Desire Unchained

“Solice?” He stared at the brunette vampire nurse who had been working at UG for years, and suddenly everything made sense. Skulk hadn’t talked—Solice had. “You bitch.”


Her sultry smile revealed long fangs as she leaned in and licked up his chest in a warm, wet lash. Her raspy tongue caught on shredded flesh. Pain streaked through him, but he’d suffered worse while playing with some of his rougher bedmates.

“I’ve wanted to taste you for so long,” she murmured against his nipple. “But you never so much as looked at me.”

“That’s because after years of fucking my brother,” he growled, “you were damaged goods.”

She continued to tongue his chest, even sucking lightly on his caduceus pendant, and he wondered just when the torture would begin, because all this was doing was turning him on. Yeah, it was messed up, but shit, he was an incubus, capable of getting it up under the worst of circumstances, and the female in front of him was throwing off arousal like she was in heat.

“We’ll see who is the damaged one.” She dropped to her knees, eyeing the blood on his thigh. And he knew. Oh, shit, he knew exactly how his suffering would go down.





Every noise that filtered through the wood and iron door made Runa flinch. She should rejoice at the knowledge that Shade was being tortured. She should volunteer to help. But damn her heart, she wanted to save him.

So she could kill him herself.

Except, she hadn’t come back to New York to kill Shade. She’d returned to her hometown with military orders to gather intel on a demon hospital, and to locate an ex-soldier and Aegis Guardian who hadn’t been heard from since reporting the existence of the hospital. The Army feared he might have become a traitor not only to the United States, but to the entire human race. And when the U.S. Army’s Raider-X Regiment issued an order, you followed it—and not just because they’d planted a microdetonator in your brain. No, the supersecret military unit inspired loyalty by giving “special humans” a purpose and a sense of belonging in a world that had rejected them.

She hadn’t been rejected, but her situation had guaranteed that, without help, The Aegis would have killed her, but probably not before she slaughtered countless innocent humans. Fortunately, her brother, a high-ranking officer at R-XR, had known exactly what to do the night he found her bleeding to death in the alley where she’d been attacked. The Army had saved her life, had even attempted to prevent the lycanthropic virus from taking hold. They’d failed, but the side effects of their experimental treatment turned out to be handy.

She still turned into a giant, slavering beast three nights out of every month—a beast with no control over her actions and very little memory of what took place while she was in beast form. But thanks to the Army, she could also turn into the beast any time she wanted to. Even better, when she changed form intentionally, she retained her humanity and could control her actions and remember everything once she returned to her human form.

Laughter bubbled up from somewhere, female laughter, followed by a long, drawn-out noise. An erotic growl. Shade’s erotic growl. She’d know that sound anywhere. So what, they were torturing him with sex?

That bastard. She hated him. But she was pretty sure that just before the werewolf attack, he’d saved her brother’s life. And, truth be told, probably hers, as well.

Runa had met him when she’d been at the lowest point in her life. Twenty-five years old but feeling double that, she still hadn’t gotten over the death of her mother four years earlier—how could she when her mother had died alone and miserable, thanks to Runa? But more recently, her best friend had moved to Australia with her new husband, Runa’s coffee shop had been only days from closing, and her brother had been dying. Arik had, in fact, been dying in her house, and the only reason she wasn’t with him was that he’d insisted that she tend to her shop and employees, who would soon be jobless.

One of her employees, a pierced, green-haired girl who called herself Aspic, had been razzing Runa about never taking risks, which was probably why her business had failed in the first place. No risks in love, business, or life. And where had that gotten her?

Arik might have been dying, but he’d lived. Should she be struck by a mysterious disease that killed her by slow measures, would she know the satisfaction of having truly lived life to the fullest?