A little flutter of hope settled in my belly at the prospect that he was coming to realize I’d be more trouble than I was worth.
He slowly turned his head back to me, his eyes, once completely black, now slowly bled out to a glowing red. I tried to make myself smaller and knew it had been foolish to think I could have persuaded him in any other way than his.
“You have no mate now, female.”
I felt my eyes widen at his words. I had no idea what he meant by that aside from… “Did something happen to Sebastian?” I straightened as chilling fear slammed into me. “Did you do something to him?”
My heart was thundering, and this cold sweat broke out across my forehead. The very prospect of losing Sebastian… no, I wouldn’t think that way.
“You have no more mate. You’re mine now. And I’ll do with you as I see fit.” He took a step toward me, but there was nowhere for me to go, no more room for me to escape.
“W… What? I have a mate. I’m his, and he’ll come for me.”
He just slowly shook his head.
“I’ll die before I let you touch me. I’ll cut off whatever freaky dick you have if you try and come near me with it.”
He just laughed. “Female, I have no plans of mating with you. My body will only come aroused for my mate. But a companion?” He grinned. “I’ll force you to stay with me for that alone, because solitude is a slow killer, especially for how old I am.”
I furrowed my brow. “You want a damn friend?” I could have laughed if I wasn’t so scared. “News flash, psycho. If you want someone to like you, don’t go kidnapping them.” I felt my anger replace my fear. Good. “Sebastian will kill you in the most brutal way.” Of that I was certain.
“I’m sure he will come for you. Killing me, though?” He chuckled. “Not likely, female.”
He stared at me, doing that damn examination again.
“I’ve been alone and alive in this world for a long time.” He took a step toward me, his black claws tipping his toes digging into the ground. “A millennium, female, with no end in sight.”
I’d heard of some Otherworld species living upward of a thousand years, but I knew that was usually the cutoff, the old of the old.
If this male was as ancient as he said he was—a millennium—and still fit and hard and dangerous as ever, could he possibly be immortal?
I had never heard of a creature possessing that kind of longevity.
“The prospect of finding my mate is not something I’ve thought about having for far too long.” He bared his teeth as if that last part pissed him off. “So I’m done waiting. I’ll just take someone else’s mate.”
“You can’t just take one that isn’t yours.” I knew my words fell on deaf ears, and I whispered them more to myself than anything else.
“Oh you innocent, naive, tiny female. Don’t you know I’m the very devil himself? I can do anything I want.”
Chapter
Fourteen
Adryan
“Boss, look at what the Lycans sent over.”
I stopped drumming my fingers over the smooth, polished top of my desk just as Kane strode in, a tablet in his hand.
“Banner got back to us. Fucking finally,” he murmured the last part.
Kane all too roughly tossed the tablet in front of me, the device skittering across the desk. “For fuck’s sake. If you want me to look at something on an electronic device, how about not tossing the fucking thing down so hard it’s liable to break, asshole?”
Kane just grinned and took a seat in the chair in front of me.
Despite being in my office at Sinners, the club I owned in Ryeka, New York, silence surrounded us thanks to the room being soundproof.
I picked up the tablet and looked at the screen. “I’m a lot of things, Kane, but when it comes to technology, I leave it to the younger bastards who know what they are doing.” I flicked my gaze to him. “What am I looking at?”
Kane leaned forward and braced his forearms on the table, a sort of anticipation covering his face that I’d never seen before.
We’d finally gotten information on Sebastian’s whereabouts. There was nothing else that would make Kane act so strangely.
He took the tablet out of my hand and started pressing buttons. A moment later he shoved the fucking thing damn near in my face until I growled and snatched it out of his hands.
“Watch it, fucker.” I stared down at the screen. It was security footage of the farmhouse in Vermont that we’d helped take down with the Lycans.
The damn place had been a secret underground facility for the Assembly, and after we killed them all, the place had gotten blown to hell.