The Rescuer
The jungle heat hit like a physical wall.
Every breath felt like inhaling hot water and rotting spores.
Jules wiped sweat from her eyes with her torn sleeve, smearing dirt and dried blood across her face.
Thorns from the fleshy ferns tore at her clothing, shredded the tough denim, and carved red, burning lines into her skin.
She stumbled over a moss-covered root and fell hard onto her knees. Mud splattered upward. A rasping gasp tore from her lips. Her lungs burned, the muscles in her legs trembling. The strength that had driven her from the cave was gone. All that remained was bone-deep exhaustion.
Jules pressed her palms into the ground and forced herself back to her feet. No weapon. No sense of direction. Just an endless green nightmare of vines and pulsing shadows.
A wet, rattling hiss cut through the monotonous insect hum. No snapping of deadwood. No rustling.
Jules froze. The fine hairs on her neck stood on end. Her blood roared, but her muscles locked. She pressed her back against the bark of a giant tree and held her breath.
Ten feet ahead, the undergrowth parted. The creature had the stocky posture of a jackal, but that was where any earthly resemblance ended.
The sinewy body was covered in ash-gray scale plates that gleamed wetly in the twilight.
The flat skull tapered to a point, two pitch-black, pupilless eyes fixed on her.
The jaw gaped unnaturally wide, exposing rows of fine, needle-sharp teeth.
Neon-green saliva dripped onto a fern leaf.
A corrosive hiss, and the leaf dissolved instantly into stinking slime.
A second hiss. To her right. Jules whipped her head around. The tree trunk gave her cover, but she was surrounded. A second beast slid silently from the brush, scale armor stretching taut over its haunches. Both creatures fixed on Jules as exactly what she was: meat.
Her fingers scrabbled across the wet ground and found a branch. Rotten, crumbling. Absolutely useless. She gripped the wood with both hands, pulled it to her chest, and shifted her weight. Her teeth ground together.
“Come on,” she forced out. Her voice broke, scratchy and thin. “Whoever jumps first gets this thing deep in the eye.”
The left beast tensed its thighs. Its jaw dropped open. Green saliva dripped into the mud.
A deafening, guttural roar shattered the silence. The raw sound wave slammed Jules back against the bark.
Kore struck between her and the left beast like a meteor.
He didn’t jump from the undergrowth—he fell from the canopy, straight onto the attacker.
The forest floor shook. Mud exploded. The kinetic energy shattered the jackal’s spine as Kore’s feet rammed it into the soft ground. A wet crack. Instantly dead.
The second jackal hissed and leaped. Kore didn’t move an inch.
He rotated his torso, raised his hand, and caught the monster in midair.
Black fingers bored deep into the scaled throat.
Toxic saliva sprayed onto Kore’s forearm, etching white plumes of smoke from his dark skin, but the warlord didn’t flinch.
He yanked the beast to his chest. He bared his teeth and sank them directly into the monster’s shoulder. One bite, one brutal jerk to the side. Scales burst, tendons snapped free from their anchors with a wet tear.
Kore spat out the flesh. He grabbed the beast’s skull with his free hand and pulled.
The muscles in his neck and chest strained to the breaking point.
With a grotesque, tearing sound, he wrenched the head completely from the torso.
The spine cracked one last time. A fountain of hot, almost-black blood shot from the neck, arterial pressure spraying the liquid in a wide arc through the air.
Sticky blood splattered Jules’s face. It hit her cheeks, soaked her shirt, ran down her arms. The penetrating stench of iron, burned flesh, and entrails choked the oxygen from her lungs. The useless branch slipped from her fingers.
Her knees gave out. Jules slid down the tree bark and hit the swamp floor. She pressed her trembling palms into the dirt to keep from pitching forward. Her breath came in shallow, jerky gasps.
Kore tossed the skull carelessly into the undergrowth.
The torso slapped down in front of his boots.
The king of the jungle stood amid the wreckage of his massacre, covered head to toe in blood.
Viscous liquid ran down his chest, mingling with sweat, dripping steadily from his thick claws.
His chest rose and fell heavily. A rumbling snort escaped his nostrils.
His scaled tail whipped restlessly through the air, slicing through ferns.
He turned his head. His amber eyes fixed on Jules. The glow in his pupils wasn’t instinctive hunting drive but unshakeable destructive force.
Kore closed the distance in two heavy steps. The earth shook under his weight. He bent forward, grabbed Jules roughly by the shoulders with both blood-smeared hands, and hauled her to her feet.
Jules gasped. His clawed fingers dug deep into her flesh.
Pain flared, but the heat radiating from him burned hotter.
He pulled her close until her boot tips touched his.
He pressed his pelvis hard against her hips, pinning her in complete submission.
His heavy, musky breath, laced with the iron smell of fresh blood, grazed her lips.
He stared into her eyes. No blinking. His heavy jaw worked before he parted his lips.
“Outside dead.”
The words scraped like gravel over rusted steel. His voice was creaky and brittle, as if he hadn’t used his vocal cords in years. The accent foreign, the syllables spat out roughly, but the articulation was razor-sharp.
He pressed his body tighter against her, the hands on her shoulders not giving a millimeter. “Here mine. Live.”
Jules’s breath caught like a sharp stone in her throat.
The monster that had only grunted in the cave.
The beast that had carried her like a lifeless piece of prey through the jungle.
He understood. He had language. He had deciphered her insults and her sarcasm, analyzed them, and consciously chosen to remain silent.
He had played her the whole time.
Kore gave her no time to process the shock.
His hands slid down from her shoulders. They glided over her bare upper arms, leaving sticky streaks of almost-black jackal blood on her skin, and tightened around her waist. The claws pressed into her sides, just above her hipbones, and yanked her even closer in one swift motion.
The impact drove the last air from Jules’ lungs.
The armor plates of his chest compressed her ribs.
Beneath the leather of his loincloth, the unyielding ridge of his arousal pressed against her lower abdomen.
A block of heat and pure dominance. He ground against her pubic bone slowly, with perverse deliberation. A crushing, possessive movement.
Heat shot into Jules’ core. A wet instinct that eclipsed the mortal terror and ran deeper than any civilized thought. She hated this reaction. She hated the betrayal of her own body.
“You goddamn bastard,” she whispered, trembling. She balled her fists, pressed them against his chest, and tried to push him back. It was like pushing against rock walls. “You understood me the whole time.”
A growl formed deep in his throat. The vibration traveled through his chest directly into her bones. The amber eyes narrowed to slits.
“Words.” His jaw worked. The way he spoke tore human language into pieces and reassembled it as a weapon. “Noise. Small prey makes much noise. Needed no noise.”
He lowered his head. His wet, pitch-black mane fell around their faces, shutting out the jungle and locking her in a cage of musk, iron, and body heat. He forced her backward until her shoulder blades crashed hard against the bark armor of the giant tree again. Not a centimeter of room to escape.
His knee shoved mercilessly between her thighs, prying her legs apart. At the same time, his scaled tail rose from the mud. The muscular length didn’t lash. It crept. It wrapped around her left calf, slid over her knee, and pushed under the torn denim hem.
Jules’ eyes flew open. She sucked in a sharp breath.
Matte black scales rubbed over the naked, sensitive skin on the inside of her thigh.
The heat radiating from the tail seared into her.
The muscular coil wound like a constrictor around her leg and pulled her hip with exacting precision against his insistent hips.
“Stop that,” she hissed through her teeth. She lifted her chin, stared at him defiantly, and ignored the blood on her face and the trembling of her muscles. “I’m not a pet. And I’m sure as hell not a breeding experiment for an oversized alien. Break my neck or let me go.”
Kore’s jaw tensed. A dangerous, amused glint flickered in his eyes.
He raised his right hand. The claws traced along her carotid artery.
He didn’t scratch, but the razor-sharp tips threatened to slice through skin at the slightest wrong movement.
His thumb wiped hard across her cheek, smearing the sticky blood of the beasts with dirt and sweat.
He marked her with the death of his enemies.
His rough tongue slid slowly over his own blood-smeared fangs. “Mine,” he repeated. The command brooked no human logic. He buried his face in her neck, drawing the scent of mortal terror, sweat, and throbbing arousal deep into his lungs. “You roar. You bite. Good.”
He shoved his hips forward again. A hard, relentless thrust against her pelvis. The friction of the leather and the throbbing heat beneath struck exactly the bundle of nerves between her thighs.
A high moan broke from Jules’ throat. She slapped her hand over her mouth, but the sound already hung in the humid jungle air.
Kore’s growl shifted into a satisfied purr.
The tail around her thigh tensed, yanking her even more ruthlessly into the hard friction of his body.
He savored the physical betrayal fully. He didn’t break her resistance with force—he drowned it in dominance.
“Not pet,” Kore rumbled at her ear. He fisted his hand roughly in her matted hair and yanked her head back. His hot breath burned against her exposed throat. “Prey. Female. Mine. Same.”
He didn’t release her hair. He forced her to look at him. His physical superiority and the ice-cold intelligence in his gaze cut off every escape route.
Kore took half a step back. He withdrew the crushing press of his body, but didn’t release the tail from her leg. The muscular coil merely slid lower and wrapped around her ankle like an unmistakable shackle.
“Walk,” the warlord commanded. He jerked his bloody chin toward the impenetrable green twilight of the forest. “Or jackals eat.”
Jules stared at the king of the jungle, at the steaming blood on his hands, and at the shredded carcasses in the swamp grass.
Her knees trembled. The wet heat between her legs throbbed hard in rhythm with her racing heartbeat.
She balled her fists, swallowed down her remaining resistance, and took the first shaky step forward.
She was alive. But she was his trophy, and the hunt had just ended.