“I care. But the only way you’d lay a finger on my Etta is if I were dead. Not much I can do from the grave but laugh while your hold on the city slips away…” Rocking the unconscious mouse on his lap, Toby ground his hips against her supine form as he hissed, “There’s always someone willing to do what it takes to steal what you got, Caspian. That’s why pack holds power together. I don’t even mind standing as Third—” The man’s words caught for a moment, Toby’s eyes rolling back on a groan.
Incredulous, Kieran looked down where the mouse was still speared by Toby’s enormous cock, scoffing, “Are you… are you still cumming in her?”
“Ummmm….” Toby took a deep, satisfied breath before opening his suddenly sanguine eyes. “Yes. And she’s still milking my cock for more.”
Kieran just shook his head. “You’ve got some balls, Toby…”
“She could be your mate too.” White hair was carefully pulled back to expose the sleeping woman’s other shoulder to the Second. Tempting him with the smooth, unmarked skin. “You could breed her just like you want, get her fat with your baby.”
Caspian spoke, but the words were gnarled with grit and broken glass. “Careful, Toby. You can’t sell what’s mine. And make no mistake about who she belongs to.”
He nodded, oddly agreeable. “And when you’re done with her, she’ll come back to me. After you’ve grown bored, it should make no difference if I keep her. Fuck, I’ll kidnap any bitch you want as a replacement. My gift to you, boss.”
No act against the First would go unpunished. Toby would suffer for this. “I want Henrietta.”
Lips thinned, Toby’s expression vicious, but his answer was collected and compliant. “Done.”
“You’d give us your sister?”
Eyes tracked back to the sickly woman bleeding in his arms. Fingertips brushing at the weeping crescent wounds on the mouse’s shoulder, he speculated. “I often wonder if it’s really fear that pushes Alphas to reject the call of the bond. All the posturing, all the power, I never found it nearly as satisfying as I do the sight of my mark on her skin. The ultimate taboo. A truly criminal thing to do.”
Scoffing, Kieran muttered, “Fucking Socrates over here.”
Arranging her body so she might rest more comfortably against his chest, Toby drawled, “I’ll give you Etta on the same terms you promised our ray of sunshine here. When you’re done with her, she goes home—pockets full, enough water for a year.”
“Oh…” Caspian crossed his arms over his chest. “That was only the beginning of my demands. You won’t be walking out of this room. You’ll submit to every last degenerate thing I can imagine. Starting with sucking my cock while you’re still inside her. Then Kieran’s. You don’t even want to know what I intend to do after that.”
Brow lowering, eyeing them both as if considering making a challenge, Toby said, “She’ll wake up and see it.”
Caspian nodded. “Yes, she will. She’ll see you bleed far more than she did.”
Chapter 13
She could not stop the tears. Sobbing, throwing herself over the boy, Wren clung. And wept, and wept, and wept.
Mikael hugged her right back, their various IV cords tangling and pulling where ports had been stabbed into soft flesh.
She’d never seen him as anything but sickly and skeletal. But now, after only a few days in a proper doctor’s care, tended in a clean room, fed, he almost looked like a regular boy from the upper levels.
Almost.
He was still sick, sicker even than she was, and the doctor had not made her prognoses with a smile. Acute pneumonia that would kill her if not treated immediately. This he’d said after she’d woken from a horrible nightmare filled with screams and pain. This, after coming to in a strange bed, over-bright lights burning her eyes.
There was only one familiar thing in the moment. Watchful, Kieran stood in attendance, scowling from the door.
Already she had been hooked up to machines, various fluids cascading into her veins, a catheter between thighs that ached. The doctor had told her she’d been kept under for three days, that she’d been fed with a tube, and that was why her nostril was sore and crusted with blood. That she had been ordered to follow treatment and he was permitted to sedate her if she attempted to resist.
And she did. She fought back wildly because she could not pay.
Of course she wanted to be well. Of course she wanted to live. But she only had to live long enough for Mikael to get better. If she was dragged off to pay off her debt in the mine, Caspian would throw him out. And her boy would be sick, alone, and have no one to provide for him.
There would be no one there when he inevitably died…
From disease, or hunger, or the unending violence of the Warrens.