Over an hour had passed since Leia came down from the grips of a life-altering orgasm to crawl onto her bed mat and curl into a weak-limbed ball. Exhaustion and tenderness pulled at her from every angle. Darkness had long since flooded the cell with black.
Still, she didn’t sleep. Couldn’t sleep.
Last night, she wanted nothing less than for Sebastian to lie next to her and hold her while she slumbered. Since the day she found the strength to leave Ken, she hadn’t allowed any man to stay in her bed longer than it took to screw. Tonight, she ached to feel Sebastian’s strong arms around her, holding her captive in the truest sense. And tonight, he was gone, left without a word. Without even waiting for her climax to end.
“I should hate him.”
Hell, she’d tried to convince herself that she did hate him for the cruelty of his handling. Tried to convince him of the same. But Leia didn’t hate him. Not after what he’d done for her—opened her eyes to the reality his handling wasn’t cruel but, rather, everything she craved. And not after having heard the anguish in his voice when he spoke of his failure to protect her from Ken’s abuse.
If Sebastian had known her ex-husband, it wasn’t from an amicable standpoint. The two men could be no less similar, her feelings for them no further apart. Ken she would never regret was dead. Sebastian she regretted only not knowing while he was alive, when missing him served some purpose because they at least stood a chance at a future.
Tomorrow, he might return to her. But soon their days together would end. Just as she could always somehow sense his presence before he entered the cell, she knew he wouldn’t keep her with him much longer. He would set her free to return to the city. To the friends and colleagues who knew nothing about the real her. To a life she’d built knowing nothing about the real her either.
Vowing to change that the moment she was free of this cell, Leia closed her eyes and once more attempted sleep. Eventually, her fatigue must have won out. The next thing she knew, she was being awakened by the plodding of feet and a chorus of keyed-up voices.
Brilliant light filtered through her eyelids, snapping her to alertness. Without moving, she opened her eyes to survey her surroundings. As when she opened her eyes the first afternoon in this cell, her surroundings were nothing she could have guessed. Dirt walls still encompassed her, but near to a dozen short, nude, white-haired skin-shifters now filled the cell with her. Unlike that first day, not one touched her. Not one even seemed to realize she lay curled up on the mat in the cell’s far corner.
Currently a mixture of males and females, they moved about the small room conversing in excited voices while gathering strips of cloth and earthen bowls from the wall chest. The bowls, of what she could now see was Camaloe, were set in a wide circle on the ground. The skin-shifters stood around that circle, holding hands and rocking their bodies side to side as they chanted in some low, foreign tongue.
The chanting grew louder, their swaying faster. The air warmed, thickened, crackled with tension. For an instant, Leia considered she was about to witness some archaic orgy. Then she caught the unease that weighted each of their vivid blue eyes, and sickness rose up in her belly. Sickness she recognized all too easily for having experienced it days on end for months in row when she’d endured Ken’s drunken wrath.
Her ex-husband was gone, not stuck in some middle life awaiting his final judgment—that much she was now certain of—but straight to Hell. Something else surged her panicked sickness. Someone else. For the skin-shifters to be in her cell in such an anxious state and without Sebastian at their lead, that someone had to be him.
Shoving to her feet, Leia demanded, “Where’s Sebastian?”
Even with the force of her words, not a single shifter looked her way, instead carrying on as if she hadn’t spoken. She bit her tongue around that insult.
Son of a bitch, she would not be ignored.
Rage and desperation tangling in her mind, she darted her gaze around the circle of pale-skinned midgets until it landed on Aubrie’s once-again female form. Hurrying to Aubrie, Leia took hold of the female’s arm, breaking the circle as she spun her around. “Where the fuck is Sebastian? What’s happened to him?”
Something changed then. Something in the air. Leia knew even before Aubrie nodded past her with huge, solemn eyes that Sebastian had arrived. Tonight, now, she could sense more than his presence.
She could feel his suffering.
The sickness in her belly turned to a coiling of pure dread. Slowly, she turned to face the dirt wall that served as his doorway. Her heart galloped into her throat at the gruesome sight there; the man who looked nothing like her sinfully sexy captor, yet she knew with sickening clarity could be no other.
“Please, God, no.” The prayer whispered out on a shaky breath.
Without words, the skin-shifters surrounded Sebastian’s far bigger body, lifting him off his booted feet as a unit and placing him on the ground the same way. They labored over him feverishly, tearing away the remains of his tattered clothing, applying fresh strips of cloth, cloaking him with Camaloe. Stealing all but flashes of his body from Leia’s sight.
She could still see it vividly in her mind, though.
So much blood. So goddamned much blood covered his shredded body. Skin gaped open in some spots and hung in limp patches in others, revealing that the muscle and bone beneath had suffered the same dire consequences as the rest of him.
For long seconds, she could only gape and gasp and fight the bile churning in her throat. Then survival kicked in. In many ways, he’d saved her, given her back a life she hadn’t known she’d been missing. She owed him for that, owed him nothing less than everything.
Leia attempted to shove her way past the laboring midgets, only to be knocked backward and thrust onto her butt in the dirt. Snarling, she leapt to her feet. God saw fit to gift her with a big ass, and right now she saw clearly His logic. With her ample hips and ass paving the way, she pushed back into the pack, this time refusing to be deterred.
She emerged on the other side victorious and nearly smiled over her feat. Nearly until her gaze fell on Sebastian’s mangled form. He lay less than a foot away. His eyes were closed, and long black lashes fanned their undersides. Sweat consumed his body while his breathing came far too shallow. She could only guess the skin-shifter’s circular chanting had somehow guided him back here—no way could he have made it on his own.
“Get out of the way! You can’t help him!” Aubrie shouted.
Leia met the female’s eyes and growled, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Small but strong hands grabbed hold of her arms from behind, yanking them painfully behind her back. “Leave, human. You’re not wanted here,” a male voice retorted.
More hands joined those first ones, jerking her backward, dragging her across the dirt, away from Sebastian.
Madly, she twisted her torso and wrenched at her arms. “Goddammit, let me help!”
The hands kept pulling, blunt fingernails digging into her flesh, gouging at the soft tissue until she could see no more than his bared feet. Please, she pleaded with her mind, praying he could still somehow read her thoughts. Please let me help you.
“Let her go. Let her see what I am.”
Sebastian’s voice was low, thready, and still she recognized it. Still, her pulse spiked with hope. He was conscious. He was asking for her.
Again, she thrashed at the arms holding her in place. “Let me see him. Let me see him!”
The hands released. The pack of skin-shifters parted. She raced those few precious feet to Sebastian’s side. Falling on her knees in the dirt, she dipped her fingers into a bowl of Camaloe. Coating his torn body with the herb that healed her in more ways than one, praying all the while she wasn’t hurting him further with her ministrations, she met his eyes. “What happened?”
“I killed someone.” Malice reflected in his voice.
Leia’s hands shook as she applied the herb to another wound, and his muscles lurched beneath her touch. Holy Jesus, how could he ever recover? “You’re hurt so badly.”
His eyes narrowed. “I said I killed someone, Leia. How the hell can you care if I’m hurt?”
“How can I not?” Such little time they’d been together, and yet, somehow, she felt she’d known him far longer, remembered him from another time. He’d been adamant about the fact that they hadn’t met previously. He’d also been adamant about the fact that he would never raise his fist in violence. She believed that first a lie, the second honest truth. If he’d killed someone tonight, it had been done in self-defense. “Tell me how to fix this.”
Sebastian’s glare remained intact, his lips firm and unyielding for nearly a minute. His mouth curved then, slowly and slyly, into a devilish grin that lent an edge of danger to the air while it raised the fine hairs at the back of her neck. “You want to make it better?”
“Yes.” No matter the sudden bolt of fear coursing through her, she would do anything to heal him. At her nod, his hand came up, sliding past her cheek to grip her unkempt hair with brute strength she couldn’t believe he still possessed.
A madman’s laugh, high-pitched and manic, rolled from his mouth, echoing off the cell walls as he forced her gaze to fall on his cock. Not limp or injured like the rest of him, but solid and thick with arousal. “Then suck my dick, slave,” he goaded. “Take it all the way inside. Show everyone what a good little pet you are.”
Leia sucked in a stunned gasp. Humiliation burned through her body, blistering her cheeks. She hadn’t given a thought to her nudity from the moment she’d awoken to find herself with equally nude company. Now, she realized how exposed she was. How many eyes watched her every move. Eyes that still held concern for their master but, now, also open desire.
“Do it!” Sebastian roared, his grip on her hair intensifying to the point shards of pain tore through her skull.
To hell with the skin-shifters. To hell with this ultimate invasion of privacy. If it meant sacrificing her pride after only just getting it back, she would do it. “Yes, Master,” she uttered almost silently. Then she took his member between her lips.
He moaned with that first contact, low, long, and keening. A sound caught between pleasure and pain, heaven and hell. Moving her mouth up and down his steely rod, Leia licked from oozing tip to throbbing base, loving his hot taste and silky texture even as she felt guilt for enjoying herself in his moment of need.
Taking the sac of his testicles in one hand, she gently massaged his balls. She risked releasing his cock then to feed his nuts into her mouth, savoring the taste and texture of those too. Crisp pubic hair teased her upper lip and nose, raising a sneeze out of nowhere.
Her mouth worked around his balls as the sneeze released, her lips opening and then clamping down hard without intention. Sebastian grunted, and his battered thighs went taut, muscles contracting around her upper half, locking her body in place between his legs.
The action was so reminiscent of every other sensual game he’d played with her, Leia’s pussy pulsed with expectation. Meeting his eyes with apology in her own, she brought her mouth back to his sex, gobbling his cock up and sucking it deep.
Without acknowledgment, he jerked his gaze away. “Heal her, Aubrie.”
“But, Master, she’s not injur—”
“Do it! The right way.”
Past the deliciously erotic pumping and pulsing of his shaft in her mouth, Leia detected the caution in Aubrie’s voice. Warning threatened at her mind. No time did she have to reflect on that warning before the female’s fingers moved between her thighs from behind, probing the shaved lips of her pussy, then pushing briskly inside.
Not with fingers, but with tongue.
Like the first time Aubrie ate at her cunt, the female seemed to know her body intimately, knew just where to lick and suck to have her sex slick and heavy with want. Instinct registered the urge to fight back, to block the invasion. Sebastian’s staying grip and the upward shove of his hips in time with the downward thrust of her mouth wouldn’t allow her to listen to that instinct.
He needed this, needed her.
Leia repeated the stabilizing thought in her mind again and again as the female’s tongue, teeth, and lips feasted on her pussy, and electric sensation built like a tempest in her core. Sebastian’s cock moved faster between her lips with each of Aubrie’s heightened pumps. The female slipped a finger inside Leia’s sheath, working it together with her tongue, and heat chased through Leia like a wildfire, racing her heart and boiling her blood.
She knew wildfires. Knew how dangerous they could be. Knew it was a wildfire of her own creation that had her here now with Sebastian. Sucking his cock with relish, moaning around his hard flesh for each of Aubrie’s feverish moves, she paid him back for putting out her fire, for giving her back her life. And he paid her back in kind by shooting his cum into her mouth.
His seed slid down her throat, hot and silky, and coupled with Aubrie’s continual mouth fucks, more ecstasy than Leia could bear. Panting around his cock, she gave into her own orgasm, coming around Aubrie’s tongue as wave after wave of pleasure rippled through her.
“That’s good, isn’t it? The feel of Aubrie’s tongue in your pussy, making you come and then sucking you dry?” Sebastian’s voice was hard, his tone mocking.
Playing a game. Playing another game, Leia thought distantly, oblivious to her surroundings as her heart boomed and mini-tremors rocked her to the core.
“Bet you didn’t know your tastes ran that dark, did you, slave?” he continued in the acerbic tone. “You like it rough. Like it when a guy swats you around a bit, when he jams his dick up your asshole.” Aubrie’s tongue jerked from Leia’s sex, and a hand swatted across her ass, hard, stinging. Not bringing to life dark passion but brutal pain that squeaked a cry from her lips. “You’re just another dirty girl. A toy made for a man’s amusement. No amount of running’s gonna change that.”
The hand he gripped her hair with released to take hold of his cock and pull it from her mouth. He bounded to his feet then, bounded up and knocked her backward, making her topple Aubrie in the process. Bounded as if he’d never been injured at all.
Past his bitterly taunting words, Leia remembered with shameful clarity how injured he’d been and how, in the wake of pleasure, she’d forgotten all about it. Despite his behavior, his body was still torn. Blood still caked his bruised and battered skin, and lay thick and acidic on the air.
He seemed oblivious to his pain now. The sense of his suffering was gone from her mind as well. As was Sebastian gone from her sight, as he stalked to the dirt wall and moved directly through it.
Forgetting his jeers and her shame, she shot to her feet and darted to the wall, pounded at the solid earth until her knuckles stung. “Goddammit, come back!”
A small hand settled on her upper arm. “He’s not in the right mood, Leia.” Aubrie spoke in a voice mingled with lust and compassion. “He can’t listen right now. Can’t respond to you as the Sebastian you’ve come to know.”
Then who the hell could he respond to her as?
Fear for his safety lodging emotion in her throat, she turned to regard Aubrie and was taken aback at the sight of the other skin-shifters. Not only did she forget Sebastian’s injuries, but she’d been so rapt in pleasure, she’d forgotten the other shifters were even in this cell.
Embarrassment rose up anew. Disregarding the slow burn in her cheeks, Leia addressed the group as a whole. “How can you just let him go? There’s so much blood.”
“It’s not his,” Aubrie explained. “Sebastian’s heart beats like a mortal, but no blood flows through his veins. He can’t die in the traditional sense. He can only move on.”
“Then the blood…It belonged to the person he killed?”
“The bear, yes.”
Bear? “He was that crazed over a bear? I thought he killed a human. Or one of your kind.”
“Bear, human, or shifter doesn’t matter to Sebastian. He’s the protector of this land. It’s his job to keep all safe. When he fails to do so, when an animal dies, he feels it’s his duty to take on their suffering. In a way, he becomes that animal. Not in body, but in spirit, in actions.”
The emotion in Leia’s throat thickened as the grim possibility in Aubrie’s admission caught up with her. She swallowed hard, fighting to keep her voice from trembling. “Will he move on tonight because of his injuries?”
Aubrie looked to the wall he’d left through. When she looked back, uncertainty filled her eyes. “He should be okay. Later tonight. Or by morning. Will you?”
“I don’t know.” How could she when Aubrie looked so unconvinced of her words? When even if Sebastian was miraculously okay, she now knew with certainty their days together would soon come to an abrupt and final end?
Earlier tonight, Leia knew she wouldn’t like leaving him. Now, she acknowledged that she would hate it, and that she would do everything in her power to see that moment never came to pass.