Read Online bedeviled & beyond 07 - beset & bewildered by Sam Cheever - Free Book Online

hot tongue. The mark he’d placed there months earlier tingled with his touch, sending a quick jolt of awareness to my sexual core. Unfortunately, like the mark that fed it, the arrow of lust died a quick death.
    Torre frowned, stepping back to look at me. “You’ve grown even more lovely since I saw you last.” 
    I rubbed my arms and glowered at him. “You haven’t changed at all. You’re still an insensitive ass.”
    Anger flared in his midnight gaze but it was extinguished quickly, humor replacing it. “Always the consummate Ice Princess. I shall enjoy thawing you.” He turned away and strode quickly toward the door.
    “Wait, you can’t just leave me here.”
    Torre lifted a hand negligently over his shoulder. “Have no fear, my heart. I’ll be back soon. I have some business to attend to first.” He stopped in the open doorway, the broad backs of the two stone-faced guards framing his elegant form. “Then we’ll see about rebuilding the love we lost.”
    I shook my head, terror blossoming in my breast. I realized as the door swung quietly shut behind him that the terror came not from the idea that Torre would force himself on me, but that I might actually welcome him back into my life.
    It was obvious we were no longer compatible.
    Were we?
    Then I remembered Slayer and the tender bud which had been attempting to open in my heart withered and died. If Torre could so ruthlessly murder a friend...a man I cared deeply for...then he and I had no future together.
    Even as I had the thought, a soul-blackening despair swept over me. Walking to the windows overlooking the fiery depths of Hell beyond the castle walls, I finally allowed the tears to fall. With Slayer’s passing, my life had changed irreparably, leaving a large black hole where once friendship and comradery had been. With that thought, my knees buckled and I sank to the floor, leaning my head against the warm glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the glass pain and horror was so predominant and unrelenting as to be numbing. No strong emotion can be sustained indefinitely and at some point even the most soul-wrenching pain became just so much white noise. But inside the glass, in my very own fresh piece of Hell, the agony was raw and new enough to still be devastating, capable of slicing my heart into pieces.
    A jolt of static noise in my mind tore me from my sorrow. Someone was trying to communicate with me. With an instinctual fear that it was Torre, I attempted to put up a mental block to cut him off. But in my grief I was slow to react. Before the barrier dropped fully into place, a shrill, ear-shattering tone ripped through my brain, causing me to scream in agony. The inside of my head exploded beneath the slicing tones, spreading misery in a wave through my entire body. I covered my ears and folded into a ball on the floor as the strident tones continued. Reality faded beneath the attack. For what seemed like an eternity, I forgot where I was, what I’d lost and how much I hated it. I trembled under the auditory assault, sweating and screaming under its immense power. I began to worry it would never end, and my mind would be turned to pudding by its horrific violence.
    But finally the noise began to fade, easing into a relatively soft ringing sound inside my head. When even that finally stopped I lay panting for a minute, afraid to move for fear it would come back. A warm wetness trickled from my ears and when I pulled my hands away there was blood coating both palms.
    I sat up in shock and shoved to my feet, anger replacing fear. Enough! No more blubbering like a baby. I was officially pissed the hell off. I’d find a way out of the castle and off the Hell plane and go find my sister. We’d pull together an army, gather up whatever remaining Hellhounds we could find, and we’d return to destroy Torre’s nasty little plans.
    Whatever they were.
    I was done being his docile little plaything. He was about to meet a royally torqued