His female was far too chaste to offer her hand or her mouth. But he could not resist presenting himself before her and kissing her throat on her veins, first the left, then the right, directly above the high lace collar of her gown. Her discomfort at his display was in the way her shoulders tightened, but the contact was permissible as they were amongst their servants who were sworn to secrecy and discretion.
It was hardly a liberty given they were properly mated.
As he eased back, he gazed upon the loveliness that was his mate and knew that he was the luckiest male in the New World, and truly, the whole of the Earth.
Within a fortnight, that view of his destiny would be altered.
And the long period of his suffering would commence.
Had he known what awaited him, he would have placed his feelings of dread in a more proper context. They were not, as it turned out, paranoia.
They were prescience.
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
Willow Hills Sanatorium (deserted)
Connelly, New York
Get the fucking car. Right now—wait! Did you disarm the collars?”
“We’ll find out. If our heads blow off, that would be a no.”
After this back-and-forth of disembodied male voices, there was a scramble of footfalls that retreated—and an electronic beeping that was short in duration, quiet in volume. And then, silence.
No… breathing.
From behind Kane’s slammed-shut eyelids, he couldn’t tell whether the ragged respiration was his own or another’s, and there was little he could do to settle the debate. He lacked the strength to lift the dead weight that was cutting off his vision, but there were other issues outside of that. His wounded body, covered in third-degree burns, was an anchor that kept his cognitive abilities far, far under the hot water of his pain. Processing anything past a simple state of consciousness required concentration he did not have.
Although, if he was having even these thoughts, surely at least some of the inhaling/exhaling was his own—
Well… dammit. He was going to throw up.
About ten minutes ago, or it might have been ten hours ago—maybe ten days ago?—they’d given him something to ease his agony, the drug administered into a vein at the crook of his elbow. Almost immediately, there had been a floating sensation that had dimmed everything and created the heavy lids he was trying to raise, and now his stomach was rolling, the nausea nearly as bad as the—
The sound of metal on metal registered.
A gun being checked for ammunition.
The shifting and clicking were enough to cut through what few thoughts he had, taking him back to places in his old life he never liked to visit. However, the tide of recollections about his past refused to heed the barriers he attempted to erect. Images, like grenades, assaulted his mental landscape, their detonations creating craters—
“Kane.”
Relieved by the distraction, he turned his head blindly to the male he knew so very well. Dragging open his eyes, he saw nothing. At least… he thought his lids were open? He had been recently beaten by some of the prison camp’s guards, and the swelling made him feel like his face was a sack of potatoes.
“Apex,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m going to pick you up.”
Shaking his head, Kane tried to speak further. Movement would be very bad in this instance. Very bad indeed—
“This is our one shot. We have to take it now.”
The arms that shoved their way under his body were like rods inserted through his flesh, and he moaned. Then panicked.
“Wait, stop,” he choked out.