“Let me go,” he choked out, grasping at the wall.
“Don’t be silly.”
Maddox was beside him suddenly, taking his arms and moving him gently so he could lean against his captor, and not the other cold, hard, overwhelmingly massive obstacle preventing his freedom.
Will tried to resist. His hands loosened and he let himself fall to the ground rather than grip onto Maddox. He slumped down. Maddox let him go. He could have caught him, but he let him fall. Will learned a lesson in that moment, a painful and brutal lesson. Maddox had come to his aid, but if he refused, he would be allowed to suffer.
“Look at me,” Maddox said, crouching down next to him, extending a finger in front of his eyes and drawing it back to his own nose. “Look into my eyes.”
A dark passenger rode in those eyes. Will saw a flash of secrets and horrors in that moment of unprecedented connection. It was more intimate than the sex he’d had with Maddox when he was crushed roughly against the floor and drunk from. That had been nothing but domination and conquest. This was something else, a flirtation with some mutual vulnerability for just a second, which made the pain seep away as Will lost himself in that dark gaze.
“You’ve broken your leg, pup. Now why would you do something as silly as that?”
“I wanted… I had to… I can’t…” Will stumbled over his words, fumbling with the very ideas he was trying to express. How to say that he was terrified of Maddox — and not because the man had turned out to be a vampire. That barely registered. Will was accustomed to living in a world of monsters. For someone to be a true monster was not unusual. What was unusual for him was the fear and horror of disappointing the man he had already come to depend upon.
“Shhh, shhh,” Maddox interjected smoothly. “You’re okay.”
Will was not okay. Will was severely injured.
“It’s broken,” a nearby voice said. “We’ll eat him and find another. A stronger one.” There was hunger in those masculine tones, the kind that made Will whimper with near certainty that he was about to be consumed. Lying on the ground, in the dirt, with the grit of concrete bits digging into his wounded flesh, Will gave up on life, abandoning himself in the hypnotic gaze of the dark-eyed master who loomed over him.
The tension was broken for a brief moment as Maddox pulled his gaze away, cursing softly under his breath.
“Lorien, go lock yourself in the basement. Now.”
Lorien hesitated but did as he was told. Or at least disappeared from view in one way or another.
“Two of you,” Maddox sighed. “One as bad as the other in different ways. Are you ready to behave, Will?”
“Yes,” Will whispered. There could be no other answer. Yes. Yes to whatever Maddox wanted. Yes to whatever he might command.
Mad scooped him up from the ground, lifting his couple-hundred-pound muscular frame as if it weighed nothing at all. The pain in his leg was still there, but it no longer felt like something he had to be personally concerned about. It throbbed and ached, pulsed and bled of its own accord.
“What are you going to do with me?”
The question went unanswered as Maddox carried Will back inside and settled him on a long piece of designer furniture which would never be the same after this.
“Do I need to chain you up, pup? Is that it? I thought I told you about the functions of the collar?”
“Oh… I forgot about the collar,” Will admitted.
“Humans!” There was an exclamation from a nearby space that was probably not the basement.
“Lorien! Put yourself away before I put you away,” Maddox snarled, drawing on his hidden reserve of dark vampire master energy in a way which made every lesser creature in his realm scurry, except for Will who was pinned in place by his gaze.
“Sorry!” A shout came back from a deeper, more subterranean location.
Maddox perched on the side of the deep black settee upon which Will lay.
“Why did you run?”
“I can’t do what you want me to do. I’m not what you think I am.”
“You are exactly what I think you are,” Maddox replied with a little smirk of amusement. “You are not what you think you are, and that causes you more pain than this shattered leg of yours.”
“I can’t feel it as much anymore.”
“That’s because you are under my influence. It is a talent of mine. Well, a talent of our kind. We have evolved to find ways to soothe humans. It makes the drinking easier if you’re not screaming and carrying on, alerting everybody in the village.”
His lips twisted in a manner which was supposed to amuse. Will let out a dry chuckle which turned to a pained rasp. Mads’ influence was not enough to stop him feeling his wounds entirely. He had the feeling that, like everything else, was intentional.