“Burn this one first!”

Over the sound of Linnea’s brain rattling around in her head like a marble inside a glass jar, she heard the scarred man with wild eyes and wilder hair say to burn her first. Her mouth tasted like dirty pennies, her skull already beginning a slow pounding that blurred her vision and sent the ground beneath her tilting. But her heart jack-hammered with fear.

Burn? As in, with fire?

What the hell had her sister gotten involved in? These aliens were insane.

The man, who she assumed must the leader because of the way everyone watched him, hauled her to her feet, nearly wrenching her arm out of her socket. “This one has some meat on her bones!” he shouted to his men. “She might take a little longer to cook!”

A furious blush spread down Linnea’s cheeks and necks; tears pricked at the back of her eyes. She’d always had the embarrassing reaction of bursting into tears when she was angry.

“Let me go!” She brought her knee up, perilously close to hitting the leader in his moneymakers, but he avoided the blow just in time.

“Oh, she’s got some life to her yet. Are you sure you don’t want to take this one home, Merick? She could be a fun ride!”

The men laughed like braying jackasses. They shouted and hooted as their leader twisted Linnea in a circle, forcing her to pirouette as a rabbit does on the spit. All around her, men yelled and shoved—some were eating raw meat with their hands—and wolves milled about, their slinking grace unnatural. Their eyes so keen, so knowing. So human.

Linnea knew from Maeve that there were shape-shifters on this planet, and looking at this group, she knew they were the wolf shifters. The leader holding her even smelled like a dog.

They parted as a short, muscular man built like a hammer strode toward her. At first, she thought he was wearing nothing but skin-tight purple lycra pants, but as he drew closer, she realized they were scales. They rustled and rattled along his legs, and when he smiled at her, his teeth were filed to a ragged point.

Like a snake.

“See for yourself, Merick,” the leader said to the scaled man. “Smell her.”

The leader shoved her at Merick. She didn’t have time to catch herself before he used her arm to jerk her up onto her toes. Pressing his cold nose against her neck, he inhaled deeply and sighed, his breath smelling of raw fish. “She smells like sugar,” Merick remarked, his voice a curdling caress against her skin.

“Fuck you!” She twisted her arm in his grip with a downward slash of her hand. His hold on her slipped. Before he could recover, she punched him square in the nose.

Dark black blood poured from his nostrils.

The men fell silent.

Merick brought a hand to his face, brushing his fingers across the thick trail of blood. His eyes, black as his blood, locked on her. Then he smiled, but his razor-sharp teeth didn’t terrify her nearly as much as his hardening cock did. His scales vibrated against the growing bulge.

He turned his smile to the leader. “You’re right, Savas. This one does have some life to her. I think I’d like to watch her light slowly fade. Personally.”

The leader—Savas—smiled broadly. “After all the women I’ve brought through here, you finally pick one for yourself? This calls for a celebration.”

The men, the pack, roared their approval.

Linnea backed away, free now that no one was crushing her arm in their grip. Her calves bumped into a raised platform, and she spun around to find a throne of skulls and twigs, sun-bleached bones and thicker, dripping things. A small, private fire burned on the dais, with a small animal cooking above the flames. Beside it were two massive men, made all the more hulking by their height above her.

One was blond and angelic, save for the sneer twisting his lips. However, it was the alien on his knees who drew Linnea’s eyes.

Her ears rang as she stared at him, her blood pumping extra loud, extra hard.

He was gorgeous.

Twisting black hair fell over his shoulders in braids with gnarled knots twining through the strands. His skin was a rich, burnished brown and glistening with sweat and ash from the building fire. His bones were prominent, his stomach hollow between the tapered points of his hips, giving the impression that like Linnea, he was a prisoner here. Because surely, if he’d been at his strongest, he could have taken the blond man holding him down with one easy swipe of his massive arm.

But his face. When Linnea’s gaze came to his face, she froze.

His brows were heavy and dark; one scarred straight through. His nose had been broken, possibly a few times, and beneath that was a thick beard unable to hide a strong, square jawline. None of that compared to his eyes—light gray, like the smoke around them, and flashing from the licking flames of the fire beside him. His eyes locked on her, and in his gaze, she saw all his pain. All his sadness.

The breath rushed out of her at the sight of him.

“Looks like someone has an admirer!” the blond mutt, as Linnea would now think of him, called over to Savas.

“Shut up, Caj,” the burnished sun-god of a man before Linnea snapped. His voice glided across her skin like trailing fingertips.

“What are you going to do about it?” Caj provoked. His gaze locked over Linnea’s shoulder. She spun and retreated a few steps, placing herself closer to the beautiful man on his knees and farther from the others. She moved on instinct before she even realized where she was going.

She didn’t move again.

“What’s this?” Savas asked, walking up with Merick. “An admirer, you say?”

“Father, don’t—” the young, skinny man beside her started.

Father? Savas was his father?

Holy cannolis.

“Don’t speak,” Savas snarled. His son instantly closed his mouth. Above him, Caj’s sneer stretched farther across his horrible face. “If the bitch is interested in even my scrap of a son, then she will be thrilled with you, Merick.”

Linnea’s eyes slid to the small fire. A longer stick to test the meat rested just within reach, its tip burning, and red. She looked up to find those smoky eyes locked on her, and ever so slightly, he shook his head. Starved and on his knees. His own father was holding him captive. Yet he stayed still and obedient while around him women were sold and threatened. Beautiful eyes or not, he was someone too abused to make an escape.

That would never be her.

She winked at him before making a lunge for the burning stick in the fire. Reaching her hand in quickly, she grabbed the end. The other end of the stick was ablaze, some kind of tar stuck to the wood, and burned so hot it was almost blue.

Caj had just enough time to shout a warning before Linnea reared back and swung the stick as hard as she could against the side of Savas’s head, setting his hair and clothes on fire.

Other men ran toward her while her target beat the flames out, but not before losing some hair and getting a nasty red mark on his cheek. She hoped it would blister and puss and get infected. Leaping down from the dais, Caj grabbed her.

Savas growled, clutching his burned face. “You’ll pay for that, woman,” he hissed.

Caj ripped the stick from her hand and threw it aside.

“Oh, really?” Linnea spit, glaring at Savas. “You’re going to make me pay? You steal women and sell them. You’re disgusting. You probably have to do that just to force a woman to be around your disgusting ass.”

At her words, Savas laughed, head back in a howling sound that sent a shiver up her back.

The sound of his amusement set her teeth on edge. “I’m not joking around with you here, buddy.”

“Believe me, human. There is a joke here, you just aren’t getting it.” The leader’s flesh rolled, and he shimmered around the edges like her vision was blurring.

A low rumbling built in Savas’s chest. Behind him, his men watched with rabid, almost glowing eyes. Caj stepped away from her, putting plenty of space between her body and Savas. Only then did she feel truly terrified.

She was about to be eaten alive.

“Father, no!” The man with long braids leaped down from the dais, throwing an arm across her chest to force her behind him. “If you have ever cared about me at all, don’t do this. Don’t kill these women for nothing. Just send them home or let them go to Gerrit.”

“Gerrit?” Savas roared, the side of his face now a painful shade of red. “You and your puppy love for that traitor! He is nothing, no leader. What kind of Alpha allows his slaves to run around like free Vilkas and denies his people the right to trade? He and Kaveh were a disgrace to Clan Vilka!”

Some of the other men cheered, others howled. Linnea peeked around the man’s shoulder and found far more wolves staring back at her than she remembered. She returned to her spot directly behind him.

I’ll just stay right back here, thank you very much.

“There’s nothing to be found with Gerrit that you can’t get here,” Savas continued. “Nothing he can offer the Vilkas that I can’t. And your adoration for him over your own flesh and blood is getting tiresome. I brought you into what will be known as the greatest pack of all the clans, and this is how you thank me?”

“You brought me in?” The man’s voice shook, but he stood straighter. Up close Linnea could see that he was almost as tall as his father, and despite his slender, hollowed appearance, he was stacked with wiry muscle. “You treat me as badly as some chained up Katu! No matter what I do, you’re never happy, and if pleasing you means allowing these women to die, I have no interest anymore. You’re no father to me. You should have killed me the night you assassinated our true Alpha. You should have let me die with my people. My real people.”

A hush fell over the camp. Whatever he’d just said, it had meaning beyond what Linnea could imagine. She saw it etched all over Savas’s face. If she’d thought the man a monster beyond feeling, his son’s words had dealt a solid blow.

“He’s a waste of energy, Savas.” Caj approached now that he was no longer between a wolf and his meal. Caj’s cruel, twisted mouth was a match for the man in charge. They were both bloodthirsty beasts. “Just today, we tracked a pregnant Katu, and he let her go so we couldn’t bring her back as a prize for you.”

The man beside her tensed. Without thinking, she laid a hand on his back in solidarity. His skin twitched, but he didn’t sidestep her touch.

“You’ve gone too far now, Son,” Savas said, his voice low.

“As have you, Father.”

Linnea felt him speak the words through her hand. His body trembled with each one.

Savas turned to Merick. “It does seem my son has taken to protecting women today. Perhaps we throw them both in a cage tonight while we feast. I’ll make sure you are entertained with plenty of compliant companions before you take the woman home tomorrow.”

Merick gave a sharp nod, his forked tongue sweeping across his lips as his eyes swept one last time down Linnea’s body. She scrunched up her nose at the sight. She didn’t even look at freshly baked brownies with that much open lust. Disgusting.

“Caj?”

At Savas’s summons, Caj straightened up like a tin soldier, all but clicking his heels together. “Yes, sir?”

“Make sure this one and my son watch.” To his men, he turned and shouted, “Burn the women!”

His pack erupted in a cacophony of noise. Wolves howled, and the women gathered near the growing pyre didn’t even have the strength to scream as the aliens descended on them like vultures and dragged them toward the fire.

“No. Stop!” The man surged forward, but Caj twisted, slamming the heel of his hand straight into the chest of Savas’s son.

The wind knocked out of him as he bent over gasping.

At the pyre, a man dragged a woman by the hair toward the inferno. Before Linnea could even scream, the woman’s body was tossed into the flames.

As Linnea crumpled to her knees, the young man turned and caught her.

She pressed her face against his chest, her world tilting sideways, and the only thing keeping her upright was an alien’s arms wrapping firmly around her.