Page 37 of Her Tortured Beasts

“Cold,” Solomon says after taking my tympanic temperature with a handheld device. “She is far too cold.” He feels my forehead with the back of his hand.

Xander looks up from his phone. I think he’s trying to distract himself from my scent. “Aren’t serpents supposed to be cold-blooded?”

“This is no serpentine magic.”

Xander stares at me and I level him a stare back.Helooks warm. The blood under his skin thrums with deliciousheat. With great purpose, I allow the shark to recede, allowing seductive warmth to fill my body once again.

My head tilts back, my back arching as I close my eyes, feeling the full power of my desire speed through my limbs like bullet trains.

“If she’s in heat now,” Solomon says, wiping the sweat off his own forehead. “The king will want the event in her next cycle, which makes it three weeks. No more, so that she is ovulating for the first attempt.”

“Right,” Xander says tightly. But instead of his voice drawing away, like I’d imagined, the cursed dragon’s voice strays closer.

“And she will require extra security due to these extra pheromones,” Solomon says. “It would be wise to lock her up again.”

A chair scrapes, and all that hot blood sits next to me. “My room is the most secure lodging after these dungeons. She cannot return to solitary.”

Cold fluid begins to travel into my hand, where they have begun the drip. I breathe deeply, the flood of lust overcoming my thoughts. My left hand slides down my stomach and towards the apex of my thighs, where I might gain some relief?—

“None of that.” Xander snatches up my wrist and pins it down to the side of the bed, his skin hot. “Didn’t anyone teach you any manners?”

“I’m sure you will,” I purr, my eyes still closed against the too-bright lights as I register the feeling of his skin against mine.

That broken part of me wails in agony. There is no bond here as there should be. No mate to be found here as there once was. My anima screams for the other pieces of our soul.

Quite suddenly, the cotton wool that had filled my mind in sustained isolation clears like clouds parting for the sun.

“You’ve gotten hard for me once,” I say. “Once that I know of, anyway.” I’d felt it that time Damien Agnis had locked ourclass in a cage filled with water and we’d asked Xander to break us out. I’d picked the lock of the obsidian shackles Xander was wearing, but in order to do that in the cramped cage, I’d had to straddle his thigh.

I’d loved and hated every part of that moment. It had been the validation I’d needed. Xander didn’t find me disgusting at all. It was quite the opposite.

Every heat I’d had, he’d made himself scarce, and now…he had no choice but to experience it.

“Does it affect your cursed, blackened soul?” I pant. The rest of the room quietens. “Or are you too far gone down the path to hell?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you, SnakeSpawn,” comes the deep drawl. “Just lucky that you’re more useful to everyone alive.”

I hate that I desire him even now. Hate that his voice makes my stomach flutter, that it makes me want to run my fingers along his bare skin and lower still.

“They’d never let you live that down,” I whisper. “They’d make your life a nightmare.”

“They can try,” he scoffs with flaming arrogance. “They’d never succeed.”

I laugh then. A hacking rasp thatcouldbe taken for sexy. “Your dragon powers know when other people are lying, but do they know when you’re lying to yourself?”

“Tape her mouth shut.”

My eyes fly open and I immediately regret it. Cringing against the pain of the light, I choke. “What?”

“We need to feed her first,” Solomon says carefully.

“This was supposed to break her,serpent.” Xander is standing now, his voice rising. “You fools with your bloated educations and useless serpent magic have no fucking idea what you’re doing.”

I smile where I lie. There’s a little glucose in this drip; I can tell by the new energy in my veins and it feels rather nice.

“I have half a mind to fire you and instate a new team,” Xander continues angrily.

“But my lord—” Solomon starts.

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