Chapter 15
When she woke, it was to nightmare.
She'd been taken while unconscious and left somewhere. Just before the world went black that's what the old Vampyren had proposed: Leave her somewhere on the street near where the Lucian were said to be. There'd been talk that the wolves couldn't leave her there without losing face.
There'd also been the talk about her having already been fucked by the Vampyren. As if that made this all right.
She knew they didn't care about her. She had thought they'd care about their property.
The wire was a burn under her skin, subcutaneous except where the head of it popped up near her elbow. She wanted to rip it out of her and run out of the place she found herself.
Only the fact that she might send back information that would somehow get to Alek and help him kept her there.
That, and she was a prisoner.
"Come."
The summons came early the next morning after a confused night of shrieks and cries from inside the city hall. She hadn't slept more than an hour and that over the hours all put together.
The Lucian who had been sent for her was tall and slender, sandy haired with a silvery white cast to his skin.
He wasn't huge and muscled like the Vampyren, but there was something about the wiry muscles and the calm air of deadliness that made her think he would be every bit as fearsome as the vampires.
"Where are you taking me?"
It was her first and only stand. The backhand seemed to come out of nowhere.
She hadn't even seen him move. And the strength she'd theorized was right there.
Her head whipped to the side, her body followed and she fell, hard, one hand to her face, the other upraised as if she could possibly stave off anymore attacks.
"You do not speak."
Probably not. Her mouth was already puffing up.
At least it would prevent her from being required to call them whatever version of "sir" the Lucian would probably expect.
"Who sent you?"
The Lucian demanding answers paced like a wolf in a cage the entire time he shouted questions at her.
The aliens were every bit as angry and dangerous as the Vampyren. They shouted and intimidated and she'd been hit more than once and if given her choice, she thought she might actually opt to go back to the condo party with Larry from Duluth.
Not that the party existed anymore. Or that Larry did, either, probably.
"I told you," she said, because lying wouldn't work and surely somewhere someone on the other end of the wire was listening.
"I was in a harem and the Vampyren pulled me out and then I was here.
I don't remember anything." And she flew back away from the swing he took at her, stumbling as she got close to the wall.
They were stories up, because that was the best and the best was what conquerors took, but this part of City Hall wasn't twenty stories of glass and steel, it was only five.
She could clearly see the men and equipment massing there on the street.
She could see the guns. She could see the numbers.
She said it fast, before she could become too afraid, spat out a question about what they were going to do with all the troops massing in the street on the northwest side of the building and didn't they know the vampires had already taken the city and what was the point of what they were doing with all those guns and the one thing that looked like a bomb?
The loudest of the Lucians reacted first. "Search her!" He didn't wait to see what they'd find, but strode from the room.
She wanted to shout another warning, but anyone listening to the wire could already determine what they'd heard.
Instead she held her breath as the males swooped in on her. She expected within an instant she'd be stripped and searched and then probably raped and killed.
But instead they delivered her to the females, who poked at her indifferently. They were more interested in the males who had been there. When they finished, she still wore the wire.
She was still alive.