Free Unchained (Men in Chains Book 3) by Caris Roane

manacle on the attacker, now bleeding profusely from his throat. Marius knew he was trying to self-heal, but a wound like that was almost impossible to repair fast enough. Blood drained quickly.
    Daniel skirted the battle, heading in Marius’s direction. If he didn’t figure this out fast, Daniel would kill him—every other guard in the place was battling hard.
    He mentally called out to Rumy. Need a few more men.
    Sending another dozen, but it’ll be three minutes.
    Thanks. It wouldn’t be soon enough, but what else could he say.
    When Daniel reached him, Marius was on his knees trying to work the chain off his wrist. “You’re in a bit of a fix, Marius. Looks like your luck finally ran out. Or more to the point, Shayna’s did.”
    He saw a blade flash.
    “Don’t hurt the woman. Take your vengeance out on me, but leave her alone.”
    “Attached already, I see. Well, this should be fun.” He turned and moved slowly in Shayna’s direction.
    Typical of Daniel to take his time when he was about to make a kill.
    *   *   *
    Shayna hurt in so many places, she could hardly move. She felt as though the two hemispheres of her brain had gone to war and planned to be fighting for a long time. Marius had flown so swiftly out of the Dark Cave system that no amount of his siphoned power had helped. And now, yeah, she was in pain.
    Her hearing was screwed up as well. Everything was muffled, maybe because she hurt so badly.
    With Marius’s blood-chain still wrapped around her wrist, and vibrating softly, she could also feel that whatever was happening to Marius, the vampire was in a rage. And something else: She felt a kind of fear that went deep and had ugly layers, something Marius had known his whole life.
    Which meant Daniel had to be nearby.
    She wished she could help, but she was so disoriented.
    She had no idea where he’d taken her. She lay on some kind of rocky surface and could smell that this cave had a lot of damp. She tried to shift position, but the rocks made it hard to move without more pain.
    Some kind of whirring sound reached her ears, but it was like listening through thick cotton balls. At the same time, she felt really sick to her stomach again, no doubt as a result of the flight. Of course it didn’t help that images of the Dark Cave system still poured through her mind, especially the last location where Daniel had killed all those women in an attempt to subvert his son.
    She breathed through another heavy wave of nausea.
    Her hearing began to clear up and she realized that some kind of battle was taking place. She lifted up just enough to shift her head the other direction and then she wished she hadn’t. Some kind of brawl was going on with thirty or forty huge men. Blood was everywhere as well as knives and chains used as weapons. A vampire nearby had died not ten feet from her, a chain around his neck, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes bulging, the tips of his fangs showing.
    That’s when she started dry-heaving. She’d already been sick earlier and there was nothing left, but she heaved anyway.
    Suddenly Marius’s voice was in her head. Shayna, look out. Daniel’s behind you and I’m caught. If you can move, try to get away, hide behind one of the bigger dripstones.
    Fear now started moving like lightning through Shayna, and she forced herself to rise to a sitting position.
    Her head was killing her.
    Then she saw the one that had to be Daniel, standing in front of her maybe ten feet away. He stood like an untouchable god in the middle of the battle, wearing a dark-blue suit and looking pristine against all the blood and gore.
    He smiled, a terrible smile full of a desire to cause pain, probably to cause her pain.
    He was extremely handsome with unusual teal eyes, his dark hair plastered against his head, his goatee tight to his face.
    Daniel.
    The evil in this world.
    The monster who had hurt his own sons, who enslaved tens of thousands of women, who wanted to rule his