He grunted, the sound beastly. “After all your hard work to draw me to you?” He tsked. “I had already found you, you know.”
She was going to kill him.
He simply chuckled as she strained against the drug holding her immobile.
“They’re waiting for me, just as they left you waiting,” he promised then. “Come on, now, let’s see what damage has been inflicted so I can take care of the trash in the other room.”
It was going to hurt.
She wanted to beg him to be careful. She wanted to scream as his touch neared her wrist. Just before the point where the explosive pain would rupture through her, he stopped.
“Broken wrist,” he snarled, breathing in harshly and shaking his head. He moved his fingertip slowly, only barely whispering over the skin, to her fingers.
Moving to her other arm he checked it, then her legs. And still, he watched her eyes. Even when she couldn’t see his, she knew he was watching hers.
Could she bear it if he hurt her further? She expected it. It could still come. He would be that diabolical. Trick her into believing he wouldn’t push the barriers of sensory agony only to break them.
Such distrust, little cat. I am the monster the world will forever know should you be taken from it. You are all that holds what little sanity I can call my own in place. And you would distrust me so? The mockery in the thought was tinged was such a well of complete icy intellect, logic and merciless hunger for the enemies blood that terror skated through her.
He moved to her neck, collarbone.
She could see his eyes now.
Fury mixed with madness and some emotion she couldn’t define.
His hand lifted, a single finger extending, and as she watched, a lethally sharp, strong claw extended from the tip, splitting the skin as it emerged and came into view.
Yeah, neat trick. She could do that too. Without the blood staining her nail.
His lips quirked as she felt him, she actually felt him, somehow merged with her, reading the pain-filled mockery and fear.
Lowering his hand, he sliced her gown straight down the middle.
Silk fell away from her, baring her breasts, the naked mound of her sex. She had never had curls between her thighs. As with all Breed females, body hair on her arms, armpits, legs and between her thighs was nonexistent.
She should be completely embarrassed. Cat knew she should be. She had never been able to bare her body to anyone, especially a man. She was still a virgin, though she doubted that state would remain long if her earlier response to him was any indication.
Bending closer to her, Graeme stared at the area just below her breasts. His fingertips whispered over it, tested the discoloration around it before lifting his gaze to hers once again.
“It’s not broken,” he promised.
Then his eyes, the gold in them burning, moved back to her breasts. From there, his eyes narrowed, looking lower, easing to her thighs as Cat watched him from her periphery, trying to hide her fear of what he would do from the connection he’d made while in the grip of the beast he’d become.
“Not while you’re unable to fight,” he snapped, furious with the moment of uncertainty she’d felt. “Dammit, Cat, as beautiful as you are, my only intent is to ensure you’re not in need of medical attention before I take care of that vermin that dared do this.”
His lips thinned in fury, the stripes crossing his face blacker than they were last time, as though they lightened or darkened according to the level of his anger.
He returned his gaze to her thighs and her mound, and she knew he’d found the faintest trace of the scars there.
A fingertip brushed over her upper mound, the sensation so different, so heated and extreme, that the fierce pleasure radiated over the echoing pain in her wrist and the areas Raymond had kicked.
“You’ll tell me how this occurred,” he whispered, the sound almost too low to hear. “No one marks what’s mine and doesn’t pay dearly for it.”
They paid by my hand.
The Coyote she suspected Raymond had ordered to punish her years before had found his blood running from his neck as he awoke in the desert several nights later. She hadn’t called the Unknown, she’d found him herself and exacted her vengeance. He looked at her one last time, regret flickering in his gaze.
“You’ve turned into a beautiful woman, little cat,” he growled, reaching across her to draw the sheet over her body.
She could still see him as he moved, reaching for a pack she hadn’t known he’d laid on the floor. It took only moments for him to show her the pressure syringe he held in one hand.
“It will ease the effects of the paralytic. Your ability to move will return far quicker and it’ll ease the pain of the broken wrist.” He placed it at the side of her neck and activated the injector. “And any Council bastard stupid enough to inject you again will find it has little effect on you. Consider it an immunization.”
He’d always been all about the immunizations, she remembered.