Chapter 1

Chapter

One

SIERRA

E ach night the same dream. Same ending, no matter how much I fight it. Still kidnapped. Still without a clue on how to escape.

Yet tonight, after seven long months, or was it eight, one thing had changed.

I'm awake and I can still hear the voice in my head.

His voice.

The one from my dreams. The deep, raspy tone laced with desperation, impatience, and always ending with a sexy growl. It, the voice each night, instructed me to answer him.

I wanted to. But I couldn't. Not in my dreams, nor fully alert.

Each morning, I jolted awake. Achy and groggy, convinced that the sulfur fumes emitting from numerous fissures in the walls of my cave prison had finally penetrated my brain cells. I'd try to convince myself that the dreams were nothing more than hallucinations. Had to be.

Being held captive deep beneath the earth under an active volcano—I'd figured that bit out on the first day—was not conducive to clear thinking or, as it turns out, to hope.

"Mate, I'm almost there." The voice penetrated my brooding and for just a moment I felt less alone until the growing panic I'd begun to battle set back in.

It was all empty promises. Had to be. No one was coming to my rescue. It was simply my imagination running rampant, and yet a small part of me recognized the voice. Not that I'd heard it before my kidnapping. And yet my soul begged to differ. It recognized him. Somehow.

A bubble of laughter escaped me, filling the void. Besides my own breathing, it was the only sound I'd uttered in the last few days. My throat was beyond raw from screaming for help or demanding my jailers set me free.

I recognized I was hanging on to my sanity by a thread. A shiver overtook me as realization hit that my time was running out in spite of the daily rations I received. My strength had been fading for weeks and if I didn't get fresh air and mother earth beneath my feet and toes soon, to feed my power and the magic I hadn't used in years, then the hope the voice gave me nightly would be for nothing.

As if the man behind the voice sensed my despair, his words echoed once more. "Mate, I'm almost there."

Warmth filled my chilled body. Despite the elevated temperature of the cave, I always seemed to be cold. Then, as quick as it came, the hope dissipated and the darkest of thoughts took over.

Oh my god, what if it's not a rescuer? What if it's him ? Filling my head with false hope.

Him being the demon who'd snatched me from my life in Inverness.

A life I had carefully created. A safe one. Far from the coven I'd escaped in my youth. Away from the reality of what my true self was. A witch gifted with unwanted skills and the pressures of lifting others like me from obscurity within the supernatural world, to the riches they obsessed over.

Yeah, poor me.

Poor Sierra saddled with a power not willing to share with her coven.

I knew boo-hooing my fate would only lead to madness, but not having a bath or chocolate in over seven freaking months tended to do that to a woman who often indulged in both on the regular.

If that Dante creature would only show his smarmy, disfigured face again, then maybe I could use whatever power I'd buried long ago to free myself. Each day my frustration grew at my inability to help myself. The jailers he'd left behind to keep me barely alive never came close enough for me to cast anything stronger than a repulsion spell.

And dammit, I had no idea if it was day or night. I had to rely on the whispered conversations between my captors to know how long I'd been here. But I did know that I'd lost enough weight, and unfortunately my will, that I'd soon have little strength to walk out of here, free or not.

Because rescuer or no rescuer, my time was running out.