Page 13 of Lost and Bound
“What the fuck?” I shouted, my voice echoing off the concrete box we were in, reverberating, and somehow sounding all the shriller and more desperate for the amplification. “What thefuck?” I repeated, not shouting this time but still rough with my fury and frustration. “Why not? Why not even consider it?”
“Because it wouldn’t be enough.” His voice sounded even rougher than mine, low and gravelly and raspy enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “It simply wouldn’t be enough. Draining you dry wouldn’t be enough. If it would, you think you’d still be alive?”
“Oh,” I managed, faintly.
“I’d need a lot more than that,” he said. “More than your lifeblood. I’d need your actuallife. And to get that—” He stopped abruptly, his lips parted, giving me a glimpse of those too-sharp teeth. And then he focused on my face, the glow in his eyes intensifying. His expression went as sharp as his canines, and his face hardened. “To get that, I’d need to mate you,” he said at last.
I moved faster than I’d ever moved in my life, scrabbling backward and flinging myself across the room. I smacked into the opposite wall with bruising force and huddled there, nearly choking I was breathing so hard, my heart trying to thump its way out of my chest. My cracked rib had nearly healed, but the last bit of the injury throbbed like a fucking bitch.
He stood slowly, unfolding himself to his full, ridiculous height.
And that was when I realized he hadn’t been trying to catch me. He hadn’t moved a muscle when I fled from him in terror.
He wasn’t doing anything threatening at all, in fact—but he still felt too close, and he loomed over me, menacing and compelling and terrifying. Monstrous. An enormous silhouette against the faint light from the window slits.
Death incarnate, without doing more than standing there.
And he wanted tomate me.
“It wouldn’t work!” I said, my voice cracking. “It wouldn’t work, forced matings don’t create a bond strong enough to—”
“You’re the one who was willing to risk anything for a chance to escape,” he snarled, his voice going from vaguely-human to completely inhuman, a bestial growl that made the instinctive part of my mind roll over and whine in mindless terror. “And I know it wouldn’t work.”
“I’m willing to risk everything if there’s a chance—wait, what?” The rest of what he’d said caught up with me belatedly. “You know it wouldn’t work?”
“Of course I know,” he said, his lip curling. “Mating 101. Those fuckers upstairs know that too. You wouldn’t be in here with me if it was possible for me to escape by raping and biting you. Nothing good comes of a forced bond. Not strength, not power. Nothing but disaster.”
The bitterness in his voice took me aback. Had he…? I had no idea. But I did know asking would be the stupidest decision I’d ever made, in a long line of incredibly stupid decisions.
I slumped back against the wall, not quite willing to get up and move back into his reach yet, whether he planned on trying to force a mating or not.
“Okay,” I said, trying to breathe evenly and get my heartrate under control. “Okay.”
I dropped my head into my hands, rubbing my palms over my burning cheeks, squeezing my eyes shut. I needed to think clearly. Focus. Consider all the possibilities.
I could do nothing at all. I could hide out over here by the door. I could die of thirst, or of starvation, if I lasted that long.
And then the variation on doing nothing at all…letting the hunger and thirst wear me down until I couldn’t resist going for the sink, and then he’d catch me. His instincts would overwhelm whatever faint desire he had to spare me, whatever little shreds of compassion were left to him after what he’d endured here. He’d drain me and kill me, and that would be that. Maybe I’d fight him. Maybe he’d force a mating after all, the instinct to survive taking over, even though it wouldn’t work out well for him: a forced mating created a forced bond, weak and twisted and deformed. He might be able to pull some of the force of my life through it, some of the magic that set me apart from mundane humanity, but not all of it.
Not enough, if he needed every last drop.
It also wouldn’t work out well for me. Obviously.
So I could die for nothing, terrified and brutalized and unmourned. No good to anyone.
Just like I’d been no good to anyone, ever, here or before. I’d be an anonymous pile of rotting bones in an unmarked grave, or tossed into an incinerator like so much garbage.
Or…or. I’d had no control at all over my life for years. No decisions to make, stupid or otherwise.
Right now, I still didn’t have any control over my life.
But I did have a decision to make. And I had control over how I died, and why.
I had to be smart for once. Smart, and not ruled by my fear and my ego.
My survival instincts flared up again, but I squashed them down ruthlessly. I had to accept that death was the likely outcome here, and that I wasn’t an animal, struggling in a trap—I was a sentient being, more than my instincts, more than my biology.
If he escaped, if he really did rip that collar off his neck and burst out of this cell…
