my ears. Needles jabbed relentlessly into my skull, shattering all cohesive thought, and the threat of vomiting reared its head again.
“You will be quiet and listen to me! I grow tired of these games. Your time is up, you have been outplayed, and it is time to submit to your master.”
He pulled me back tighter against his hard, steroid-muscled body and, with every word, I could feel his excitement growing, pressing against my behind.
“And you will submit, Kara. Deliciously unwilling—” he ground his cock against me, “—I can’t wait. You may not enjoy it at first, or the second or third times, but you will eventually. Then, when you are broken, when you will do everything I ask you — just to make it stop — and you are carrying my child, I will let my lieutenants play with you.” He laughed, a sickeningly hollow sound. “You will not enjoy that, I promise.”
The words were not new, the vile threats and repeated promises the same as those he had whispered to me during my last year with his pack, but they hit me like a freshly delivered punch to the stomach. I had not escaped. All that time, alone in the wild, had it been for nothing ? Fighting my heaving stomach, I steeled myself. Show him no weakness, not now, not when I had come so far.
“You can’t make me,” I hissed, twisting around to look him in the eye.
A blankness stared back — cold and hollow. An edge of madness swirled in his eyes.
A cold, triumphant smirk twisted his face, and a coldness threaded through my heart — what now? He whistled — a long, low sound — and snapped his fingers. Moving silently, like the predators they were, his goons slid from the shadows.
They leered at me, with matching sickening expressions. The one on the right licked his lips, revealing stained and crooked teeth. It was a slow and deliberate movement, one he punctuated by grabbing his crotch. Rubbing himself slowly, he jerked his groin at me, growling. “I can’t wait to have our turn to play,” he said, his eyes promising pain and humiliation.
“Never!”
“Oh, sweet, Kara, don’t be so hasty to deny my friends,” Eric said, sounding like the cat with the cream, or maybe the wolf who had caught the rabbit — to be a little more species specific. “See what they have brought you? Or rather, what they have brought me?”
My gaze swung from Goon 1, as I had named him, to Goon 2. He clutched at something lumped haphazardly over his shoulder. I strained my eyes, peering into the shadows at the unmoving lump. Pulling away from Eric, I fought his grasp, straining to look around Goon 2, to see what he was holding. My heart hammered in my chest — I knew the answer, I just didn’t want to see .
A long, slender arm hung lifeless down his back, the hand tipped with nails the color of pink cotton candy. Corkscrew curls bounced as he shifted her carelessly on his shoulder.
With renewed fervor, I shoved at Eric, scratching and hitting any part I could reach, as he struggled to clamp my arms to my sides. “Lisa!” I screamed. “No. No! Lisa!”
No response, no movement.
A keening sound clawed its way from my throat as my legs gave way. I hung in Eric’s grasp, all the fight drained from me, my eyes locked on Lisa. He had her. He had hurt her. Was she—?
Goon 2 quirked an eyebrow, his teeth set in a vicious approximation of a smile. “She’s not dead” —his meaty hand smacked Lisa hard on her behind— “ yet . Gonna have lots of fun with her first,” he said, while groping and fondling Lisa’s motionless body.
That was it. I heaved the contents of my stomach onto the floor.
“You have no choice, Kara.” Eric’s voice cut through the sound of my retching. “You will deny James and choose me in front of the Council. I will not have anyone contesting my claim to you again. Choose me, and Lisa will live. She will be set free — eventually — but she will live, and you will have saved her. Choose James, and Lisa will die, after
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