No one deserved this.
And now Killean, the only man she’d ever kissed and who made her feel a hint of passion about anything in life, was one of the monsters keeping her here. Tears clogged her throat, and if she wasn’t as dehydrated as a raisin, she might have cried for the first time since finding herself here.
Hopelessness and self-pity swamped her. She hated herself for the emotions, but she couldn’t shake them. She saw no way out of this debacle, and she dreaded becoming one of the foul-smelling creatures keeping her here.
Even if she could come up with an escape plan, she’d never been a fighter. She’d taken some of the self-defense classes Nathan imposed on the women in the stronghold after Kadence ran away, but she’d hated every second of them.
She was born and bred to become a wife, not a fighter or killer. Cooking and sewing were where she excelled. She’d been the epitome of the perfect student and destined to be the mother of the son who would one day rise to take his father’s place as the hunter leader.
Then Nathan fell in love with another, and all her dreams crumbled. She left the stronghold so she wouldn’t have to be reminded of that every time she saw Nathan and Vicky together. She left so she wouldn’t have to take another class on how to punch, kick, and stab something.
She left because, if she wasn’t going to become the wife of the leader, she planned to resume her old life as much as possible. She’d never liked change, and the changes Nathan was implementing on the hunters were too much for her.
But they were far less than the changes shoved onto her in this hellish place. And soon, if she didn’t do something, she would become one of these monsters and what remained of the woman she was would be destroyed forever.
“Simone,” Dallas croaked again.
“What?” she asked and was appalled to discover her voice sounded as bad as his.
“That vampire they brought in was one of Ronan’s men, wasn’t he?”
Simone tried swallowing to wet her arid throat; it was pointless. “Yes.”
For a second, hope shone in Dallas’s eyes. “Do you think they sent him in search of us?”
Oh, how she wished that were true, but though she was many things, some of which she hadn’t realized until recently, she wasn’t delusional. She’d seen Killean’s eyes, and though he was nude, he wasn’t chained. Recalling his cruel dismissal of her after they kissed on the beach, she knew if anyone was going to join these monsters, it was him.
“No,” she rasped. “He’s here for an entirely different reason.”
Noise on her left drew her attention to Killean and Joseph when they emerged from the room. Killean had clothes draped over his arm, but he remained as bare as the day he was born. Again, she felt a hideous blush creeping up her cheeks and ducked her head. What was it about him that always unsettled her so much?
Killean stared at Simone’s bent head as her shoulders hunched forward. Her profile revealed the delicate slope of her slender nose, high cheekbones, and the curve of her full, pink lips. In his lifetime, he’d encountered numerous beautiful women, but none had affected him as she did.
He felt no desire for her, not while she was like this, but protective urges he’d never known he possessed rolled through him. He wanted to go to her, draw her into his arms, and shelter her from this atrocity, but he was caught in this hideous pit of helplessness until he could figure out a way to get her free.
“They’re future puppets and nothing more,” Joseph said. “Come, let’s hunt.”
Killean forced his attention away from Simone to follow Joseph past the hunters; all fifty of the ones taken from the New Hampshire stronghold were here. Some of Joseph’s flunkies trailed them down the long, concrete corridor. No other rooms or tunnels branched off this one, and every ten feet a recessed light cast a dim, yellow circle onto the concrete. A hundred feet from the end of the corridor, the line of hunters stopped, but empty chains continued to dangle from the walls in wait for future victims.
When they reached the end, Joseph stopped outside the large steel door there. “You should probably dress for this,” Joseph said. “I don’t care if you run around naked for the rest of your life, but you’ll only draw the attention of the humans we hunt, and not in a good way.”
Killean couldn’t argue with that, and since he was ready for more than blood in a glass, he lifted the brandy-colored shirt he’d been handed and tugged it on. It was constricting across his chest and shoulders, and the sleeves ended an inch above his wrist, but the jeans fit well, as did the socks and boots.
“I’m sure you’ll understand that you’ll be blindfolded and put in a trunk again,” Joseph said when he finished dressing. “And that once we get where we’re going, you will be watched. You are not to ask anyone any questions about where we are or try to escape. I’m sure you understand that these rules will be enforced, and you will be monitored until a more mutual trust is established.”
Everything inside Killean rebelled against the knowledge that he would have no freedom outside of this place, but he gritted his teeth and replied. “Of course.”
Joseph gestured to the Savages, and they tied a blindfold around his eyes before slipping a sack over his head and pulling the string tight around his neck. Killean didn’t protest that they cut off some of his air supply; he was sure it was done on purpose, and he would not give them the satisfaction of bitching about it.
The door clanged open and fresh air washed over him. Killean scented the air to try to decipher some clue as to where they were, but all he smelled was grass, the sharper aroma of wild animals, and a nearby fresh water supply. He heard no nearby traffic, but crickets chirruped loudly, and the wings of bats or birds fluttered overhead.
“This way,” Joseph said.
Someone grabbed his elbow and guided him forward. Instead of asphalt or stone, grass crunched under his feet as he walked. Wherever they were, it was a rural area, and he suspected it was far from the city. He stopped when his knees bumped against the bumper of a car and someone guided him into the trunk.
Chapter Five
Killean stared at the weak light in the ceiling as he lay motionless with his arm draped across his forehead. He was slipping further down the rabbit hole of Savagery and tonight hadn’t helped him.
They’d driven for at least an hour before finally stopping. Before removing him from the trunk, they pulled the sack off his head but kept the blindfold on until they stood outside the back door of a small nightclub. Killean never glimpsed a license plate or the name of the club before the door opened and he was led inside.
He’d been brought to the club to hunt, and with Joseph and two other Savages monitoring his every move, he had to kill. It was what they expected of him; it was why he was here. And if he didn’t kill someone, then they would destroy him, and Simone would be lost.
Seething with resentment, Killean stalked the fifty or so patrons of the club in search of one who would fit some of the criteria he’d used for his other victims. After an hour, he witnessed a man slip something into a woman’s drink, but unlike his other victims, he knew nothing else about the man. It had to have been a drug the man used; he had to have been planning to rape the woman, but Killean didn’t know for sure.