Free New Regime by Laken Cane Page A

accustomed to heat.
    “Who…” she swallowed, trying, with that brief swallow, to
force herself not to question him. Not to care. Eat him. Just eat him and be
done with it. “What happened to you?” she asked.
    Shit.
    He took a step closer. “I can bear unimaginable agony,
Alexander. I laugh at pain. But…” He hesitated.
    “Ah.” Sudden understanding flooded her like a bucket of cold
water. “The addiction. That’s not something you’ve been taught to deal with.”
    “No,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. Hoarse and despairing.
“Imagine going through a lifetime of torture only to end up beaten by a fucking
addiction. There’s nothing else in my brain. Nothing but you.”
    “You deserved the bite I gave you. You tried to stake me.”
She smiled, knowing he would see the cold satisfaction in her smile. “And now you
can’t kill me because you can’t bear to be without me.”
    His eyes were like glinting pieces of steel beneath the
holes in his mask. “It would almost be worth it.”
    “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t.”
    “The deal.” He was once more unemotional. He’d given her a
glimpse of the real man who lay beneath the mask, but she was pretty sure that
wasn’t an ordinary occurrence with him.
    “You’ll give me back my ghoul if I feed your addiction.”
    He didn’t even hesitate. “I will.”
    She’d have to kill him. He’d never stop chasing her. He’d
never stop taking or threatening those she loved because he’d need them to use
as barter.
    She would kill him.
    He needed put out of his misery anyway.
    But first…
    “You have a deal, assassin. Now take me to Gunnar.”
     
     

Chapter Thirteen
    He had no way of knowing if she’d keep her word and bite
him, so he refused to give up Gunnar until he had what he needed from her.
    And she refused to bite him until she had the ghoul. “Take
me to him, assassin. I won’t feed your addiction until I have him.”
    “You have no choice—the ghoul has another forty-five minutes
before he’s gone for good. I swear that to you.”
    Shit. She balled her hands into fists. Gunnar might already
be gone. The assassin would say and do whatever he had to in order to get his
drug.
    “Fuck you,” she said. “This is the last chance I’m going to
give you. Take me to Gunnar, or I swear I’ll leave you here to suffer.”
    “Fuck.” He ground out the words and pressed his fingers into
his temples.
    He was strung out and desperate, and wouldn’t be able to
think past the horrific clamoring in his brain. All he wanted was her. Her
bite.
    And he knew he had no choice.
    “He’s in the crabapple tree grove. I buried him beneath the
thirteenth tree and marked the bark with a cross.”
    “Show me.”
    He put his shirt back on, then turned without another word
and loped away.
    Eventually, maybe after he’d been bitten and the raging
demons inside him slept, he’d try to come up with a plan of action.
    But there was nothing, really, that he could do.
    He could only hope that she’d continue to munch on his
twisted, gruesome flesh.
    She smiled grimly as she followed him.
    The assassin was hers.
    “Here,” he said, and pointed to the thirteenth tree. “He’s a
few feet under the ground.”
    She strode forward, her heart beating hard and fast against
the recently healed stake wounds.
    Gunnar.
    Dammit, she should have brought his Baby Ruth candy bars.
    The assassin whirled and grabbed her arm. “My bite. Do it.”
    She snarled and shook him loose. “When I see Gunnar.”
    It would be a simple thing to bite him and leave him drained
and dead in the grass. If she decided to kill him, he’d go happily into death
once she pierced his flesh with her fangs.
    “Who sent you?”
    “You know better than that.” His rough voice was somehow
soft, silky. He crossed his arms, then shifted from one foot to the other. His
hand was shaky when he uncrossed his arms and wiped at the leather of his mask.
    Yeah, she’d known better, but it’d been