“It doesn’t matter how I found it. What matters is that you’re a bastard. A sick, twisted, evil bastard who operates a business where death is entertainment.” She could have sworn she saw hurt flash in his eyes before they became chips of ruby ice again, but that didn’t stop her rant. “Why did you bother to save me? You should have bet on the outcome like everyone else.”
“Shut up.” His voice was as cold as his gaze.
“What’s the matter? Did I strike a nerve? Feeling a little guilty? Or are you upset that you got yourself into trouble with your boss?”
He took a step forward. “I said, shut up.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me? Newsflash, buddy. It’s going to happen anyway. But you can bet that if I disappear, my colleagues are going to tear this place down and feed it to you before they slaughter your ass.”
Actually, she hoped they’d pull a cavalry and rescue her. She just had to pray Eidolon and his brothers got her message before she was fed to the lions. Or whatever creatures were screeching in the nearby cages.
One second Nate was standing near the door, and the next he was chest to chest with her, pinning her against the wall. It didn’t escape her notice that they spent a lot of time in this position.
“Your colleagues,” he ground out. “At Underworld General? It’s time to stop with the games, little shifter, and tell me who the f**k you are and why you’re really here.”
“Bite me.”
That was so the wrong thing to say to a vampire who was teetering on the edge. He struck like a viper, sinking his fangs deep in her throat, and despite the dire situation, despite her anger and hurt and confusion at how he’d treated her and his involvement in the fight club, she gasped with pleasure. The initial sting turned into a lovely burn that spread through her body in the form of liquid heat. Vampires could make feeding horrifically painful or orgasmically wonderful, and clearly, Nate had gone with the latter.
But she couldn’t allow this. She hated him. Really. Weakly, she flattened her palms against his chest and shoved, but she didn’t need to. His head snapped up and he stepped back all by himself, surprise glittering in his eyes.
“You’re no tiger,” he snarled. “Damn you, has everything about you been a lie?”
She slapped her hand over the punctures in her throat. “Me? You’re the one who has a hidden door in his office. You’re the one who’s been hiding a club where people fight to the death.”
His nostrils flared, and his gaze zeroed in on her neck. Before she could protest, he peeled away her palm and licked the fang punctures, sealing the wound.
“Gods,” he murmured against her skin. “You taste like dark chocolate, and honey, and . . . canine.” He tore away from her, leaving her swaying unsteadily and relying on the wall behind her to hold her up. He faced away from her, his hands running through his hair over and over, as if doing so was as important to his existence as blood. “Why? Why are you here?”
“Because you murdered my brother.”
He wheeled around. “Who was your brother?”
“Given the number of people who probably pass through your arena, I doubt you’ll remember him,” she said bitterly.
“Who?”
“His name was Vaughn.” She raised her chin, meeting his gaze so he could see her pain. “He was a hyena shifter who died last week.”
“Hyena . . .” Nate’s brow furrowed. “Blond. Mismatched green and blue eyes.”
“So you do know who he was.”
Nate’s tongue flicked over one of the fangs he’d sunk into her flesh. “You’re not a hyena any more than you’re a tiger.”
“I am,” she ground out. “And you killed my brother.”
He snorted. “Your brother killed himself.”
With a pained cry, she launched herself at Nate. He caught her easily, well before she landed a single blow. “You son of a bitch,” she screamed. “You evil, heartless son of a bitch!”
From the nearby cages, she heard catcalls and cheers, as well as a few curses. Nate tugged her against him, his arms wrapping tightly around her, caging her so she couldn’t strike out.
“Shh.” His soft voice didn’t penetrate her anger. “Hey. Listen to me. Your brother came to us. He made a deal for a fight.”
“No. No! He wouldn’t—”
“He said he was dying.”
Dying? She stilled completely, freezing solid against Nate’s big body. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. Why did he say that?”
“I don’t know.” He relaxed his hold, but still cradled her against his chest. “All I know is that he wanted to fight one of our champions, a hyena named Vic. And Vaughn made a provision that if he died in battle, Vic would leave Vaughn’s sister alone. I guess that’s you.”
“Oh, gods,” she whispered. “Vic. He’s here?”
“Yeah. Nasty bastard. Why would Vaughn want Vic to leave you alone?”
“Because,” she said, on a shaky inhale, “ever since my father died, Vic and my other brother, Van, have tried to kill me every few months.”
Curses fell from Nate’s mouth. “So Vaughn was here to guarantee your safety.”
His hand cupped the back of her head with surprising tenderness, and his voice softened, which was something she couldn’t afford to do. If Nate was telling the truth, he hadn’t killed Vaughn, exactly, but he was still a scumbag who ran a vile operation.
And yet, she didn’t pull away. She told herself she needed the support because her legs had gone all noodle. She told herself she was cold, and while he wasn’t overly warm, he wasn’t as icy as the air that smelled like raw sewage. She told herself all kinds of lies, because right now, she couldn’t handle the truth, the mind-boggling realization that hate was not the only thing she felt for Nate Sabine.
“Poor Vaughn,” she murmured. “He should have come to me. He didn’t need to sacrifice himself for me.”
“He loved you.” Nate paused. “Is there a reason he wouldn’t shift?”
“What do you mean?”
He made long, soothing passes over her braid. “He didn’t shift when he was fighting Vic. It put him at a huge disadvantage. I thought it was strange, because even if his intention was to lose, he clearly hated Vic and wanted to hurt him. Vaughn could have done a lot more hurting in animal form.”
A knot twisted her insides. He said he was dying. Those were Nate’s words. Her brother was dying. He didn’t shift. Oh . . . oh, gods. He didn’t shift because he couldn’t. He’d been dying for the same reason she was.
“Lena?” His hand stopped stroking her hair. “Lena, what’s wrong?”
“I know why he didn’t shift.” She swallowed. “He couldn’t. A shifter who has never turned into his animal dies shortly after they turn twenty-four. It’s why I didn’t leave when you fired me. There was no point.”
“What do you mean, there was no point?” He pulled back to look her in the eye. “Wait . . . in the arena, you didn’t shift. You can’t, can you?”
“No,” she said quietly. “And because of that, I’m dying too.”
Chapter 10
A sick, bitter sadness shattered the anger Nate had felt over Lena’s revelation of deception. He’d rescued her from the Neethul brothers because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. Now, thanks to a fucked-up genetic glitch, he was going to lose her anyway.
“Can’t someone at Underworld General do something?” His voice was humiliatingly hoarse.
“We’ve tried.” Lena heaved a sigh and plopped down on the straw-coated floor. “There’s nothing left to do.”
“Why would you and Vaughn be unable to shift when your other brother can?” Nate went down on his heels in front of her.
“Both of my other brothers can. I’ve seen them. I never saw Vaughn do it, but I guess now I know why.” She rubbed her arms as though cold. “I think it might be because we were born different. When shifters give birth in animal form, the babies are born that way too. But Vaughn and I weren’t. My father had to protect us from our brothers for years. Even our mother wanted to kill us.”
He stripped off the T-shirt he’d worn straight in from the jungle and wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl, and was surprised when she didn’t argue. “What a way to come into the world.”
Shivering, she tugged the ends of the shirt tight. “What about you? How did you come into the world?”
“The supernatural one?” At her nod, he made himself comfortable on the ground. “It was two hundred years ago. I was twenty-seven, stumbling home after a night out with the boys in Paris. It was dark, foggy. Right out of a Jack the Ripper movie. I heard what sounded like a brawl coming from an alley, and like an idiot, I investigated.” He remembered being horrified when he saw what looked like a huge, armored man in a bloody battle with a hooved, red-skinned, horned thing. “Now I know that one of the males doing battle was a demon. The other . . . he was a vampire, but not one like I’ve ever known.”
“What happened?”
Nate had stood there, shitfaced and blinking, as if it was all a drunken mirage. “The vampire killed the demon, but he was injured. Badly. He had a gushing wound in his neck, and when he saw me, his eyes lit like the fires of hell. I tried to run, but he was on me and feeding before I could stumble two steps.”
“So he forced you to drink his blood to turn you?”
“That’s the weird thing,” he said. “There was no blood exchange.”
She frowned. “You sure you just don’t remember? Because to make a vampire—” Blushing, she cut herself off. “Sorry. Duh.”
Gods, she was cute. How the hell could she be a hyena? She couldn’t. He’d have tasted it in her blood. The same blood that had left a trail in the corner of her mouth. Without thinking, he reached out and wiped it away with his thumb. He wanted to linger, to frame her face in his hands and kiss away her pain, but the wariness in her doe eyes told him she still wasn’t ready to take him for anything other than a miserable son of a bitch who profited off the blood of others.
Reluctantly, he dropped his arm. “I’m sure he didn’t do the blood exchange. He wasn’t normal. I can’t explain it, but whatever he was, he turned me . . . and made me different.”
“Different?”
He lowered his voice, because he’d learned a long time ago that this wasn’t something to be said out loud. “I can walk in the sunlight.”
Lena blinked. “That’s . . . that’s not possible.”
“I know. And yet, I can hang out on a tropical beach at noon.”
“Okay, so then what?” she asked, sounding very much like a medical professional digging to the bottom of a mysterious ailment.
“I went home to my wife. I don’t remember much, but I remember waking up so f**king hungry.” He hadn’t understood what was going on, only that he was starving, and the sound of Eleanor’s beating heart was driving him mad. “I attacked her. Nearly drained her.” She’d screamed, pummeled him with her delicate fists, calling him a monster. Which he was. “Afterward, she lay there on the bed, pale and limp, and a weird instinct to feed her my blood came over me, and . . . I did. But I didn’t know what I’d done. When she died a couple hours later, I went insane. That’s the only way to describe it. I took off, and the next decade was a blur. My mind came back gradually, and I decided I needed answers. I traveled all over Europe, trying to find the as**ole who turned me, looking for other vampires. It was a shock to learn that other vamps couldn’t go out in the daylight.”
“You’re the only one?”
“There have always been rumors of others, but I’ve never found any. And I learned real fast not to announce my own sun-loving nature.” Other vampires either tried to kill him out of jealousy, or they wanted to experiment on him in order to find a way to cure their own issues with severe sunburn. “So anyway, eventually I realized it was possible that Eleanor could be a vampire, given what I’d done to her.” He closed his lids, but that didn’t shut out the memory. “I found her, in London. She hated me for what I’d done to her, and she’d moved on, right into Fade’s arms.”
“Oh, damn,” Lena breathed. She touched his knee, a soothing gesture he didn’t think she realized she’d made. “That must have been hard for you.”
He had to clear his throat of the lump of emotion before he continued, and it struck him that the memory wasn’t what was affecting him, but Lena’s concern.
“I was furious,” he said, “but I still loved her. So I seduced her away from him.” Nate looked down at Lena’s hand, which looked so dainty on his leg. “That proved to be a fatal mistake. I didn’t realize what he was. He chased us all over Europe, and when he caught us . . .” He trailed off, his mouth drying up and acid scouring his veins. Fade had tortured the f**k out of both of them, and then he’d dragged them both to one of his fight clubs, where he’d tortured them some more.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What happened, Nate?”
“He put Eleanor in a pit with two Cruentus demons. She put up a good fight, injuring one so badly that he had to be put down. But the other killed her. I had to watch the whole thing.”
“I’m so sorry.” Lena’s nimble fingers stroked his leg. No one since Eleanor had offered him comfort like that. He’d missed so much in his life, and it had taken Lena to make him realize it. Now it was too late. “So did he let you go?”