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  For all she knew, he was someone from the crowd, a male bent on owning her.

  She could not trust him.

  The need to leave warred with the need to stay, to remain near this mysterious male.

  In the end, leaving won, driving her to limp away.

  She looked back over her shoulder at the majestic silver-haired warrior.

  He struck the demon down, threw his head back and roared.

  Lyra froze.

  Her heart pounded wildly.

  Blood rushed.

  Gods.

  He stood in the middle of all the carnage, covered in blood, breathing hard, every carved muscle straining, calling to her.

  Drawing her to him.

  He dropped his head and his blue eyes met hers, seared her all over again.

  Who was this male?

  He was the owner of that roar she had heard, the one that had driven her to fight, had unleashed her fury.

  A stranger who had wrought a brutal victory and had freed her.

  He stalked towards her, setting her heart racing faster, her blood rushing fiercer, and she trembled in response, belly fluttering as she waited.

  Waited.

  Her breath hitched as he pulled her up into his powerful arms, and his mouth descended on hers, crushing her lips in a hard kiss that claimed a piece of her soul.

  Lyra jerked awake and hissed as pain ricocheted up her left leg.

  Damn.

  She growled as the pain grew fiercer.

  “Sorry.” The dulcet male voice rolled over her like a warm tide, washing away the pain and giving her something else to focus on.

  She hissed again, panic rushing through her as she realised she wasn’t dreaming now. She was awake, and she wasn’t alone.

  The silver-haired warrior was with her.

  He crouched beside her, intense blue eyes locked on her left leg as he probed it gently with his fingers, pressing them into her short black fur.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “It’s broken alright.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

  He stood, scrubbed a hand over his short tousled hair and sighed, a pensive expression settling on his handsome face.

  “Stay put,” he said, and then chuckled. “Not as if you’re going anywhere. At least you stopped fighting me.”

  When he turned away, her eyes widened.

  Red lines littered his back, crimson trailing from them over his dirty skin, reaching all the way down to the waist of his trousers.

  She had done that.

  She remembered it now. It was hazy, but there, a flicker of a memory. It was always this way when her animal instincts hijacked her, driving her consciousness deep down. It was a protection mechanism, something all shifters had. Her animal side saw things differently, felt differently, and wasn’t as affected by things as her human one. When she was in danger of suffering any sort of mental damage, that animal side took control.

  When the male crouched, she followed him, and watched as he tore at the back of his pack. He grunted as he ripped the black material, and tugged out two metal poles. The supports.

  When he turned back to her with them, an instinct to survive and protect herself seized her.

  She hissed at him, flashing her fangs as her rounded ears twisted backwards and flattened against her head.

  He looked down at the two short poles, and then at her, and held his hands up, his eyes wide. “They’re not batons. I’m not going to use them to hurt you. I’m just going to use them to fix your leg in place so it can heal, and then you’ll be able to shift again.”

  She fought to suppress the need to fight him as he approached her, cursing her animal side for a change. The male wanted to help her, not hurt her. It was difficult to make herself believe that though, especially when her animal side was still pushing for control, and everything that had happened was still fresh in her mind.

  He helped by tucking the two poles down the back of his trousers, out of sight.

  The desire to attack him faded.

  She watched him carefully as he dropped to his knees beside her. He picked up a t-shirt from the black dirt and ripped it into lengths. She hissed again when he leaned towards her head and draped one of those pieces over her eyes.

  “Just don’t look,” he murmured softly, his voice like honey in her ears, soothing her.

  She forced herself to keep still as he took hold of her leg, to deny that urge to fight him and see what he was doing. If she did, her animal side would wrest control from her again the second it saw the poles.

  “I’m going to need to align this bone,” he whispered. “Gods, I hope you understand me.”

  He was gentle as he manoeuvred her leg, somehow managing to keep the pain to a dull ache when she had been expecting another blast of white-hot fire.

  “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here… what if I can’t do this… maybe the bloody demon was right and I should have taken his men with me… can’t speak a damn word that anyone understands in this place.”

  Lyra had the feeling he wasn’t talking to her now. He was talking to himself. Had he been alone so long that he needed to hear someone’s voice?

  Or was it that he needed to hear a familiar one?

  She could understand that desire, because she had talked to herself more than once during her captivity just so she could hear her own voice and take comfort from it, draw strength from it that she had badly needed.

  She focused on him, on his accent that sounded British to her ears.

  He was a long way from home.

  It struck a chord in her.

  She was a long way from home too. She didn’t belong in Hell. It had been a mistake to come here. It had been a mistake to trust a male of her kind.

  “Done.” He removed the cloth from her eyes.

  She immediately rolled so her front legs stretched before her and her front half was upright. Her left hind leg throbbed. She looked at it, twisted and licked the area around the black bandages, careful not to disturb them but unable to deny her instinct to clean the wound.

  “It’ll heal faster now,” he said and sat on the other side of the small cave to her. “Sorry I can’t light a fire. It might attract attention.”

  She didn’t need light to see him. Her vision was sharp enough to make out every detail about him.

  He reached into his pack and pulled out another t-shirt.

  He didn’t put it on.

  He moved onto his knees and held it out to her. “I can put it over you if you’re cold.”

  She bared her fangs at him and curled up as best she could with her left rear leg throbbing like mad.

  “Message received very loud and clear.” He sank back against his side of the cave.

  Lyra studied him, using him to block out the pain in her flank.

  He was fascinating.

  He pulled out a wrapped bar of something from his pack and ate it while keeping an eye on the cave entrance.

  “Are there a lot of slavers around here?” He glanced at her and she hissed at his question, just the mention of slavers enough to have her hackles rising. His blue eyes slid her way again. “I’m going to take that as a yes. It never struck me as a particularly nice part of Hell. Apparently, there are nice parts… like the elf kingdom. Have you been there?”

  He was at it again, talking to himself, filling the cave with the sound of his own voice.

  “I bet they have clean water.” He lifted his canteen, shook it and frowned. It sounded almost empty to her. “Is there clean water around here?”

  She didn’t have an answer to that question.

  She didn’t really know this part of Hell.

  But she knew the realm better than he did.

  It struck her again that he was lonely, out of place.

  And he was new to Hell.

  He swigged his water, recapped the canteen and set it back down, and then stared at the mouth of the cave so long that sleep almost claimed her. It was certa
inly sneaking up on him. His eyelids dropped and flicked open, and dropped again. He jerked his head up and shook it, and then rubbed his eyes as he yawned. It kept him awake for a few more minutes.

  His eyelids grew heavy again.

  Before he nodded off, he quietly murmured, “Wake me if you need me for anything… anything at all.”

  Fascinating male.

  She wanted to know his story.

  But she wanted to run from him at the same time.

  Lyra shut out that desire and focused on him. He had helped her. It was hard for her to trust him though, to see him without part of her remembering how she had trusted a male before, and had ended up sold into slavery.

  By one of her own kind.

  She hoped the bastard was dead.

  She had discovered in one of his enlightening little talks with her, the ones where he sat by her cage and boasted about the things he had done, that it was a trade of his to lure hellcats and sell them on the black market.

  Would her mysterious warrior do such a thing?

  Was she a potential payday to him?

  She fought the lure of sleep just as he had, but she wasn’t strong enough to deny it, and she slipped into nightmares about the male who had sold her, the things she had seen and the things they had done to her. Each image fluttered by quickly but left their mark, a cut that was deep and bled, stole her strength and had her desperate to wake again, to escape the horror. She saw her bare dirty feet as they marched her across the wastelands, humiliated and shackled, stripped of her strength.

  In a collar.

  The sound of metal on metal had her snapping awake.

  “Sorry,” the silver-haired male muttered and eased back. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  There was a touch of colour on his cheeks.

  Lyra gasped as she realised she had shifted back.

  Panic lanced her and she shot up into a sitting position, hands racing to cover her nudity. They hit soft material where bare flesh should have been.

  She looked down at the black t-shirt draped over her body, concealing her curves, and then up at him as she clutched the material to her, touched by what he had done for her.

  He diligently kept his eyes off her, fixed on his work.

  He hissed through his teeth and muttered something as he tried to pick something up off a small fire, fingers touching the metal cup and then leaping away from it. He eventually managed to hold it long enough to get it off the fire and onto the floor of the cave.

  Lyra tried not to stare as he licked the pads of his fingers and then blew on them to soothe them.

  He lifted those stunning pale blue eyes to meet hers.

  She tensed when he moved onto his knees, closing the distance between them. His black fatigues stretched tight over muscled thighs, and his torso tensed as he rested his hands on those thighs, close to his hips. The blood that had been all over him when she had fallen asleep was gone, scrubbed off every delicious honed muscle on his chest and his arms, leaving golden skin behind.

  She saw him as he had been on the battlefield, a warrior naked and covered in the blood of his enemies.

  A wild and dangerous male.

  He averted his eyes, as if he knew her thoughts and they unnerved him for some reason.

  Perhaps it was more that he had felt something in her, that strange and powerful pull she felt towards him, that she couldn’t escape. It was like gravity. No matter how fiercely she fought it, it refused to release her.

  But she had to be strong. She had to keep resisting.

  Because she wasn’t sure whether she could trust this male.

  She wasn’t sure she would ever trust a male again.

  It was better she didn’t fall under his spell. It was safer.

  So no matter what happened, no matter how entrancing he was or how fiercely he tried to bewitch her, she wasn’t going to let it sway her.

  When she could, she would leave, and she would never see him again.

  It was safer.

  That way, he wouldn’t have a chance to hurt her.

  He poured the contents of the metal cup into a plastic one and offered it to her. She stared at it, watching the steam rise lazily from the surface of its contents.

  “It’s just soup,” he said when she made no move to take it. “I used the last of my water to make it. You need to eat.”

  Damn him for being so thoughtful and kind. He was going to make this hard for her, wasn’t he? He was going to push her to her limit and test her, to see if she could keep her distance from him. He was going to try to win her trust.

  It wasn’t going to be easy.

  She took the cup and sipped the soup, but not because he had used the last of his water to make it for her or had been thoughtful enough to give her food.

  She sipped it because she needed to regain her strength so she could leave him.

  His eyes remained locked on her and he didn’t move back to his side of the cave. He remained kneeling in front of her, too close for comfort, so close she could feel his heat and smell his alluring scent of woods and rivers, of pure and clean nature.

  She was about to ask what his problem was when he spoke.

  “What’s your name?”

  Fear swept through her.

  She wasn’t fae, and giving him her name wouldn’t give him power over her, but it felt as if it might.

  She wanted to keep that barrier between them, needed to hold him at a distance.

  Yet she was powerless to stop herself from being drawn towards him.

  She was powerless to stop herself from surrendering it to him.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Lyra.”

  Grey stared at the slender black-haired female, right into those luminous cerulean eyes.

  Gods, she had a beautiful name to match her beautiful looks. He should have expected it, but it hit him hard, would have knocked him on his arse if he hadn’t already been sitting.

  He looked at the small fire he had risked making so he could heat some soup for her, and then at his knees, anywhere but at her. He had stared at her enough already. If he kept on staring at her, she was going to start feeling nervous, and he didn’t want that.

  He lifted his eyes back to meet hers. “You were out a while. I took your brace off while you were sleeping.”

  “How long?” She frowned at her cup and turned it in her hands, and hell, it was sweet relief to know she understood English.

  She spoke it with a confidence that said she more than understood it. She was as fluent in it as he was. Although, her accent wasn’t British like his. It was hard to place. An accent of Hell?

  “Two days… I think.” He raised his hands from his knees and turned them, trying to get her to look at his wrists, which felt like a dick move when she ended up looking at her own instead, and the cold metal that circled them. “I don’t have a watch… if I’m honest, I don’t have a clue what day it is, let alone what time.”

  She didn’t smile at that attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

  She remained cold. Distant.

  He could understand that though.

  She had been through a lot, more than he had guessed if the pronounced scars around her throat and the ones he had seen on her back were anything to go by.

  “Drink up,” he said and moved back to the other side of the cave to give her some space.

  She tucked her legs up against her bottom to keep herself covered. She looked small like that. Fragile. She was strong, he could sense it in her, but there was a frailty to her that called to him, had him wanting to be close to her at all times, roused a need to make her feel safe and protect her.

  He forced himself to remain where he was, at a distance from her, and rifled through his backpack, looking for a protein bar or something to keep him going, something to do other than stare at her.

  She awkwardly sipped her soup.

  The silence in the cave weighed down on him, growing more strained by the second.

  He tried to think
of something to say to set her at ease and reassure her that he wasn’t out to do anything sinister to her.

  “It’s good,” she whispered, shattering the silence for him.

  She looked over the rim of her cup at him, her blue eyes instantly pulling his to them. There was something magical about those eyes of hers. Once his met them, he couldn’t stop looking into them, found it hard to break free.

  If he was being honest, he didn’t want to break free of them. He wanted to look into them forever.

  “I can’t take the credit for that. It came out of a pack.” He shrugged and forgot about looking for something to eat and settled for drinking his fill of her instead. “It was my emergency rations.”

  “You were expecting things to go badly?” Her fine black eyebrows pinched above those alluring pools of tropical blue.

  He rolled his shoulders again. “Maybe. It always pays to be prepared.”

  “Were you in the SAS or something?” Her soft rosy lips almost tilted into a smile.

  He smiled at her. “No. Just raised that way.”

  Gods, this easy banter felt good. When was the last time he had been able to speak with someone like this, someone who wasn’t his family?

  “Not around here though.” She set the cup down beside her knees.

  He smiled wider. “That obvious, huh?”

  Was she local? He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to push her too hard. He had never heard of a hellcat living in the mortal world, so she had to be local.

  She looked as if she wanted to ask him something else, but then she lifted her cup and sipped the soup again, and looked for all the world as if she was hiding in it, avoiding him now.

  That dreadful silence descended again.

  Cut only by the sound of the broken chains attached to the thick silver cuffs around her wrists jangling as she moved.

  Grey glared at them, a need to get them off her flooding him, driving him to do something, even when he couldn’t.

  He had tried to break them when she had passed out.

  Whatever metal they were made from, it was tough, strong enough to withstand all his attempts to remove them. But then, he had been trying to be gentle with her, afraid of waking her with what he was doing. Maybe if he made another attempt now that she was conscious and he had no fear of waking her, he would be able to break them.