Free Dark Wrath by Celeste Anwar Page A

telling her that that was what they’d done to
him--for months.  Even she had no idea how long they’d kept him chained in
that cage, but she knew he had been captured long before she came to the
facility, and she knew she had been a part of the experiment for over a month.
    “I want to find
him as much as you do.  Let me go!  I’ll help you.”
    Frustration
filled her as he left the room, closing the door behind him.  She tugged
at the bindings after he’d gone, twisting her head to look up at them. 
Her fingers were already numb.  The rag the others had used to bind her
wasn’t tight enough to completely cut off the circulation and she’d had her
hands bound in front of her, which had allowed some circulation.  With the
binding Jesse had looped around her already bound wrists, and the position of
her arms, it hadn’t taken long for the numbness to become more
pronounced.  Concentrating, she wiggled her fingers and arms as much as
she could, not because she thought there was any real chance of getting loose,
but to keep some of the circulation flowing through her arms and hands.
    She was rewarded
for her efforts with stinging pain.  Gritting her teeth, she continued
until her fingers didn’t feel so stiff and swollen.
    If she could only
pull herself up a little higher on the bed, she thought, maybe she could get
enough slack to slip her bound hands from the loop?
    She discovered
very quickly that there wasn’t enough slack in the cords around her ankles to
allow for it.  Even when she’d stretched until it felt as if every joint
from her groin down would separate, it wasn’t quite enough.
    She subsided
after a while, wondering if he did mean to kill her.  Her throat closed at
that thought.
    * * * *
    Jesse strode
through the front room and out onto the porch, staring up at the night sky
while he struggled to bring his heart rate and breathing back to normal. 
He felt more than vaguely nauseated.  For several moments, he held his
hands out, palm up, staring angrily at the tremor in them.
    He hadn’t
anticipated the things he’d felt from the moment he’d set eyes on her.  He
wondered if she’d been able to tell the effect she had on him, or if she’d been
under too much duress herself to see his sorry state.
    After a few
minutes, he plopped his butt down on the edge of the porch and settled his feet
on the lower step, struggling to summon the hatred that had consumed him for so
long, that had carried him through the months it had taken him to recover from
his wounds, that had kept him from totally losing his mind in the months after
that when he had searched for her so frantically.
    Of all the stupid
things that he had done because of her, marking her was probably one of the
stupidest.  The link alone had tortured him.  It hadn’t been strong
enough to help him find her and yet it had been strong enough to taunt him.
    Propping one
elbow on his knee, he speared his fingers through his hair, propping his
forehead on his palm while he tried to remember, and sort through, the things
she’d said.  Derisively, he realized he didn’t remember a hell of a
lot.  He’d been the next thing to mindless, roiling emotion even before
he’d stripped her.  From the moment he’d begun that, it had been far more
torture to him than her because he hadn’t been able to get his mind off of his
memories of stroking her soft skin, her taste, the way she’d felt when he had
sunk himself deeply inside of her.  The sounds of pleasure she’d made.
    His mouth went
dry.
    With an effort,
he pushed the memories aside.  He hadn’t waited all this time to allow
himself to be sucked in by her again.
    The fury he’d
been questing for rose inside of him at that thought.  He hated all of
them for what they’d done to him, but he hated her worst of all.  Nothing
they could do could touch him as she could.  Nothing they could have
thought of to do could have given him nearly as much pain.
    He’d thought he
loved