Page 1 of Her Dark Seduction
Prologue
The metallic smell of blood—my blood—faded, but the screams remained, seeping from the stones in the wall and echoing around me. They were the cries of my fellow inmates, both those who’d preceded me and the ones who would follow. The darkness in my cell mirrored the black void in my heart, which had long ago swallowed up any hope.
As the screams gave way to low moans, a faint scuffling sound grew louder until its source moved in front of my eyes. I was not alone. I took a breath, wheezing against the stone floor. The shape turned. Two silver pinpricks flashed, then sharp, yellow teeth. I bared my own teeth, hissing until the shape drew back. One animal against another.
How had I come to this? For my entire life, five and twenty years, I’d built a fortress around my heart and mind, protecting the soul within. Yet over the course of one short year, that fortress had been destroyed by nobody’s hands but my own.
As a woman, I was the property of others since birth, a commodity to be used to suit their purposes. But my mind had been free, nurtured and encouraged by my beloved Maman. She schooled me to protect my maidenhead and my heart. Dearest Maman, who’d had so much love to give. Her one weakness had been her desperate need to be loved in return, and she’d paid for it with her life.
Lying on the cold, damp floor, separated from my own child, only now did I truly understand her despair. Her lover was dead. The sweet delivery from torment that death gave her had been made bitter by the knowledge she was abandoning her only child—me—to a traitor and madman. My father.
Now my own life had come full circle, my fate identical to hers, except for one thing.
The man I loved still lived.
A hoarse cry echoed from deep within the dungeons, and I shifted, the cold air contrasting with the white hot shards of pain in my shattered arm. My body was lost. Twisted and broken, it lay on the floor of my cell as my mind drifted above it and looked down at the pathetic creature I had become.
It would be all too easy to let myself slip away, to surrender to the pain.
Yet I had to fight for them.
For him.
My husband.
What would they do to him? These men who, with cold detachment, had told me of their ability to keep a man alive, screaming for days. Would his screams join my own—and those of the long-dead victims who haunted me?
Tomorrow they would destroy me, but I would fight them—take their blows and field their questions. I would never see the sun again, but my death would bring about life—the life of my beloved.
Spots of gray stained the walls as the light bled from the first rays of the sun, picking out the shadows of the pock-marked texture of the stone. With a squeal, my companion turned, claws scraping, a blur of a tail disappearing into the shadows.
An echo of footsteps whispered in the distance before growing louder, the rhythm of a man with a purpose.
Dawn had broken.
They were coming for me.
