Page 26 of Claimed

A couple of the guys pick me up between them. One has me under the arms, the other has me by the feet. Prague spins in a big historical swirl as they cart me off somewhere. I hope it’s fun. Maybe there’s another party.

We end up somewhere cool and quiet. A room of some kind. Messy, I think, hard to tell. My eyes are sort of blurred. Focusing is not the easiest. They put me down on something that feels soft, but not good. A mattress without a sheet, I think. I smellall sorts of masculine scents and such. My human senses would recoil from it, but my wolf side is intrigued.

I am comfortable—not because I think I am safe, but because I know I am the danger. The alcohol has dulled my human senses, but done nothing to my animal side. If anything, that part of me feels sharper and more keen than ever before.

I lie there, quite drunk and being tentatively violated by these two terrible men.

“She’ll be a good snack for Master,” one of them says.

“Oh, he’ll be so pleased. Pretty thing like this. Look at her tits.”

I am already thinking about killing them, of course. It’s a strange thought to have because it doesn’t come from my human side. My human self, a pretty young woman still innocent in so many ways, could never consider hurting anybody. This desire comes from the animal part of me, the part that knows that these are jackals, scavengers, not true predators, and they deserve to be taught a lesson.

“What have you brought me?”

A new voice enters the room, along with a chill. I don’t know who this is, but I sense that it is the master they referred to. I suppose they’re catching young women for the use and abuse of this creature, this man whose shiny leather boots enter my field of vision before my gaze manages to creep up the length of him.

“Very pretty,” the newcomer says. “We don’t get many like this here, do we?”

He comes and stands over me, tall, dressed in leather. His eyes are narrowed, his skin pale. His hair is blond and his eyes are a frankly creepy ice blue. He has a sort of haughty demeanor thatsuggests he thinks he is better than everybody else.Psychopath, my senses tingle.

The two who brought me here leer at me with a sort of general pleased-ness. They’ve done well in the eyes of their master, as they call him.

“Should we strip her for you, sir? Or would you like the pleasure? She’s not been very feisty. Shouldn’t put up much of a fight.”

Men almost always underestimate women. These men have underestimated me more than most.

“Strip her,” the master says, his voice taking on a note of perverse pleasure as my eyes widen.

My two captors start to bend to his will.

As my dress comes up over my thighs, I realize that this is not funny. They’re laughing. The master is chuckling. Even I manage a giggle, but this is no joke. They are predators. Unfortunately, I am not prey.

Before they can touch me in a too terribly intimate way, I shift. It has never been this easy before. I don’t know if it’s painful or not, because I can’t feel anything. One second I’m lying helpless on their bed, the next I am all muscle, fang, and fur. This is only the second time I have shifted, and unlike the first time in which I was entirely out of control, this time I am only completely out of control.

Their screams are very satisfying, and my hunger is intense. I didn’t really eat at lunch. I picked prettily at a salad, playing the role of demure bride. I didn’t think I was hungry then, and even if I was, I didn’t want to eat too much in case I appeared, well, I don’t know. I cared about how I looked to Alexei and hissophisticated friends—but my wolf self doesn’t care about how she’s perceived, certainly not by meat.

I’ve been told shifters don’t eat people. I’ve been told we hunt animals, deer, elk, anything with hooves. But in this moment, I am certain that humans are prey. They are made of meat as much as any prey animal, and they are of the soft and squishy edible kind. They are not sinewy like predators. They are tender and they are delicious, and their arterial blood is like great spraying fountains of sugar. I lap it up, roll in it, I bite and I feast and I consume to my heart’s content.

Alexei

Anya is taking a very long time in the bathroom. The conversation is relatively intense, and it takes me far too long to realize that she is not actually coming back in anything resembling a timely fashion.

“Excuse me, I believe my mate may need my help,” I excuse myself.

Going into the ladies’ bathroom is not my habit, but I am already getting the feeling that something is going quite wrong. Call it a gut feeling.

There’s nobody in the bathroom. But there is an open window, and as soon as I see that, I know that there is a problem.

I cannot believe she snuck away from me like a spoiled little girl. When I find her, she’s going to be in so much pain. I am going to absolutely whip her ass, as the Americans say.

A good twenty minutes have passed since she first left the table. That is not good. Her scent is messy and difficult to track because the city is so busy, but we eventually follow it to a bar, where it is confirmed that she went drinking.

“Two of her friends took her home,” the bartender says.

“Friends?”

“Local boys,” he says.

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