Chapter One

One lousy decision landed Ky Lanzo in his current state of Suckville.

Hands bound behind him, he snarled as someone pushed him down an austere, sterile hallway into the depths of a concrete industrial building. The hangover from whatever tranquilizer his captors had darted him with hours ago sent pain shooting behind his right eye. Over the last minute, it had spread. His entire skull felt like someone pressed down on it. He squinted to dim the light of the dangling overheads and slammed his teeth together to suppress his gut instinct to lash out and fight for freedom.

Remember the mission.

This facility’s purpose remained unclear. His goal was to find out what it was. Could be a prison, research facility, or something else. The last possibility was the one that concerned him. Most people lived in blissful ignorance that his kind existed. These men seemed well aware that he was a lycanthrope. The fact they’d captured him instead of outright killing him, like certain paranormal hunter groups would have, conjured up imagined scenarios involving experiments such as DNA extraction, cloning, or human-enhanced hybrids.

Clearly, he’d seen one too many sci-fi movies. Although, some fiction wasn’t too far from reality, which was as terrifying as it was humbling. Their greed pushed humans to break ethical boundaries in a heartbeat. He was here to find out what boundaries they’d charged past and why they wanted him alive.

He smelled other lycans in this place, and even picked up a faint hint of witch. Despite all the pervasive technology humans had designed, paranormal creatures of the world thrived mostly undetected among them. Lycans had many superhuman abilities beyond strength, such as the power to mesmerize through voice coercion, super speed healing, and a glamour used to mask their inner predator from humans. They might not be able to transform into an animal like werewolves of silly fictional lore, but they did change into something powerful; although still humanoid, their lycan form was more muscular and infinitely stronger than humans, with sharper claws and teeth.

He should’ve argued harder to do this mission a different way. His wrist tingled where the tattooed curse band flashed a warning bite intended to keep him in line. It made sure he remembered to obey orders. Cursed to serve the Crown of England along with his three brothers—as in a genuine curse invoked by a witch using an ancient talismanic scroll—his sole purpose lay in stopping paranormal terrorists. As lycans, he and his brothers represented a unique weapon, three apex predators stronger than other paranormal species. On most missions, they aimed to thwart threats before they endangered anyone.

Ordering him to surrender to these humans on purpose, however, had been pure idiocy. But he’d been told by his handler: “Get yourself caught. Do what they say, so you can get information on the purpose of the place.” He had to follow the directive, even if getting “caught” was a terrible plan. That or deal with pain signals from the curse band that would increase in intensity until they incapacitated or even killed him—and then it’d transfer the orders on to his brothers.

A burly human in generic black tactical clothes pushed him. The unnecessary force reflected a pervasive revulsion for him, maybe for all lycans. He spat long blond hair out of his eyeline and glowered. Despite a buttload of vertigo from the waning tranquilizer, he flexed his shoulders and shoved his body backward, sending the guy pinballing against the wall. Not hard enough to kill him, but a calculated warning shot. Fire pierced his thigh. Ky grunted when his knees crumpled, and he collapsed to the ground. He eyed the cattle prod headed in his direction again.

“You think I can’t kill you with my hands behind my back?” Ky threatened. “Go ahead. Hit me again and find out for yourself.” The human should fear him. Ky had dropped his glamour from the moment he’d been captured. Humans’ innate sense of self-preservation usually sent them into flight mode when he wasn’t masked. He hadn’t transformed into his “feral” form where he became more muscular—okay, not Hulk-huge, certainly not green, but he liked to envision himself similar. Without his glamour, he remained human-looking while exuding serious threat.

The man paused but didn’t seem as impressed as Ky wished.

“I can walk on my own.” Ky tested his leg to see if it could support weight, then stood. Fake submission was part of being undercover, but his tolerance for abuse had limits. He should be able to overpower these two despite the shackles around his wrists and his weakened state. Uncertainty rolled around liked a toxic beast inside his head. Their attitude bordered on cocky. Maybe they planned to dart him with the drug again or something worse.

Starting to think he didn’t want something worse, he figured he needed to ditch the fake submission. He’d rather tolerate the pain of the curse until he could persuade his handler to rescind the order.

He lowered his tone to give voice coercion a try, a gift all of his species possessed over humans to encourage they go along with whatever was suggested. “Release me.”

The guard with the cattle prod chuckled and tapped his ear. “You can’t mesmerize us. I heard you already tried this during transport. These special earpieces keep us safe.”

Chills licked across his shoulders. Cue a mega “Oh shit.”

He didn’t remember a previous attempt at coercing them. What else had the drug made him forget?

The guy with the cattle prod nudged him in silent threat to move faster.

He wished for a gun. Eyes closed, he could level every human in this room. None carried one. Shame.

Ky calculated fifty yards to the door behind him, the exit. Screw orders. Pain flashed up his arm from the curse punishing him as he disobeyed. It weakened him. Slowed him.

He shoved the guy with the cattle prod, which sent him backward onto his ass and knocked his head against the wall with enough force to render him unconscious. Shoulders lowered, Ky plowed into the human behind him.

Within twenty yards of his goal, a solid slap struck his shoulders as two taser darts plowed into his skin through his shirt. He dropped like a pole-axed mule. Muscles clenched as the worst full-body Charlie horse of his life detonated. Can’t move.

His headache morphed into a splitting sensation that extended toward the back of his head. Vision flickered in and out in his right eye until it settled into something blurry. Was this a stroke?

They dragged his tremoring body to a large room with drains on the floor.

“Legt ihm das Halsband an!” Collar him, a man yelled in German, dangling something from a finger. “Es ist eines der neuen Designs.” It’s one of the new designs.

Metal clicked into place around his neck.

Collared like a dog?

This went way over the line.

One human propped him upright while another unlatched his thick handcuffs and moved his hands around front. This was his moment. Attack. His muscles didn’t cooperate. Regular tasers couldn’t cause his muscles to be useless for this long. He sat like a saggy bag of useless goo. He still couldn’t see well out of his right eye, and the pain in his head pulsated with each heartbeat. The cuffs were hooked into the wall. A mechanical whirring started as something pulled him upright to a stand. He hung there, limp, from his wrists.

Someone cut off his clothes. The scissors were handled with the care of a barber using a dull razor on his genitals. A slice here, a scrape there.

Three cleansing breaths helped push away some of the head pain. He needed focus to call forth his telekinesis power to control the scissors. Perfect weapon. This skill to move objects with his mind wasn’t inherently lycan, but instead a side effect of a paranormal chase gone wrong a few years ago. The scissors didn’t move for him.

Well, shit.

He wanted to lash out. Craved it. Fantasized about it. But his muscles remained unresponsive. He wouldn’t give these assholes the benefit of seeing him cower. As he smoothed his facial expression, he calculated the manner of death for all three humans once he had the information he sought.

A burst of water knocked him from behind, its cold a shock. The water’s purpose remained unclear, but obviously the collar was waterproof. Using a mop, they slathered him with some sort of perfumed body wash. Another blast of water rinsed him.

They wanted him clean and stinking of soap? Strange.

Bindings were lowered and unhooked from the wall. As he hit the ground, his legs held. Shaky but strong enough. Someone removed the bindings. Another chance to attack. Someone threw clothes at him.

All three humans smirked in a superior way that said they now had the upper hand.

The collar was about control.

“Dress,” he was ordered in German. “Move an inch toward us, and you’ll pay.” The speaker, a diminutive man dressed in a starched button-down shirt and khaki pants, held up a small black remote.

Ky stepped toward the man. Do it. Hit me with the collar.

Not knowing the collar’s capability was far worse than whatever pain it delivered. Couldn’t be more painful than the catastrophe going on already in his head.

Blinding electricity tore through him and dropped him to his knees. Different than a taser, but powerful enough to incapacitate him. It didn’t worsen the headache, but nausea kicked in.

No puking.

“Get on your feet. Dress. Disobey again, and I’ll crank up the settings,” the German said.

Stomach roiling, Ky managed to fit the hospital scrubs over the shackles in a deliberate manner to hide his shakiness. Cloth caught on his wet skin, making the clothes hard to get on. The fabric was too light to provide any sort of insulation in the frigid facility. He couldn’t make out the color of the material, since he was color-blind. Maybe red or green, but he couldn’t differentiate.

Someone pushed him. He froze at the uncalled-for force. With a direct-eye evil glare, he refused to move. Instead of activating the collar, the man jabbed him with the blunt end of the cattle prod straight into his stomach. It sent him backward—if he hadn’t been still buzzing from the electrical hits, it wouldn’t have moved him. His mid-lumbar spine struck a hook protruding from the wall. That broke skin.

In an instant, he punched back, which launched his attacker across the room. The guy smacked against the wall and collapsed, unconscious. He could still hear the human’s heartbeat. Electricity tore through him from his neck again. He tugged at the collar, ineffective in removing the metal device. His body jolted convulsively until he was on his side on the ground. Guess this was level two. Although it sucked, he’d learned long ago how to compartmentalize physical pain. The use of potential pain as a deterrent didn’t work on him. Psychological pain, however, still got to him—the kind that used those he cared about or other mental weaknesses against him.

He didn’t remember getting back to his feet. Dragged and pushed, he moved down hallways until he heard deadbolts unlocking. He swallowed convulsively to prevent the vomit working its way up. A few clicks, and his armbands, even though not connected, disappeared. Someone leaned in and said, “Don’t transform. You do, and the collar will crank up to maximum.”

He should’ve done it. He should fight, but he concentrated on not spewing and not falling over. He despised weakness like this in himself, but more than that, he hated vomiting.

A solid push from behind landed him on his knees in a dark room with two cement benches and linoleum flooring.

With a thunk, the door closed him inside the dark eleven-by-fourteen space, which was clean to the point of sterility. Light from two skylights and one red bulb on the wall barely illuminated the room. The skylight windows weren’t wide enough for him to fit through and too high to reach. He gauged time to be a bit after dusk. The storm outside provided little additional light.

Two deadbolts slid into place.

He pulled himself onto the closest concrete bench and slumped his back against the wall, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The need to heal, and sleep off the pressure inside his head, tugged hard. Cold from the concrete seeped through the fabric into his skin.

The smell in here…

That scent. He went on high alert.

In the midst of his agony, he sensed that on the other side of the room, on the far edge of the other bench in the shadows, sat something fresh. Something exquisite and exotic. Something forbidden.

Oh, hell.

Not good. He could imagine little to be worse on a full moon night. His brain could spin some doozy badness that they might have cooked up for him, but he’d never conceived of this.

He focused through the wet strands of his hair that obstructed his view.

His heart rate skyrocketed to the point his chest hurt. He’d faced off with phantoms, witches, angels, demons, and supernatural things without names that surpassed evil. But this…

Lycans had one weakness that transcended all, and it sat across from him.

He might not shift into an animal on demand, but some legends about lycans and the full moon were true. When the moon rose while in its most gibbous state, the urge to mate became unbearable, especially if a lycan neglected his dose of moon-madness suppression serum. Which he hadn’t. But the drive kicked up to maximum if one of his kind whom he found attractive was nearby.

Long legs crossed when a female lycan shifted to face him, dressed in skintight athletic pants and a sports bra that kept few secrets. Her intoxicating “in heat” pheromones called to him on an elemental level, activating the most fundamental of drives for sex.

This was a new kind of torture to him, one he’d never confronted before. No touching. Swear on my soul and that of my dead father. Will. Not. Touch. Her.

He breathed through his mouth to avoid inhaling more of her scent. Because the aroma was luscious. Decadent.

It was so potent, the scent of her dulled the migraine pain. How was that even possible?

One small cheat…an inhale… It was heaven and everything he’d never imagined could be his.

How did she end up here? Female lycans weren’t allowed out of their homes without an army of protection. There were so few of them that lycan society protected them with a vigilant obsession. Their species had lost many of their women during an interspecies war against witches early last century. Witches targeted women by cursing his species to have few female live births in hopes of diminishing lycan numbers. It worked.

How did these humans capture her?

Fascination with her turned his brain to mush. He’d never been this close to one who was non-mated. Or in heat. As in never ever. Which only amplified his absorption in everything about her. As the middle brother, he hadn’t been old enough to be invited to society parties a half century ago when he’d been part of the lycan world, when his kind still knew the Lanzo brothers existed. Families brought out their available daughters at those functions with the sole purpose of finding them an acceptable mate. Of course, it wasn’t about chemistry or love. It was about power and money.

You don’t know she’s unmated.

Dark, wavy hair fell on either side of her pale face. In the dim shine of light from the bulb on the wall, her eyes were intelligent and serious without a hint of insecurity, but he couldn’t make out their color. She scanned him back, her perusal moving over his naked arms with their many tattoos, coming to rest on the most important ink—the blue mark around his left wrist, the one that represented the curse that held him in thrall to the Crown of England. Her pausing on the mark was probably all in his head.

“Who’re you?” he asked. It came out in English with the British accent he’d perfected as a servant to the Crown, who often forced him to pretend to be an MI6 agent. He was so much more dangerous than that.

The draw to stare at the swells of her breasts in the too-small sports bra was hard to ignore, but he did his best to keep his eyes north of her neck.

“The moon is blue?” Her forehead scrunched before she glanced skyward toward the rain hitting the skylights above them. Her accent was British with a faint Scottish burr to it. “I don’t know its color yet, but given it’ll be full, it’s going to be a problem for us in about an hour or so.”

He hadn’t thought he slurred. Was he that out of it? He tried again, speaking louder, this time careful to enunciate. “Who. Are. You?”

“There are two?” She glanced around. “There are two of us in here. You’re right. I’m thinking they’re going to leave it that way until we do what they want. Or until I kill you and then only one of us will remain.”

He scowled. “Are you hard of hearing?”

“You sounded garbled. It’s the drug. Or maybe they hit you one too many times with the collar?” She tapped the metal band around her own neck. Wrinkles creased the corners of her eyes, and she compressed her lips as if trying not to smile. She’d been messing with him?

The lady had a sense of humor and wasn’t afraid of him. He gave most women the jitters, even if unintentionally. Roman, his oldest brother, said it was because he rarely smiled and looked like an ex-con about to do something illegal. The fact she’d been placed in front of him for the specific purpose of driving him nuts and yet she didn’t fear him suggested she had defensive skills.

“What’s the purpose of this place?” he asked.

She tapped her chin and then said sarcastically, “I’m thinking it’s not a day spa.”

A smart-ass. He liked that.

He bit back a chuckle. “Lacks a bit in customer service.”

Her lips tilted upward for a fraction of a second. “It’s a place where they imprison us in rooms with cheap toilet paper and shitty food that’s not even real food.”

“Got the imprisonment part. Not yet sure on the why they’re locking us up. Are you with them?” She could be a plant, somehow meant to use him. Maybe a willing player? Or it was simple torture, even though they hadn’t said what they wanted from him? Put a beautiful, in-heat lycan female in his path as an exquisite torment, and he might break. Might. He’d handled much worse.

“You think I’m with who? The humans? Are you daft? They must’ve whacked you in the head.”

“Maybe so.” He glanced upward when the rain picked up, now battering the skylights.

“If I were on their side, I’d lie to you and say I wasn’t. So it’s a ridiculous question.”

“Good point.”

“Why would I lock myself like this in a room with you? That’s an unacceptable risk. I don’t know you. There’s a high chance you turn into a snarly, drooly beast with no control on a full-moon night.”

He snorted out a laugh.

“That wasn’t funny.”

He sobered at the seriousness of her tone. Someone hurt her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to laugh. Me doing drooly isn’t a good image. I can do snarly, though.”

“Some lycans, like the last guy…” She shook her head as if to erase a memory.

His jaw grew tight as he worked it slowly back and forth. They forced her with someone without control? Tightly, he asked, “Did he hurt you? Force you?”

“We fought. In the end, I won, and they had to remove him. He went away bloody.”

“Good for you. It’s despicable to be unable to control oneself, even with all the odds against us.”

“Most of us can’t fight the moon’s lure. You staying over there so far is an anomaly.”

“I’m different. Don’t be fooled, though. I’m no one’s hero. If I flip out and go nuts, feel free to kill me. I’ve been ready for death for a long time. Probably won’t fight it too much.”

She watched him skeptically but seemed to buy his little speech. “There still won’t be any you and me no matter how smooth your words.” She shook her head as if convincing herself as well as him. “I can survive without relief from…” She gestured back and forth, tacitly acknowledging the hormonal pull between them.

He’d heard rumors that the pain when a female went into heat and wasn’t satisfied was brutal for about a day, but he’d never witnessed it. Society didn’t allow female lycans to choose their own mates or have lycan sex for fun. Someone like him could get close to one, could touch one if it was sanctified by her family. The rareness of lycan women contributed to the fact that the feminist revolution hadn’t yet made it to the Lycan Council or the elite families.

“You didn’t say what happens in this place.” When she didn’t spew forth more information, he asked, “Why aren’t you asking me what I’m doing in here? Why was I put in here with you?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I assume you were captured specifically for this and tossed in here with me. They’re going to leave us in here until we do what they want.”

“Which is what?”

“I know you’re not that dense.” She threw up her hands. When he said nothing, she rolled her eyes. “They want you to go moon crazy and tear off my clothes, so we can get it on. They’ll watch like”—she raised her voice and yelled—“like the pervs they are.” Then she lowered her tone. “They do many things to us in here. Awful things. The worst is to be put in one of these. They call them breeding rooms.”