Caris Roane: Born in Chains

And for the first time, she truly doubted that she’d ever be able to see her mission through. For one thing, his loyalties lay elsewhere, with his brothers still in prison and with the vampire world generally, so he could never be a truly reliable partner. But given his size and physical strength, that he was a trained fighter and that he had tremendous potential among his kind, what on earth made Kiernan think she’d be able to control him all the way to the end?

Adrien stood beneath the shower attached to Lily’s tent. He hadn’t been clean in a year and he didn’t care how many times Lily’s crew had to refill the tank, he’d be damned before he took one more step into the future without getting every molecule of filth off him.

He scrubbed his hair until his scalp burned; his legs, arms, and chest until his skin felt raw; his crotch until he felt bruised.

Only then, stripped of the last of the cavern muck, did he step, naked as hell, from the shower into Lily’s tent. His captor sat at a small desk.

She glanced at him and grew very still as she looked him up and down. Her lips parted, her nostrils flared. And just like that, as unexpected as anything he could have imagined, he smelled her sex, a warm, sweet flow of desire that tightened his abs. She wants me.

She cleared her throat, then gestured to a stack of towels on a small table to his right. “Help yourself.”

She returned to review something on her desk, a small notepad. She rubbed her neck beneath her binding chain. Apparently, the fairly lightweight string of small black loops chafed her as it did him.

Good. If he had to be bound, then he wanted her annoyed and scratching to get free as well.

His jaw quivered at the sight of her, all woman, a reminder yet again that he’d not been between a woman’s legs in too damn long.

He let his gaze fall slowly down her body. She stretched, her hands behind her back, which pushed her chest forward. Her breasts were large and firm. A nice handful. A better mouthful. Her narrow waist flared to womanly hips.

Her hair hung in soft waves to the middle of her back in a light brown, layered flow with subtle gold streaks, hair obviously cared for in an expensive salon. Once again he noticed the beauty of her hazel eyes. She had thick dark lashes, arched brows, full lips.

She turned toward him and he let the towel fall away from his now partially erect cock. She needed to know what he intended her to have, the sooner the better.

“What am I supposed to do about clothes?” he asked.

Her gaze dropped exactly where he wanted it. But she looked away, swirling her hand in his direction. “At least put a towel over that.”

“You might as well get used to it, Lily.” She jumped at the use of her name. “I haven’t gotten laid in a long time and it’s all I can think about right now. That, and tapping your vein.”

She shook her head, color climbing her cheeks. “You’ve got the free use of your hand.”

Oh, this was too easy. He stared at her hard as he took his cock in his fist and started stroking. “You’re right, I do.”

She made a disgusted sound, left her chair, and headed to the front tent flaps.

He called out, “Wait, human—”

But she’d moved too fast trying to get away from him. She got pulled backward by the chain’s power and landed on her ass. He couldn’t help himself: He laughed long and loud, and it felt good.

She stood up and swiped at her jeans. She turned to face him, her jaw grinding. “Would you please cover up?”

The slight note of desperation in her voice made him wonder. He leveled his gaze on her and asked, “You sure you want me to do that?”

She looked him up and down once more, blinking a couple of times.

She took a deep breath. “This isn’t going to be simple,” she muttered. Meeting his gaze once more, she said, “Yes, please cover up. I won’t deny I’m tempted, because ever since I saw you in the cave, the chains haven’t really stopped vibrating, and I’ve been experiencing visions as well. I’m feeling too much here, but I’m not fool enough to believe it means anything. You know how you look, how women react to you. You’re a slab of meat, nothing more.”

Hatred boiled in him that she would speak to him that way. In his world, he was admired and not just because of his appearance. For her to reduce him to something found in a slaughterhouse repulsed him. She had no soul, this woman, bent on using him for her own purposes, probably to make a fortune just as all corrupt humans did in their world.

He’d met so many like her. They’d catch rumors of the secret vampire world and hear tales of making a fortune by selling their fellow humans—mostly women, but some men as well—to vermin like Kiernan. Those humans in Kiernan’s mold would serve as go-betweens, approaching Daniel or a dozen other vampires who ran illegal sex-slave clubs that traded in human flesh. But it was always the humans who brought their captives to market, selling them like cattle.

Of course both Daniel and Kiernan did a lot more than just trade in human flesh, especially now that Daniel ruled the Council of Ancestrals and could do as he pleased. Daniel would forge documents and take control of mineral-rich caverns owned by wealthy vampires. Then he’d sell the caves off to Kiernan, who in turn worked surreptitiously with many human government officials, each profiting as the food chain went on and on, everyone involved obligated, by the heinous nature of the transactions, to continue keeping the vampire world a secret.

One day this house of cards would fall down, but probably not for a few years yet, maybe even decades.

All of it disgusted Adrien, and now he was bound to a human woman who had also sold her soul for profit, something apparently she was willing to die for.

Lily now hunted for the extinction weapon, at Daniel’s request, forging a tracking bond with Adrien. Through the shared chain, as she siphoned his power, she’d be able to locate the weapon, at least in theory.

Though rumors had abounded since the 1950s about the existence of the weapon, other rumors had surfaced as well: that there had been several versions of the weapon, and that the remnants of those weapons had been hidden away in hundreds of caverns all over the globe.

Hunting for a viable weapon would be the old needle-in-a-haystack pursuit.

He took a towel and slowly wrapped it around his waist.

Lily returned to her chair but shifted it to face in his direction. She dipped her chin toward another, larger chair. “Why don’t you sit down and we can talk for a few minutes? Things need to be said, plans laid out.” He felt the weight of her words, and at the same time the chains that bound them together spoke to him of all that sadness again.

He tucked the white terry in at the waist.

He sat down carefully in the large camp chair, hoping it would hold. He was a lot of vampire to test so little canvas.

“It’s good for up to three hundred pounds,” she said.

He nodded, then settled in, stretching out his legs. Damn but it felt good to move, to be free of his shackles, even to sit. He rubbed his wrists.

“The first thing you need to know is that you’ve been released permanently from prison. No going back. I was told it’s all legal and that your release will be publicized to your world over the next few days, which means that you won’t have to worry about anyone coming after you.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Why? I thought that would be your first concern, that you’d land back in prison before we even got started.”

“Daniel put us there, and I don’t intend to let it happen again.”

She met his gaze, her expression grim. “I can feel through the chain that you mean what you say.”