CHAPTER 5
“Lyra.”
Grey stared at the slender black-haired female, right into those luminous cerulean eyes.
Gods, she had a beautiful name to match her beautiful looks. He should have expected it, but it hit him hard, would have knocked him on his arse if he hadn’t already been sitting.
He looked at the small fire he had risked making so he could heat some soup for her, and then at his knees, anywhere but at her. He had stared at her enough already. If he kept on staring at her, she was going to start feeling nervous, and he didn’t want that.
He lifted his eyes back to meet hers. “You were out a while. I took your brace off while you were sleeping.”
“How long?” She frowned at her cup and turned it in her hands, and hell, it was sweet relief to know she understood English.
She spoke it with a confidence that said she more than understood it. She was as fluent in it as he was. Although, her accent wasn’t British like his. It was hard to place. An accent of Hell?
“Two days… I think.” He raised his hands from his knees and turned them, trying to get her to look at his wrists, which felt like a dick move when she ended up looking at her own instead, and the cold metal that circled them. “I don’t have a watch… if I’m honest, I don’t have a clue what day it is, let alone what time.”
She didn’t smile at that attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
She remained cold. Distant.
He could understand that though.
She had been through a lot, more than he had guessed if the pronounced scars around her throat and the ones he had seen on her back were anything to go by.
“Drink up,” he said and moved back to the other side of the cave to give her some space.
She tucked her legs up against her bottom to keep herself covered. She looked small like that. Fragile. She was strong, he could sense it in her, but there was a frailty to her that called to him, had him wanting to be close to her at all times, roused a need to make her feel safe and protect her.
He forced himself to remain where he was, at a distance from her, and rifled through his backpack, looking for a protein bar or something to keep him going, something to do other than stare at her.
She awkwardly sipped her soup.
The silence in the cave weighed down on him, growing more strained by the second.
He tried to think of something to say to set her at ease and reassure her that he wasn’t out to do anything sinister to her.
“It’s good,” she whispered, shattering the silence for him.
She looked over the rim of her cup at him, her blue eyes instantly pulling his to them. There was something magical about those eyes of hers. Once his met them, he couldn’t stop looking into them, found it hard to break free.
If he was being honest, he didn’t want to break free of them. He wanted to look into them forever.
“I can’t take the credit for that. It came out of a pack.” He shrugged and forgot about looking for something to eat and settled for drinking his fill of her instead. “It was my emergency rations.”
“You were expecting things to go badly?” Her fine black eyebrows pinched above those alluring pools of tropical blue.
He rolled his shoulders again. “Maybe. It always pays to be prepared.”
“Were you in the SAS or something?” Her soft rosy lips almost tilted into a smile.
He smiled at her. “No. Just raised that way.”
Gods, this easy banter felt good. When was the last time he had been able to speak with someone like this, someone who wasn’t his family?
“Not around here though.” She set the cup down beside her knees.
He smiled wider. “That obvious, huh?”
Was she local? He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to push her too hard. He had never heard of a hellcat living in the mortal world, so she had to be local.
She looked as if she wanted to ask him something else, but then she lifted her cup and sipped the soup again, and looked for all the world as if she was hiding in it, avoiding him now.
That dreadful silence descended again.
Cut only by the sound of the broken chains attached to the thick silver cuffs around her wrists jangling as she moved.
Grey glared at them, a need to get them off her flooding him, driving him to do something, even when he couldn’t.
He had tried to break them when she had passed out.
Whatever metal they were made from, it was tough, strong enough to withstand all his attempts to remove them. But then, he had been trying to be gentle with her, afraid of waking her with what he was doing. Maybe if he made another attempt now that she was conscious and he had no fear of waking her, he would be able to break them.
She looked down at them. “I couldn’t find the key for them. I found the one for my collar.”
Collar.
His eyes snapped up to her throat. Settled on the scars that ringed it.
Gods.
The thought of her collared had his blood running hot, a fierce inferno sweeping through his veins, and it birthed a dark and terrible need to return to the area where she had been held, where some sick son of a bitch had set up a stage to sell her into slavery, and track down every single person associated with that twisted business.
He wanted to hunt them.
Needed it.
“What’s your name?” Her soft voice lured him up from his black thoughts, broke them apart to allow light to shine through.
She wasn’t there now.
She was here, safe and free.
With him.
She gave him an expectant look, those blue eyes pulling him back under her spell, making him forget what she had asked.
What was it about this bewitching, beautiful hellcat that had him so on edge around her, torn between a need to move closer to her and a need to distance himself?
“You do have a name?” She canted her head, causing her messy black hair to brush her dirty cheek.
Name.
Yes. He had one.
Hadn’t he told her it already?
Fuck, maybe he hadn’t. He had been so caught up in hers, and how it fitted her so beautifully, that he had forgotten to repay her courtesy by offering his own.
“Grey,” he said.
Husked if he was being honest.
It had come out murmured and intense, filled with emotion he didn’t quite understand but he knew was dangerous.
A touch of colour rose onto her cheeks as she looked down at her soup.
It was gone a second later, her pretty face shifting to a blankness that he found he didn’t like, because he didn’t want her to hide her feelings from him.
She set the cup down.
Didn’t look at him.
“Thanks for the soup, but I need to be going now.”
Those words left him cold.
She couldn’t go.
He had only just found her.
She reached her right hand up above her to grip the black wall of the cave, plastered his t-shirt to her curves with her left arm, and pulled herself up.
Her left leg buckled beneath her.
Grey was across the short distance between them in the blink of an eye and had caught her before she hit the ground.
“That was stupid,” he muttered, fury pounding in his veins at the thought she had been so desperate to get away from him that she had hurt herself, a darkness he liked as much as the thought of her leaving.
They mingled together, blurred and had a need flaring inside him, one that demanded he make her stay.
He eased her back down, trying to ignore how the feel of her soft bare skin against his lit him up inside.
She pressed warm palms against his bare chest and shoved hard as she growled and snarled at him, flashing her short fangs.
Grey pushed back against the instincts that gripped him, the ones that told him to exert his strength on her, to bend her to his will and make her submit to him.
It took all of his willpower, but he managed to force himself to release her, the fear he could feel flowing through her giving him the strength to go through with it, because he didn’t want to hurt her.
He didn’t want to frighten her.
He rose to his feet and took a step backwards, and then pushed himself to take another, and then a third and fourth, until his back was plastered against the rough wall of the cave and he was as far from her as he could get.
It was hard.
Gods, it was hard to stand at such a distance from her when his animal side roared with need the depth of which he had never experienced before.
It shook him.
He pressed his palms against the sharp rocks behind him and clawed at them, focused on the pain to ground himself and on her.
She shook as she clawed at her meagre cover of his black t-shirt, hands trembling violently as she desperately tried to keep herself covered, her heart a wild erratic thundering in his ears.
The urge to hunt and kill those responsible for her mental anguish returned full force, had him looking towards the mouth of the cave to his right and battling the powerful need to leave, to risk losing her in order to avenge her.
But, holy hell, he wasn’t sure he would be able to go on living if he returned to find her gone.
Grey closed his eyes, ground his molars together, and clenched his hands into fists that shook as he tried to tamp down the conflicting needs that were pulling him apart, and that terrifying urge to stake a claim on her.
She stilled on his senses, her eyes searing his bare chest, but her heartbeat was off the scale and the scent of her fear grew stronger.
Because he was frightening her, standing there fighting with himself, no doubt giving her the impression he wanted to do something to her that they would both regret.
He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He was stronger than that, and he would master this need that burned inside him, this hunger that raged out of control.
Because it frightened him too.
It wasn’t him.
Gods, what terrible beast had she awoken in him?
He sharply turned away from her, sank to his knees beside his pack and rifled through its contents, pulling his shit together as he did so, slowly shutting down his feelings one by one and mastering them, bringing them back under control. As he worked on finding her something to wear, focusing on the small task of making her feel more comfortable, the hunger began to abate and finally it weakened enough that he could reclaim control.
His hands stopped shaking.
He pulled out an item of clothing, his only spare, and offered it to her without looking at her.
She snatched it from his hand.
Grey averted his face, turning it towards his right, and kept his eyes closed, ignoring that whispered voice that told him to peek at her. That wasn’t him. He wasn’t that sort of male. The voice grew louder, telling him that she belonged to him now, she just didn’t know it yet and he needed to make her know it.
He needed to make her submit.
He ground his teeth again, clenching his jaw so hard they creaked under the pressure.
It wasn’t him.
“Shorts?” She sounded horrified, but her voice was still a sweet balm to his aching heart, soothed that part of himself he was finding hard to control, a new and terrifying part that had never existed before he had set eyes on her.
He shrugged as casually as he could manage. “I figured Hell might be a bit warm for my taste.”
She huffed, and he was glad to hear and to feel that she was calming again, becoming more at ease around him.
“Done.”
He wanted to look at her, but at the same time he didn’t, because he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to fight the strange urges that came over him whenever he so much as glanced at her.
They troubled him.
They had come on so quickly, strong and fierce, gripping him hard the second she had announced she was leaving.
Had there always been this darker side of himself inside him? Did it come from the fact he had spent his entire life alone, even when he had been surrounded by people? Was it because he had been shunned at every turn, treated with contempt by the very people he had fought to protect?
Or was it something about her that had him feeling this way?
He risked a glance at her.
She sat by the small fire, the warm glow playing across the subtle curves of her face and brightening her eyes as she fidgeted with the belt on the black cargo shorts, trying to tie it tighter around her slender waist.
Gods, he had thought her beautiful as a hellcat, but she had stolen his breath and roused something fierce inside him when she had shifted back and he had seen how much more beautiful she was in her human form.
That something had only grown fiercer as she had spoken to him, passed time with him, told him a little about her past and revealed small details about herself without saying a word.
She lifted those striking blue eyes to meet his and then quickly dropped them again, a touch of innocence about the way she did it that had his heart pounding harder, blood rushing faster.
And that need rising again.
He tamped it back down, refusing to let it control him.
He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t the sort of male that could force a female to like him.
He stared at her hands, trying to focus on something other than her face to give himself a moment to pull himself back together.
It was a mistake.
Her black nails captured his attention and stirred wicked thoughts. They were long and sharp, made for raking down his back.
He swallowed hard.
This wasn’t him.
He was a male made for protecting others, and he would be that male with her.
He would protect her from himself.
“I can get you to the nearest portal.” Those words sounded hollow in his ears and his tiger side rebelled against them, snarled and snapped, paced in his heart and filled it with an urge to do the opposite, to keep Lyra here with him instead of setting her loose.
He would protect her in the only way he could.
He would take her to the nearest portal.
And he would never see her again.