Savage Desire (The Infinite City Book 4)

by Tiffany Roberts

  He angled his chin down, bared his teeth, and positioned himself in front of Yuri. Even if this was most likely Firios coming with their rations, Thargen would not risk leaving her exposed to another blast from that fucking hose. Her pale skin was mottled blue and purple in the spot the stream had first hit her.

  Mortannis was going to suffer for that, but not for long. Thargen wouldn’t be able to hold back enough to prolong the ordeal.

  Fortunately, it was Firios who entered the chamber now, carrying his bucket of meal bars and water cubes. As he began tossing out those meager rations, he said, “You people produce more of a stink than a menagerie of wild animals would.”

  “Come here,” Thargen growled. “I’ll show you a wild fucking animal.”

  “I see you still have not learned your lesson, vorgal,” the volturian said. He dropped a water cube into the female azhera’s cage. “Perhaps we should end your journey without food and water to see if you’re more cooperative afterward?”

  “Thargen, don’t,” Yuri said, a note of worry in her voice.

  But he couldn’t stop now. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He needed to get this out, to ease this pressure, to find a release. He needed to take the infinitesimal chance that Firios would be stupid enough to open the cell door.

  If Yuri were to have moved closer and placed a hand on him, that might’ve been enough to temporarily soothe the raging beast within him.

  Thargen stalked to the front of the cage before she could. Rage whispered in the back of his mind, its voice rough and seductive, urging him to slam into the bars, to batter them with his body, to bend them to his will. Heat blasted out from his center, suffusing his body and intensifying every sensation. “You won’t be around to find out.”

  Tilting his head slightly, Firios stopped in front of Thargen. “You lost, vorgal. It is finished.”

  “Do I look dead to you?”

  Firios smirked and lifted one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “No. But you do look like you are bound and locked in a cage, on your way to the Caldorian slave market.”

  “It’s too bad you’ll be dead before you can feel the pain you deserve.”

  “You really ought to get more creative with your threats, vorgal. Make an effort and take some pride in it.”

  Thargen didn’t need to get creative with his threats, he just needed to kill.

  The volturian stepped closer, leaning his face close to the bars. “I have you figured out. You’re a simple creature. I can withhold your food and water, we can beat you, make you sleep in your own piss and shit, but it will not break you. It won’t even bother you. But if I do the same”—his ethereal purple eyes shifted to look past Thargen—“to her…”

  Thargen lunged forward with a snarl, slamming his head and chest into the bars. He felt the impact only as a dull vibration in his bones. His arms strained against the manacles, making the metal cuffs bite into his flesh. “You do anything to her and—”

  A muffled but powerful boom rocked the ship, rattling the cages and making the lights flicker. Thargen felt the explosion resonate into his feet through the floor; only the ship’s artificial gravity kept him steady.

  The whir of unseen machinery he’d sensed throughout his time here suddenly became a chugging, clanking, vibrating cacophony that made the floor tremble. Even if he couldn’t see the damage, he’d been on enough crippled dropships to know by the sounds that the engines had been hit and were in the process of failing.

  Alarm lights flashed on the ceiling, making the room strobe between dirty white and panicked red.

  Eyes wide, Firios spat a curse that was well outside his dignified demeanor, dropped his bucket, and ran toward the chamber door.

  Several of the captives cried out—a couple in sadistic delight, most in terror.

  In his heightened state of awareness, Thargen felt a change in the wounded engine. A faint electric charge spread through the air and tingled across his skin. The machinery below whined, producing a sound so high pitched that Thargen couldn’t be sure whether he was actually hearing it or not.

  Dread pooled in his gut; he hadn’t experienced such a feeling in longer than he could remember. Rage tended to leave little room for true fear.

  He spun to face Yuri. Her eyes were rounded and unfocused, darting all over as though she were unable to choose one place to focus her attention, and her skin was even paler than usual.

  A tremor shook the ship so violently that it seemed likely to tear apart. The main overhead lights flickered out, leaving only the pulsing alarm lights.

  Thargen’s stomach fluttered. The familiar, reassuring weight of his body was suddenly nullified, and his feet rose from the floor. Gravity reasserted itself an instant later; fortunately, he’d only been a centimeter or two up.

  Fucking grav generators are sputtering out.

  Thargen threw away conscious thought; there was no time to plan and assess. Only one thing mattered—Yuri. Rage flooded his veins with fire, and he roared, forcing his arms apart. The manacles resisted, but he was already too far beyond pain to know if they sliced his flesh. The manacles gave slightly, allowing his wrists to separate by a few millimeters. That tiny bit of leeway was all he needed.

  The muscles of his arms, shoulders, neck, and chest swelled with another surge of strength. The connection between the cuffs snapped. Something metallic clinked on the floor.

  He moved to close the distance between himself and Yuri. Gravity gave out again while he was midstride, and his body was in the air before he could even bring down his lead foot. Yuri floated off the floor in front of him, her dark hair spread in a wild, restless mass, her limbs waving like she was fighting for balance. For a second, Thargen drifted freely, without anchor, without control.

  He thrust an arm toward Yuri, and she reached out to him, grasping his hand. He yanked her toward him. The impact of her body against his, however gentle, created enough force to push him through the air until his back bumped the bars at the front of the cage.

  “What’s happening?” she asked, slipping her arms around his neck.

  The chugging machinery had grown louder and more desperate, and that high-pitched sound had intensified to the point of being painful; it pierced Thargen’s skull and made his temples throb.

  “Just hold on tight.” Thargen banded an arm around her middle, grabbed the bars with his free hand, and pulled himself to the back of the cage.

  Facing the corner, he wrapped his body around Yuri as best he could and wedged himself between the rear wall and the cold tristeel bars, holding the latter with one hand. Her grip on him tightened as she buried her face against his chest.

  “Oh God, we’re gonna die,” she moaned, her words barely audible over the noise.

  “Not gonna die,” he growled. “I got you, zoani.”

  Thargen welcomed another wave of Rage. It surged through him, pumping his muscles with fresh strength, bracing his body for what was to come. At the very least, it would make him a better barrier to shield her. Thargen breathed in; Yuri’s scent, exotic, sweet, and calming, filled his nostrils.

  The universe burst into primal chaos.

  Another explosion rocked the ship—not that rocked or explosion were adequate words. The roar consumed Thargen, so loud he felt it in his every cell and saw it in flashes of white across his vision. The ship jolted and rattled around him; the fabric of reality itself rippled, making the space within the cage imperceivably vast and infinitely tiny, impossibly cold and searing hot, thin and ethereal but thick and oppressive.

  He was blinded by intense light but engulfed in impenetrable darkness, and his body felt like it was being both stretched out over a maddening distance and crushed down to the size of a single atom.

  This is what it feels like inside an exploding star.

  It was impossible to know whether the ship were thrashing around him or he was being thrown around inside it, but it didn’t matter in the end; his body was repeatedly assaulted by the walls and floor, some of the
impacts strong enough that they might’ve shattered his bones were it not for him being amped on Rage. His strength was not enough to keep him unmoving, and his anchors—the hand clutching a bar of the cage, his shoulders wedged against the wall, and his feet braced to either side of the corner—would not have been adequate regardless.

  All he could do was hold Yuri and cushion her from as much of the punishment as possible. Her every whimper, grunt, and cry were a direct blow to Thargen’s heart, a sign of his failure. And he heard each one of them despite all the other noise. She was the only thing he could identify in that chaos.

  The utter darkness was broken by bursts of bright light, but Thargen could not tell if his eyes were open or closed. The thunderous noise in his ears might’ve been from the ship falling apart, the screams of other passengers, the thundering of his heart, or dead silence. The air against his skin was heated and stifling or chilled and wavering. His stomach flipped, clenched, and knotted.

  The ship was spinning, rolling, tumbling, yanking and tossing him, treating Thargen like a tiny pebble in a massive industrial tumbler.

  A new roar joined the cacophony, a fiery rumbling from somewhere beyond the walls. Yuri—little Yuri, precious Yuri—clung to Thargen desperately, digging her blunt nails into his skin.

  Everything culminated in a crash that sheared the universe apart. Thargen was distantly aware of screaming from either very far off or very close by and more acutely aware of immense strain in his left arm, which was holding the bar. Both those things couldn’t have lasted for more than a fraction of a second before his hand was torn away from its hold and he was launched across the cage with the speed of a plasma bolt fired from a blaster. He didn’t feel any impact—he was swallowed by oblivion.

  Thargen’s perception returned gradually. First there was blackness, as complete as the void. Then silence, deafening in its own right, that was slowly chased away by an intensifying ringing in his ears. Pain came next—or at least its echoes, still held at a distance by Thargen’s lingering Rage. The air was different. The usual stench of bodily waste was now layered with the acrid smells of burned electronics, stinging smoke, and superheated metal.

  Soft, pained cries drifted to him as though carried by the wind across an expanse of open grassland. He recognized those weak, confused sounds, so laced by suffering. They were the cries of battered, disoriented survivors after a bombing or a direct hit from artillery fire.

  He grunted. Though his lower half was in a sitting position, his torso was twisted to one side and slumped over with his back against the tristeel bars. The position wasn’t unnatural, but it sure as hell was uncomfortable. And the floor felt like it was at a slant, on top of all that.

  There was a small body against his, partially draped over his lap, warm but unmoving.

  Yuri!

  Thargen’s eyes snapped open, and he sucked in a harsh breath. The dust-laden air set him to coughing immediately. He forced himself to survey his surroundings despite the burning in his lungs. There was just enough red-tinged light for him to make out the bars of the cage’s opposite wall, but everything beyond was made hazy and indistinct by thick dust in the air.

  “Yuri,” he rasped.

  He looked down. Yuri lay on her back, her spine curved over his arm and legs atop his thighs. Dirt and a dark liquid were smudged on her face. Thargen’s breath caught in his throat, and he froze just before he would’ve jolted upright.

  There was something he knew about terrans, something Urgand and the others had mentioned—something important. Terrans…they could be startlingly resilient, but they could also be equally fragile, especially when they were already sick or wounded.

  Swallowing thickly, Thargen carefully shifted his arm until it was beneath her shoulders. Now that he was awake and alert, Rage thrummed around the edges of his consciousness, its insistent pounding reminiscent of the beating of frantic war drums. He held it at bay and forced himself to move slowly despite the tremors threatening to course through his limbs.

  A tiny bit at a time, he straightened his torso to sit upright, lifting Yuri as he went.

  Body stiffening, she groaned and winced before falling into a coughing fit. Thargen stilled, unwilling to so much as breath until he knew if she was okay.

  “Yuri?”

  Her eyelids fluttered open. She blinked several times, but her eyes remained unfocused, pupils dilated wide.

  Thargen’s chest constricted, and his heart stuttered.

  Yuri squeezed her eyes shut, coughed again, and released another groan once her coughs faded. She trembled as she pulled her torso up the rest of the way. Thargen kept as much of her weight on his arm as she allowed. She pressed a hand to her forehead and exhaled heavily through her nostrils.

  “What happened?” she asked. Her trembling intensified, wracking her entire body.

  He wrapped his arms around her as gently as he could, fighting the urge to crush her against his chest and shower her in relieved kisses. It was too soon to celebrate survival. For all the optimism he usually expressed—and as little consideration as he normally held for his own safety—having Yuri here made it impossible for Thargen to ignore the truth of the situation.

  Either this was an opportunity to escape or a prolonged death sentence.

  “You hurt?” he asked, pressing his cheek to her hair.

  “I-I don’t know. I don’t think so?”

  That answer resonated with him; he understood that confusion, that inability to assess the damage to one’s body. Rage greatly diminished his perception of pain—sometimes nullifying it completely—and accelerated his healing rate, but it sure as fuck didn’t make him invulnerable despite trying to make him believe he was.

  He lifted his head and scanned their surroundings again. Some of the dust had settled, strengthening the faint red light from outside the cage. That wasn’t a flashing alarm signal—it was the glow of emergency lighting.

  The kind of emergency lighting that usually came on when a ship experienced power failure.

  Thargen swung his gaze to the front of the cage, and his eyes widened. For a few moments, his mind could not reconcile the half-meter-wide gap in the bars, could not understand the alteration to an environment that had been constant and unchanging for what felt like an eternity.

  The door was open.

  Fuck yeah.

  The ever-burning fire at his core flared and spread outward through his limbs. An open door meant escape. It also meant there was no barrier between Thargen and the smugglers.

  Yuri first. She matters most.

  But a significant part of him was already fixated on the chance to feel the smugglers’ bones crunching beneath his fists, to feel their warm blood splatter his skin, to hear their pained cries—and to cut those cries short.

  Yuri.

  Killing the smugglers is protecting her.

  Rage latched onto that notion and agreed vehemently, grinning the sharp-toothed grin of a bloodthirsty predator in the back of Thargen’s mind.

  Clenching his jaw, he carefully slid Yuri off his lap and lowered her to the floor.

  She grasped his shoulders with shaking hands. “Thargen?”

  “Making sure it’s clear.” Taking her chin in one hand, he tilted her face up and met her gaze. Her eyes were wide and searching, brimming with fear and uncertainty. Rage lashed against his conscious mind like angry waves against a shore, demanding control, but Thargen held it back a little longer for her. “Stay here, zoani. Don’t move until I say.”

  She was silent for a couple seconds, her fingers flexing, before she nodded and withdrew her hands. “Okay. Be careful.”

  Klagar’s balls, he wanted to kiss her. But that wouldn’t lead to anything good now, not when Rage was about to take over, not when he had no idea how much time they had to take advantage of this situation.

  “Whatever you see,” he said, voice growing more guttural with each word, “I will not hurt you. Never you.”

  She touched her fingers to his cheek.
“I trust you, Thargen.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch for a moment, locking the feel of it away in his memory; for that little while, his Rage was silent, and everything in him was still and peaceful.

  Thargen didn’t allow himself to look at her when he pulled away.

  He rolled onto his hip, braced his hand on the floor, and shoved himself to his feet. As he drew in a deep breath, his senses sharpened, honed by the primal force to which he was surrendering. There were more moans and strained cries from the other captives, and now he could smell blood on the air—the mixed scents of the blood of several species. The red glow in the chamber deepened toward crimson as his vision—or his mind’s interpretation of it—altered to focus foremost on motion.

  And there was motion all around—pieces of wire and metal dangling from walls and ceiling; a few red emergency lights along the walkway flickering irregularly; a few survivors stirring in nearby cages; small showers of sparks spraying intermittently from a broken fixture toward the rear of the room. But none of those held Thargen’s attention—that was claimed entirely by movement at the far end of the chamber, near the door.

  Someone was there, features obscured by the poor lighting and still settling dust.

  Thargen strode forward, slowing only to kick the cage door. The door swung wider open, its bottom scraping across the floor, and produced a brief but piercing metal-on-metal scream before coming to an abrupt halt. As he emerged from the cage, Thargen turned toward the figure at the end of the walkway.

  Leaning to the left to counteract the slant of the floor, Thargen stalked along the walkway. He barely felt the bits of debris scattered beneath his bare feet. The chamber’s entrance was straight ahead, the door halfway raised from the floor and stuck at an angle completely at odds with its frame.

  The panel beside the doorway, the one Mortannis had pulled the hose from, was open, and the figure that had caught Thargen’s attention was clutching the inside lip of the panel with both hands, hauling himself up. He’d only managed to get one foot beneath him.