Page 16 of The Lycans: Vol Four

I didn’t want to give up. I couldn’t. But when I tried to stand, I fell to my side, my throat burning as I coughed, my lungs on fire.

And that was the last thing I remembered before the darkness took me under and I was no longer able to be strong for her.

6

Odhran

Ialways thought the same thing when the drugs wore off.

I’m going tae kill every last one of these motherfookers. Slowly, painfully.

I groaned and lifted my arm, the limb feeling heavy as if I had a lead sleeve covering it. I ran my hand over my face, my beard springy under my palm, my mouth dry, my throat feeling as if I’d swallowed a bucketful of sand.

I rolled to my side just as nausea took over. I emptied my stomach onto the corner of the cell. Slowly, reality filtered back in. I could hear sounds, males roaring, someone slamming their body up against the bars. I could hear a female screeching, someone crying.

After passing out in the corridor from all the smoke, I’d found myself in this exact same situation: on the floor in a cell, feeling like I’d been run over by a stampede of stallions.

It didn’t take long for any confusion I might have had to vanish. Human males had come to stand on the other side of my prison bars and only said two sentences before leaving:

“You are now property of the Assembly. Enjoy your time in hell.”

How long ago had that been? Days? A week?

I scrubbed my hand over my face again.

And as the time passed and they didn’t do anything but feed me and make sure I was drugged enough I didn’t put up a fight whenever they showed their faces, they left me the fuck alone.

I just needed them to take me out of the cell so I could tear them limb from limb.

I’d roared and growled for them to tell me where she was, to give me a sliver of information so I wasn’t fucking crazed with fear and worry for her.

But my demands were met with silence and sedation. And asking any of the primal fucking Otherworld males trapped here proved fruitless. They didn’t give two shits about anything aside from not losing their minds.

Although I wanted to destroy every human in this godforsaken place, burn it to the ground, and watch them scream in agony as fire licked at their skin and charred their bones, my priority was getting Larkin.

And she was here. I felt it.

Time seemed to roll together in one continuous loop, and it didn’t help that whatever toxic cocktail they kept injecting me with was done on a schedule.

And the last time they thought I was sedated enough, when they’d been brave enough to come into my cell, I made them wish they hadn’t. I was pretty sure I tore one of their arms off, nearly had his throat ripped out before they shot three more darts into the side of my neck, successfully taking my big ass down.

I emptied my stomach one more time, getting all that poison out of my body. I placed my palms on the cement and pushed myself up, staying on my hands and knees for a minute until the nausea faded.

When I lifted my head, I could see a bottle of water and a sandwich on a paper plate sitting by the cell door.

It was a long while before I was clearheaded enough to stand, but when I was upright, I started pacing the cell. From wall to bars. Wall to bars. Back and forth, back and forth.

I could hear the creature in the cell next to me growling, something hard and heavy being slammed up against the bars.

“Bane, mate, stop with the bloody fucking racket!” a male with a thick accent roared so loudly I gritted my teeth in annoyance. “You do this shite every damn time, and all it earns you is being fucking tranqed.”

“I’m not your mate, Vox, so you’ll do well to keep your fucking mouth shut,” the male in the cell beside me growled in the deepest voice I’d ever heard.

There were so many creatures surrounding me that it was hard sifting through the scents. I smelled a variety of Otherworlders mixed with the stench of the Assembly humans.

I walked up to the bars, as close as I could get to the cell beside me without getting fucking singed from the magic, and inhaled deeply, focusing on his scent.

A demon.

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