Page 152 of Monsters in Love

“Please,” she choked out, her words halting when she felt the slight prick of his claws.

His displeased growl shot through her, and she nearly wept at the horrific train of thoughts running through her head. There was no telling what the beast would do to her. Eat her? Rape her? Both? She had nearly worked herself into a panic when, after a stretch of silence, it was followed by a grunted sigh. She toppled over with another indignant squeak when he surged up, pushing to his feet.

Blinking up at her captor in the soft light of the torch-lit room, Vicky watched as he rubbed one horn with his large hand before dragging his fingers through his mane in a distinctly human expression of frustration. His eyes narrowed on her unhappily.

“I should not let your soft words sway me. You are mine. You are in my care and protection. My companion. I should enjoy your softness and heat as much as you enjoy my strength,” he muttered with a venomous glower.

He shook his head, his massive dark horns cutting through the air, and spun away, his long legs carrying him away from her quickly. Her eyes widened fearfully as he headed toward a deeply grooved wall with the realization that he intended to leave.

He was going to leave her there—alone.

Vicky scrambled to her feet in a rush, half stumbling as she chased after him. “Wait! Don’t leave me! Please!”

He tossed her an impatient look over his shoulder without so much as slowing his pace.

“I hunt,” he snapped.

In the next moment, he ducked his head, angling his body to the side. There was a shift around him that blurred his edges enough that Vicky rubbed her eyes, thinking that there was something wrong with her vision, and then he was gone.

Vicky stared intently at the space for a long moment, bewildered. He had just disappeared. How was that even possible?

Approaching slowly, she continued to eye the space. There was a definite groove there, but she couldn’t see any kind of doorway. Uncertain, she moved closer, waving her hand over the space in front of her until she finally flattened her hand against the stone. Nothing.

“What the hell?” she whispered.

Frantically, Vicky ran her hands over the wall, her fingernails digging into any crack or crevice in search of a mechanism or handhold that might reveal a doorway. She dipped her fingers into one particularly deep crack only to jerk her hand back at the sensation of something gripping her fingers and a tickling sensation brushing across the back of her hand. Reacting on pure instinct, she ripped her hand free and yelped in pain and then again in horror at the large black and red centipede scurrying up her wrist. With a shrieked curse, she shook it free before proceeding to stomp it beneath her boots.

“Shit! Fuck!” She continued to gasp as she rubbed the back of her hand numbly after finally stepped away from it to stare down at its pulverized remains.

She soon became aware of a stinging sensation that shot through her hand, making her wince and draw her hand up to inspect it. Even in the low light of the room she could see the trail of three deep scratches that vaguely resembled claw marks not unlike scratches she received from the neighbor’s cat she tried to pet as a child. It had felt like someone—or something—had grabbed her hand.

She winced and shook her hand in an attempt to relieve the sting. It had certainly hurt enough when she had pulled free. What the hell could have grabbed her? Whatever it was, she wouldn’t feel comfortable in the room unless she was certain that nothing was going to make an appearance in there with her the moment that she let her guard down.

Hoping that she wasn’t doing something phenomenally stupid by investigating, though maintaining a safe distance, she crept closer to the small crevice, her brow scrunching as she peered at it. Her expression slowly morphed into a confused frown.

She couldn’t see how even a whole hand would have been pushed through from the opposite of the wall. She had small hands and had only just barely been able to slip hers inside. Whatever the case, there certainly wasn’t any sign that she could see now of clawed hands reaching out for her.

Vicky backed away again and shivered as she skirted around the remains of the centipede.

“Probably just got my hand stuck in a tight spot and scratched it on some sharp rocks in there. That they line up in a way that looks like claw marks is just a weird coincidence. Don’t go losing your mind now, Vicky.”

The pep talk didn’t help.

Spinning away, she raced back toward the bed, throwing herself onto the platform and pulling her legs as she burrowed under the furs. The monsters in the walls could have them. She wasn’t planning on moving from the bed at all if she could help it.

Her bladder took that moment to remind her that it was uncomfortably full. Groaning, Vicky threw her feet back over the side of the platform and slid off the bed. Keeping on her toes as if not letting her heel touch the ground would do anything to evade a potential threat, Vicky hurried off in search of a place to relieve herself.

As she scrambled around the room, she cursed the minotaur’s furry hide. The very least he could have done was show her where to pee if he had planned to keep her trapped in there. Her curses turned a lot more inventive when her search turned up nothing useful, especially since she was leery about going down into the two unknown tunnels after her last experience of sticking her hand somewhere it didn’t belong. With her luck, the water source would have something living in it ready to eat her. Who knew what kind of creatures her captor lived with if the centipede was anything to go by?

In a moment of sheer embarrassment, she reluctantly found a space near a wall that wasn’t too dark to take care of her business, her cheeks flaming every moment that she squatted there and long after she hurried back over to the bed.

Asterion paused in the corridor, his fur standing on end as the sensation of being watched washed over him. His preternatural vision sharpened in the dim light as he turned his head, seeking the source of the sensation. Frustration unfurled in his gut at the delay. He had been gone far too long and was eager to return to his human, which made his mood all the fouler at being detained to deal with the creature stalking him.

“Come out now and I may not break your neck at the first opportunity,” he growled, his threat amplified by the high-vaulted space of the labyrinth’s torch-lit walls.

His ear twitched in response to a light scrape behind him, and he slowly turned, preferring to neither show his back nor demonstrate any unease in the face of a potential threat. His nostrils flared, drawing in a familiar musky scent.

“Barbasas, what are you doing in this part of the labyrinth?” he grunted, his eyes narrowing on the satyr that emerged from the thickness of the shadows.

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