“I want to have a look at that scalp wound. The last thing I need is for you to collapse and die on me before I can make you talk.”
He put his hands on her shoulders, and she flinched under his touch. He tightened his grip and turned her around. Her hair had come loose and he ran his fingers through the silky strands. A red, angry swelling marred the smooth line of her skull, but the skin hadn’t broken. He turned her back to face him, and slipped a finger beneath her chin, tilted her head so he could look down into her face. Her eyes were an amazing color, bitter chocolate flecked with gold, but the pupils weren’t dilated, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t concussed.
Her lips were slightly parted. Without thinking, his hand moved from her chin to her face, and he stroked the pad of his thumb over her full lower lip, swollen where she had worried it with her teeth.
Her eyes widened, her body stiffened, but she didn’t move away. Sebastian slipped his thumb between her lips and felt the warm, wet velvet caress of her tongue. His reaction was instant, his cock stiffening in his pants.
A deep longing filled him, to pick her up, carry her to the cot, and lose himself in her body. Instead, he pulled away and stepped back. He shoved his hands in his pockets to stop himself touching her. She stared at him, a bemused almost hurt expression on her face, and he had to bite back the need to tell her everything would be all right.
Which would very likely be a lie.
Jesus, what was it about this woman? He was in trouble. He had to get out of there. He crossed to door and banged on the bars. “Riley,” he called. “Let me out of here.” He turned back to her. “What’s your name?”
She shrugged. “Anya.”
“Well, Anya, I don’t want to hurt you, but my loyalty is to my people. I will do anything needed to get them back or avenge their death.” He shook his head. Why was he explaining?
Riley entered the outer room, and unlocked the cage. Sebastian stepped out and glanced back at Anya; she hadn’t moved.
“I’m going to leave you alone for a while,” he said. “I want you to think about it, and when I come back, you will tell me what happened to my people.” He locked the door and turned to leave.
“Sebastian.”
“What?”
“I’ll never talk.”
A pain clenched his heart. “Then I think we will both live to regret it.”
Chapter Four
Anya reached up with a trembling hand and touched her lips.
What had just happened?
For a minute back there, she’d thought he was going to kiss her.
Who was this man, who threatened her with torture one moment then the next touched her with a gentleness she’d never experienced before. At the memory of that touch, her eyes stung, and she blinked, feeling the unexpected dampness on her lashes. She never cried. What would be the point?
She backed up and sank down on the cot, rolled onto her side, and curled into a tight ball as though she could shut out the world. But he would be back soon, and she needed to decide what to tell him. If anything.
The Agency was all she knew. All she had ever known. They had created her, brought her up. She owed her very life to them and without the medicine they provided for her daily, she would die.
All that was true. But recently, she had come to hate her very existence. She had spent all her life at the Agency, but sometimes, out on a mission, she would watch people go about their lives, and the craving to be part of the world had grown inside her until it was a constant companion.
But she wasn’t a person. She was a thing the Agency had made in a test tube then trained as a weapon. She belonged to them. But she didn’t want to kill for the Agency anymore. She’d found it hard even when she had believed she fought on the right side. Now she no longer believed.
She wished she could read Sebastian’s mind. The Agency had told her he headed up a group of mercenaries. A group who would do any job for the right price. Somehow, that didn’t ring true anymore. Why would a mercenary be shielded? It must mean he knew of the work the Agency had been doing with telepaths.
She’d long suspected that the Agency was carrying out other research. From time to time, she’d catch flashes of strange minds imprisoned in the cells beneath the building. She hadn’t understood who or what they were; only that they were something other than human, and she’d tried to close her mind to their pain and suffering. Was that when her doubts about the Agency had begun?
Her mind flinched away from thinking about what she had seen in the forest. Now she forced herself to confront the truth.
Sebastian Quinn was a wolf. A werewolf.
Bound To Moonlight (Sisters Of The Moon #2)
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