Chapter 28

I had made the most terrible mistake.

I'd known as much the moment before the club came smashing down upon my head, and it was now even more obvious. My whole head throbbed mercilessly, and my vision pulsed in time with the waves of pain. When I'd come to, I'd found that I was bound hand and foot, slung over a saddle like a bundle of kindling, and the horse's relentless motion had driven the breath out of me with every stride. When the journey had come to an abrupt stop, I'd thought I'd get some relief, but then I was hoisted up into the arms of a man that stank of beer, old blood, and stale body odour, and the nausea was rising, rising, as I was carried inside. Inside where? Not to safety, that was for certain. What I saw made me want to close my eyes tight, as if that would make it go away. My guts lurched as I stifled the urge to vomit.

"What do we do with her?" one man asked.

I tried to look at the speaker and my surroundings, but I couldn't see far. The place was dark and seemed cavernous. I realised why as torches were lit and stuffed into primitive sconces set into the walls of an actual cave. The man who was carrying me dumped me onto the cold stone floor. The movement jarred my throbbing head, and I reflected again on just how terrible my decision had been.

"I need my cut." Rion's voice was snivelling and querulous, and he sounded a completely different person to the sweet bath attendant whose intelligence I'd discounted. One who'd been so eager to help me. His eyes were squirrelly, while his nose twitched like a rat's. "Gotta get back before the master realises."

"‘The master…'" It was the same man who'd carried me in and unceremoniously dropped me onto the cave floor, mimicking Rion's whiny voice.

"Hey, that job helps me find all the likely marks for you to intercept on the road out of town," Rion whinged. "This one almost fell into my lap." He nodded toward me, but not in acknowledgement. It was more as if I was an inanimate object with no more thought or feeling than one of the rocks that littered the ground near me. Rion grinned in a way that I recognised. I'd become familiar with it at court: the conspiratorial, sly smile that weak men used to try to keep themselves out of the line of fire by mocking someone weaker. "Gave me a gold coin for my ‘help.' Got herself free of those likely lads she came in with, too."

"If she already gave you a gold coin, then you don't need anything from us." The leader's eyes had narrowed. "You've got your payment."

"From her but not…"

The slow trickling sound of cascading gravel coming from somewhere outside the mouth of the cave put a sudden halt to their argument.

"You led them here?" the leader snapped at Rion.

"What? No. How could I? I was with you the whole—"

Rion's babbled protestations were cut off by a long, drawn-out howl. All the men stiffened, even though it could have been a wild wolf out there howling at the moon. All I could do was laugh. Each movement hurt my head and my stomach, but I was unable to stop. It poured out of me in loud, racking bursts of relief because I knew that it meant I wasn't here on my own anymore.

Creed was coming.

I looked around me, still laughing, then realised that there were at least seven men, along with Rion, and each one of the robbers was armed to the teeth. I knew that the beast men had fearsome reputations, but fear struck me as I worried whether Creed might be outmatched. My laughter trailed away, turning sour and desolate before fading totally.

"Is one of your guards a beast man?" the leader asked me, his head whipping around to stare at me. "Is he?"

"A wolf shifter?" I forced myself to smile, then nodded, my whole head bobbing on my neck. "Worse than that."

"What?" The bandit strode forward. "What could be worse than that?" He kicked me with his foot, the blow reverberating through my whole body. "What the fuck could be worse than one of the beast men on our trail?"

"I'm his fated mate."

The moment I said the words, something broke inside my captor. He strode forward, grabbing me by the ropes around my wrist and hauled me up so high I was forced to go on my tiptoes.

"You want to hope you're lying about that, girl. Beast men might be legendary, but no more so than the Band of Twenty." I started to look around me, looking for the others, because I could only see seven. With a shake, he drew my focus back to him. "Haul the bitch up." He pulled a knife from his belt and held it toward me. When I went to shuffle back, he pressed it against my throat. "The beast man can either walk away or watch his ladylove's blood spill out on the stones. Garret, Riley, go and guard the cave entrance and send up the signal when the beast man arrives."

The men all moved, but I was only conscious of those nearest me. Of a rope going through the loop around my wrists, then how it was used to haul my hands up high above my head. When I looked up, I saw it was attached to a rusted bracket, set into an overhanging section of the cave well. I was tied in place, the balls of my feet barely touching the ground as the bandit settled in behind me, his position a mockery of a more intimate connection. The leader, the man I'd been prepared to pay good gold to help me, pressed the knife to my neck, making me take shallow breaths for fear of doing his work for him, and then he waited.

It didn't take long. A horn sounded, but the blast was cut off before the wet sound of a throat being torn heralded the fact that Creed had found the cave.

"Get ready to fight, you bastards!" the leader barked. "You're in this just as deep as I am, and the only way through it is to stick together." Men drew swords, but their agitation was clear in the way they moved from foot to foot and flicked their eyes back and forth, trying search the shadows. "Hold your ground! Hold your fucking ground!"

Perhaps a coordinated display of martial prowess would've helped in some other situation but not this one. A beast had found the cave, but he wasn't about to make it his home. It was going to be their graveyard.

Creed was in wolf-man form, halfway between a wolf and a man, with all the power of one and the superior instincts of the other. Death incarnate, in other words. He growled my name, a prayer to the battle gods,

"Jessalyn…" Then he took a step towards us.

The knife pressed harder against my neck.

"Don't take another step," the bandit leader ordered. "Not another fucking step. I'll have her bleeding out on the stones quicker than you can take another breath if you do."

"Oh, for that…" Creed's wolf's eyes glowed like lamplights in the dark, so it was easy to see as he trailed them down my neck and how they narrowed when he saw the knife blade. "…I'll have to kill all of you."

"But not before I kill her!" The bandit leader's voice sounded shrill with fear, and I could hear the harsh sound of his breath in and out, faster and faster. "She'll be dead…"

His threat trailed away as he watched Creed move.

I couldn't take in all the chaos Creed wrought. He moved too fast; here in one blink of an eye, there in the next. I forced my eyes to stay open so I could witness every moment as he plunged the same clawed hands that had caressed me so softly into the stomach of one man, then another, leaving their guts to spill on the ground before they could even raise their swords.

The remaining bandits blinked, unable to believe what they were seeing, but I didn't have that problem. I stared with a small smile on my face. I didn't fear Creed's ferocity because I had the conviction that he would always deploy it on my behalf, never against me. And he did, wrenching swords from shaking grips and then throwing them point first so they ended up embedding themselves in the chests of the bandits.

"You're not having all the fun, are you?"

Silas prowled into the cave, seemingly casually, a knife in either hand. One man rushed forward, thinking Silas was the weaker link, only to end up with a knife embedded in his eye socket. Those green eyes followed his enemy's fall to the ground with cool disinterest.

"You fucking tied her up?" Roan prowled forward with all the catlike menace of a lion, his brows jerking down. "You gutless prick."

"I'll kill her!"

He pressed the tip of the blade harder against my neck. As I breathed more frantically, I felt the point nick my skin followed by the sensation of a single drop of blood sliding down my throat.

"Now you've done it."

Arik tried for his usual tone of mocking disinterest, but as he spun his sword in his hand before gripping it firmly, they all moved as one. Knives flew, swords cut through the air in massive arcs and blood, so much blood, fountained before me. I should've been repelled by it all, but, curiously, my breathing calmed and my stomach settled.

"Seems like the best thing to do right now would be to run," I told my captor.

"Not while I have you." All the cocky callousness was gone from the man's voice now. "You're my way out of here."

"I'm your death," I promised him.

"Close your eyes, Princess," Arik warned as Creed got closer. "You don't want to see him like this."

But I did.

The knife was twisted away from my neck as the wrist of the hand holding it was broken. Then as the man screamed, he was hauled forward by the broken joint and sent slamming into the wall.

"Don't break him too soon," Roan said, with a grin, stepping forward and stabbing his sword into the cave wall to the bandit leader's left, then to his right, when he tried to make a run for it.

"He took Jessalyn!" Creed roared, still in his wolf-man form.

"We know." Silas appeared at his shoulder. "That's why this has to hurt him." He stared at my former captor, and a cruel smile formed on his lips. "You could've whisked away any other girl. Any one other than the one who belongs to us."

Belongs to us…? That's what my brain focused on and played over and over in my head, not the violent murder of my captor. He kept trying to get free, so Silas stabbed knives into both his wrists, then his ankles, to make clear what a mistake that was.

"I'll give you anything…" the man babbled in between screeching sobs. "I've got gold." He nodded to the bag he'd taken from me, but they just watched as the coins spilled on the ground. "There's more further back in the cave, jewels as well." He then looked past them to where I remained bound. "Furs for the lady—"

"Don't fucking look at her." And to drive his point home, Roan stabbed his sword into the man's shoulder joint, staring into his eyes as he pushed it home.

"If you do, I'll be forced to cut out your eyes." Silas let his knife come to rest just under the man's socket. "Before the ravens eat them."

"So you…?" I liked the frantic way he looked from one man to the other. "There's no way…?"

"The minute you took Jessalyn from us was the moment you signed your own death warrant," Arik said, tossing his sword to his other hand. Then, using a reverse grip, he cut the man's head from his shoulders in one sharp swipe.

"No…!" A high, almost girlish shriek drew our attention to where Creed stood with Rion kicking in his grip. "No, please, I didn't—"

"You tried to take her from me," Creed growled, his voice so deep and rumbly it echoed all around the cave. "You tried to take my mate!"

"I didn't know! Please, sir, I'm begging—"

"No one that walks this earth will ever take my mate from me again."

Creed consecrated his vow in blood, breaking Rion's neck with a negligent snap before letting his body fall to the ground.

And then he turned to face me.

I'd thought Arik, Roan, and Silas beautiful, each in his own way, but as I ran my eyes over Creed's body, I felt like none of them had anything on him. He was a big man—so much bigger than me—even in his purely human form, but, as I stood in front of him in his wolf-man form, I felt even more tiny and insignificant. Those massive arms, bulging with muscle, captured my attention first, then those savage claws that I knew could touch me so tenderly, but there was much more than that. The night we'd all met had been the first time I'd seen a naked man, but I'd been half out of my mind on roseblood and the differences between their bodies and mine hadn't really sunk in. Now, my eyes were drawn to the heavy, pendulous weight between Creed's legs and how it jerked as I took him in. He let out a low growl and stalked towards me with claws outstretched to slash through my bonds.

Then Arik stepped in his way.

"The princess tried to run from us." His voice was sinuous as a snake's, and it cut through the bestial haze Creed was caught in. "I think we need to make a few things clear. That she belongs to us." The light in Creed's eyes flared brighter as he studied Arik's face. "And that if she tries to run away, she will be punished."

I tried to yank against the rope, testing the knot that kept my arms high above me. But as I wriggled, twisted, and pulled, the rope tightened around my wrists.

"Punish me?" I stammered out, trying for a strident tone and failing utterly. "I just escaped a wicked plan to kidnap me and do… the gods know what."

"Wicked plan?" Silas' eyes slid down my body, taking in the way it was pulled taut by the rope above me. He flicked his wrist and a knife sliced through the bindings at my ankles before he smiled. "Oh, Princess, the wickedness has only just started."