Page 132 of Pretty Little Prey
The alpha shifters could hardly hold back from thrashing the woman and shrieking up at the rafters.
“Pain?” Kobe growled.
“Freezing to death?” Sly asked. “What’s happening to her? Where is she?”
“Well, you see, when a boy and girl fall in love, and the boy decides to be stubborn and not let his friends—enemy?—share her, the girl ends up being tortured because the boy didn’t notice she was kidnapped by a prey-farmer.”
More slack jaws. More clenched fists. More eyebrows drawn in anger and dread.
“Tortured?” Kobe echoed in a broken tone.
“If the farmer can get her to shift, he will shoot her up with a chemical to keep her in animal form—permanently. Spoiler alert: no witch spell will be able to counteract it. If hecan’tget her to shift, he will skin her.”
“WHAT?”
“S-K-I-N,” Hag spelled it out for the dragon. “Skin her. As in to remove the top layer of the body.”
“But she’s a prey now,” Nikolai countered. “She won’t heal from that.”
Hag saluted Nikolai with finger guns and a first-place blue ribbon appeared pinned to his suit. “Duttur human form skin actually has very interesting qualities,” she commented. “It can be turned into thesoftestmaterial—as in, who needs cashmere? Or it has sleeping properties when consumed. Like those brain activity pills for the overthinker. Who needs to ‘count sheep’ when you can use the mystical properties of one?”
“Skinned? What the fuck?” Bastille raged. “Tell us where she is, specifically, right now.”
She swooned. “So you can save her?”
“Yes,” he hissed.
She mocked his tone as she replied, “No.”
“Remind me why I shouldn’t kill your seer, Daxton?”
The dragon scowled at Hag. “The reason is escaping me at the moment.”
“Haha, aw, you babies think you could kill me?” She pinched Bastille’s cheeks. “Adorable.” She looked over each of the men, surveying them. “If you wanted her, you would have done anything for her. Instead, you chose past prejudices and pride. Jealousy. Ego.”
“Well, we’ve learned our lesson.”
She tilted her head. “Have you?”
“We’re willing to share her,” Bastille grated, glancing at Daxton. Both of them nodded stiffly at each other.
“Aw, too late,” she said.
The men held their breath.
“Just kidding! You can find her at the farm located on the edge of the Mount Rancos cliff. She’s in an underground cell there, impossible to scent her through the thick cement. But beware,” the seer said as her eyes flashed with bright light again.
Lightning struck just outside the windowpane as she continued, “She is only there because of your choices. She was to become queen. Instead, she bleeds on a dusty floor, crying for her mother. She stopped begging for you to save her about five minutes into the torture. That was around the time she began to blame you for her capture. If you leave now, you might be able to get to her while she still has most of her skin.”
“Most?”
“But, between us,” Hag whispered. “I don’t see how she’ll ever trust or forgive you after this.”
Chapter 52
Cold. Broken. Hurt.
“Please, stop,” Luna cried.
