? But she didn’t want to take Tina with her. The girl was unreliable — an utter flake.
It was too risky.
After what felt like eons, Seth slid away his hand. He cupped her cheek, smoothing his thumb over her cheekbone. Leaning down, he touched his lips to the tip of her nose.
“I think it’s gone.”
“It?” Pearl managed in a shaky rendition of what used to be her voice. “What the fuck is it?”
“You’re going to think I’m mad.”
More mad than hiding her away in a stranger’s bedroom? She managed a tiny, uneasy laugh, wished she hadn’t, and lay her hand over his.
“You can tell me,” she said not really knowing if she wanted him to. But, if she couldn’t convince him to trust her, then she might not be able to slip out later.
“It’s… it’s crazy.” His voice was uneven, hoarse. “I’m not even sure—”
A sliver of fear raced through Pearl. Seth, scared? No… uneasy. Not scared, because he didn’t even believe in whatever it was.
“Seth…” she wanted to add that he was scaring her — because fuck he was — but it wouldn’t help.
“It’s her.”
“Her who?” Pearl managed.
“The… fox lady.”
Pearl opened her mouth. Then she closed it again, completely bereft of words.
Fox lady.
Tanner’s little fox.
Have you seen everything I’ve done for you?
Pearl began to tremble. “Who is she?”
The mattress shifted as Seth lay down beside her. He slid a hand around her waist, tugging her back against his chest, squeezing her until she had no air left in her lungs.
His beard tickled her neck as he whispered into her ear.
“Thought I was losing my mind. The first time—first time I—saw her.” His hand glided up Pearl’s stomach, cupping her breast. She wanted to pull away, wanted to squirm out of his grip. But the uneasiness of his retelling, the jagged way his words escaped, left her enthralled with morbid fascination.
“That was—in the dungeon. Thought it was just the glass. From the fox on the altar. You know, a reflection on the glass?”
Pearl managed a nod. Seth’s other hand — his bicep under her head — wrapped over her collarbone and crushed her to him.
“I blinked, and she was just standing there. Naked. But… furry. Like, on her arms.” Seth ran his hand over the top of Pearl’s arm. “Her thighs. This fuzz.”
His voice stirred the hairs by Pearl’s ear, increasing the veracity of her shivers. Seth slid his leg between hers, twining around her. Keeping them ajar. Pearl did squirm then.
Now? Seriously?
“Seth—”
He lifted his thumb from the tight grip around her shoulder, pressing it to her bottom lip. Brushing the edge of her mouth.
“She was staring at me. Staring through me. Like she was trying to figure out who I was.”
His voice picked up strength. His story spilled out like water from a dam, the deluge drowning her mind and leaving her floundering for air.
“Standing up, pretty as a lady, but a fox. She had tails. Lots of them. They kept moving, so I don’t know how many. More than five, maybe. She was a fox. Her ears must have been flat or something — I couldn’t see them. But the rest of her—”
Seth’s hand slid behind the waistband of Pearl’s sweats. She stiffened, then remembered the keycard was in her shoe. Closing her eyes, Pearl tried to focus on Seth’s mad ramblings, trying to ignore that searching, burrowing hand of his.
“I saw her about a year later. In the maze. Coming around a corner — she was just standing there.” Seth pressed down on Pearl’s mouth, levering her lips apart. “But not looking at me. Looking ahead.”
It was so black in the room; Pearl had nothing but Seth’s voice and his hands. An image of the maze sprang into the darkness of her mind. Twisting, turning — green blurring on either side. Then, a silhouette. Tall and slender. Long fingers. Thin hips. A slip of a woman. But tall.
The figure turned, its profile momentarily highlighted on the grey-green of the maze wall. A sharp, pointed nose. Jutting out jaw. Short, sloping forehead.
The woman faced her, face in shadow but a glimmer of light flickering deep in those oval eyes.
“Her tails kept twisting around each other. She called me, crooking a finger at me, and walked around the corner.”
Seth tugged her sweats over the curve of her hips. Pearl drew a sharp breath — his jeans were rough against her ass, the metal button ice cold.
“When I got there, she was gone.”
Her sweats were balled mid-thigh — trapped by his leg. They rubbed against her sex as Seth shifted to loosen his button. He was cupping her face now, his thumb brushing her lower lip until furious tendrils of pleasure flitted through her muscles.
“Where… did she go?” Pearl whispered.
“Don’t know.” Seth’s warm flesh met with hers. He was unbelievably hard, unrealistically thick. His dick snuggled into the crease of her ass, sending a rush of anticipatory tingles through her. “Maybe she was never there at al
l. Ever.” His lips touched against her ear. “Maybe I am mad.”
He nipped at her ear.
“But I saw her now. Again. In the library.”
“You did?” Pearl breathed. “I didn’t see—”
He slid his hand between her legs, cupping her sex. He squeezed her, hard. Pearl gasped, arching against him, into him. His cock burrowed deeper into her crack, pulsing against her flesh.
“You wouldn’t. Why would you? She only shows herself to men.”
“What?” Pearl writhed for a moment, a distant thought about escaping him, escaping Seth, ringing through her mind like a lighthouse bell in a fog.
“She’s a kitsune,” Seth murmured.
Three of his fingers speared into her, testing her.
Pearl gasped again, stiffening as a shudder of pleasure tore through her. Seth grazed his teeth over her throat, before his hand slid down and his fingers wrapped around her throat.
“I looked it up,” Seth said. “What she was. I figured it out.”
He tore his fingers free of her, smearing that wetness over her sex, and then grabbed her inner thigh. Yanking her leg up, Seth dug his fingers into her thigh.
Pearl exhaled and arched against him. He kept her waiting — wanting — for long, heavy-breathed seconds that made her heart beat so fast that she could feel it pulsing in her mouth.
“Kitsune means fox in Japanese,” Seth rumbled into her ear.
The tip of his cock touched against her sex, sending an electric shock through her body. Pearl moaned, trying to buck into him, but the grip on her leg kept her still — perfectly positioned for him.
“She’s come here for me. To tempt me. That’s what they do. They… tempt you.”
He thrust into Pearl hard enough to make her cry out. His thumb found her mouth, forced her lips against her teeth to still her.
Again, barely giving her time to draw breath, Seth pounded into her.
“I thought you were her,” Seth murmured into her ear. “The first time I saw you.”
Pearl’s mind flashed back to the maze. Twisting and turning from corner to corner. A flash of auburn as a teasing guide.
“Your hair. Your eyes.” Seth grunted and slammed into her again. A flash of pain, interlaced with coruscating tentacles of deep-muscled pleasure wriggled through her. “They’re exactly the same color as hers.”
In the maze, Pearl turned a corner.
The kitsune stood with her back to Pearl, slim-hipped and dusted with a shimmering, auburn fuzz. She turned, facing Pearl.
Grinning.
Canines sliding over her bottom lip.
Pearl’s own blue-grey eyes stared back at her.
“I knew you’d come back,” came the soft echo of Tanner’s voice in her head. And the fingers around her neck were not Seth’s anymore, but Tanner’s. The breath on her face his. The cock ramming inside her… his.
Pearl cried out: terrified, disorientated.
But Tanner held her tight. Too tight. He was strangling her, his fingers squeezing the air from her throat.
“You’ve seen everything I’ve done for you,” Tanner hissed in her ear. That’s why you came back isn’t it, my little fox? The gifts… the girls? All for you, Kitsune. It was all for you.”
“Please!” Pearl yelled, but it was strangled, breathless word.
Tanner thrust into her again, filling her deeply, entirely. Rending her apart. Cleaving her body and mind, soul and flesh.
“Why did it take you so fucking long?”
Pearl jerked awake, her body flinching. She blinked into pure darkness, her heart tapping a furious tempo against her breastbone. For a moment, she had no idea where she was.
Not her apartment: the air contained no traces of mold or alley-cat piss.
Not her bed in the Fox Pit: the mattress felt too soft, too different.
Something twitched. A hand draped over her hip.
Memory flooded back, obliterating her confusion. Pearl scrambled away from the man behind her, trying not to focus too strongly on the vague silhouette in case it revealed a much slimmer man. A man with sandy hair.
A man who wanted her dead.
She cringed against the cool wall, gathering breath into her lungs and trying to shove down a quickly rising scream of panic. He was asleep — whoever he was — and she would wake him if she made a sound. Her hand found its way over her heart, and she pressed down with shaking fingers until that insistent thud-thud-thud calmed.
Swallowing, she ran a hand over her face. Her skin felt clammy, cold. She could feel her fingertips quivering as she traced the outline of her jaw, the bridge of her nose. Her fingers moved down, sliding into the neck of her jumper, trailing along the top of her arms.
No fuzz. No fur. She was just her.
Pearl let out a long, slow breath and shimmied carefully over the bed, making sure not to jar the purring mound that was Seth.
And it was him: that bulk could only be him.
She’d imagined everything. A fever dream, with no fever. Tricky to explain, that. But still the only reasonable explanation. Unless…
The injection. The one they’d stuck her with the day she’d arrived. The one they’d claimed was a contraceptive.
Pearl froze in the process of levering herself off the bed’s edge.
Maybe hallucinating was one of the side effects. Depression. Aggression. Increased sex drive. They could have put anything in there. Anything at all. She could be part of some crazy scientific experiment funded by a pharmaceutical company desperate to cash in.
It all made sense.
She forced her legs forward, glancing over her shoulder. Seth was still fast asleep. She went to the door, squeezed her eyes shut in silent prayer, and turned the knob.
It opened silently on well oiled hinges. She pulled it carefully shut behind her, only releasing the stagnant air in her lungs when it was closed and she’d taken a step back.
“Are you new?”
Pearl swung around, clutching her jumper in a white-knuckled fist.
A girl with glossy black hair to her hips watched Pearl. She gave her a slow, owlish blink with a pair of limpid brown eyes and then yawned widely.
“Gotta get some sleep,” she said through the yawn, shaking her head. “They run you ragged in this place.”
Then the girl was shuffling past Pearl. She pushed her way through one of the doors — not the one where Seth dozed — without bothering to close it behind her.
Pearl’s breath came back hard and fast. She pressed her fingertips to her temple, dabbing at a trickle of sweat. Maybe she did have a fever. She was suddenly really hot, her skin clammy and sticky. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth like a piece of damp cotton wool.
She tried to swallow — couldn’t — and walked over to the fridge. The design on the refrigerator door was different here — a lily or some other flower — but the contents looked the same. She grabbed a bottle of water and hurried up the stairs.
Before she reached the top step, Pearl paused and cracked the bottle’s seal. She downed a quarter of the bottle’s contents and then sank down to catch her breath.
The Fox Pit was utterly silent. The only thing she could hear was her own pulse humming in her ears. She shivered, pressed the bottle to her forehead, and took another long swallow before standing.
“Pearl?”
Cold water splashed over her face as Pearl had her second near-heart attack of the day. She spun around, throwing Tina an exasperated glare. The girl wore her Fox Pit nightie and a pair of yellow slippers. Where’d she gotten those from?
Tina glanced over Pearl, perhaps wondering the same thing of her sneakers, judging from her frown.
“I—” she began, but then stopped. “Never mind. It’s… really fucking complicated.”
Tina shrugged. “I got time.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder with a flick of her head. “Insomnia, remember?”
“Well, I don’t,” Pearl said. S
he turned and headed down the passage. If the east wing had the same layout as the west, then—
“You hear about Ethan?” Tina asked. “Didn’t see that coming, did you? I feel kinda bad, that poor guy—”
“Why are you following me?” Pearl glared at the girl over her shoulder.
Tina shrugged. “Wanna see where you’re going.”
“Back to my den.”
“Dressed like that?” Tina cocked a perfectly plucked eyebrow at Pearl’s shoes. “Doubt it.”
“Look, Tina—” Pearl swung around, pushing her palm into the girl’s shoulder. “You can’t follow me, okay? Plus, I’m not going anywhere except to bed. You’ll get into trouble if you follow me.”
Tina didn’t seem fazed by Pearl’s warning. “Why were you in my den?”
“Check the rooms. You’ll find a big guy sleeping off a nookie session.”
“Your handler?” Tina wrinkled her nose. “He’s so big.” She sounded a little in awe. And a little disgusted too.
“Yes.” Pearl stopped and turned to Tina, halting the girl in her tracks. “Yes he is. Now fill your mind with all the dirty little thoughts you want and go back to your fucking room.”
Pearl shoved the girl’s shoulder, but Tina rebounded with the suppleness of a willow fighting a breeze.
“Why’d he bring you here? I mean—”
Pearl cut in with a frustrated growl. “Tina, just go…”
But Tina wasn’t looking at her anymore. Tina’s eyes were wide. Her jaw had gone slack. And she was drawing her shoulders up like she was about to spin around and run like hell.
Pearl’s stomach dropped into her shoes. Her heart gave a painful lurch as the skin between her shoulder blades decided it was due a holiday in warmer parts — somewhere far, far away. They were almost at the library. Almost at the exact same place where Seth had seen—
“What?” Pearl croaked.
Tina lifted a shaking finger. Her other hand went to her mouth, fingertips trembling against her bottom lip.
“Is it behind me?” Pearl whispered furiously. She couldn’t turn around. She knew what she would see. Who she would see. Another sheen of sweat popped out over her skin, heating her in a flash before making her shiver in sudden cold.