Page 73 of The Breeding Cave
Once she came down from her orgasm, I forced myself to put the canines away, and I walked into the hot spring, laying her on a rock. She lay there, the water making her black hair wet and cling to her body.
The burns on her body reddened in the water, but she sighed so I assumed that it felt good for her. I needed to find a cure so Yeosin didn’t discover any more burns on her body. While I didn’t look at her any differently, she looked at herself differently. She thought of herself as ugly because her body was covered with them.
Fifteen minutes later, Yeosin crawled out of the hot spring and into my lap.
“Will you stay with me?” she whispered, clutching on to me, even in her sleepy state.
“I won’t leave the cave,” I said, placing her down on a rock. I tugged up on a blanket to cover her naked body. “But it’s getting cold. I need to find some firewood for us so you don’t freeze to death.”
“No,” she mumbled, dozing off. “When Brent went out there …”
Instead of finishing her sentence, Yeosin drifted to sleep. I grabbed another blanket and placed it over her smaller body. The mate bond had snapped into place quickly, and I could feel everything that she was feeling. She was cold and filled with pain that I couldn’t understand.
Once her breathing evened out, I tugged on some pants and walked out to the main entrance of the cave, where I had been inside her more times than I could count now. I sniffed around, faintly smelling Brent’s scent lingering in the air.
“Brent?” I called, heading to the entrance.
Brent leaned against a tree, his arms crossed and a bundle of firewood at his feet. Next to the wood was Alpha Alf, one of the alphas who owned a cave farther down the mountain. He and his pack had fallen victim to the Dragon Clan years ago too.
Now, he was barely holding on to his life.
“What happened to him?” I asked from the cave.
After slamming his foot into Alf’s side to turn him over, Brent picked up the bundle of firewood. While I expected to see burns all over Alf’s body, he wasn’t covered in any burns at all. No, but his body was contorted in ways that it shouldn’t be.
Brent couldn’t have done that.
“What happened?” I said, my beast becoming possessive as we caught Yeosin’s scent.
“Alpha Alf tried to attack Yeosin when you were gone,” Brent said. “I tracked down the scent through the woods and found him. He was about three miles south from here, lying in a puddle of his blood.”
“What do you mean, he tried to attack Yeosin?”
“It’s the full moon, and he’s an alpha without a mate,” Brent said, refusing to make eye contact with me. Pain crossed his face, almost as if he was disappointed in himself. “What do you think I mean?”
Did he try to … to rape her? To claim her? To make her his?
“Where the fuck were you?” I snarled, sight clouding with red.
“I went right outside to get firewood,” Brent said. “I wasn’t more than five feet away from the cave. Somehow, I passed out. The Colossals had something to do with it. It had to be them … you know about their powers. Messing with monsters’ minds.”
“I knew it was a bad idea to work with them,” I growled underneath my breath.
But how? How could we defeat the Dragon Clan without them? We had tried so many times before, only to be utterly destroyed and almost annihilated. I couldn’t put Yeosin in that kind of danger, going at them myself.
“Thank Goddess they can’t do it to humans,” Brent murmured, “or else the dragons wouldn’t be the strongest monsters in the forest anymore. The world would be ruled by Colossals.”
My gaze dropped to Alpha Alf, and I growled. “Chain him up and bring him into the cave once you’re finished. I don’t care if he was overcome with anything during the full moon. He will pay for what he tried to do to Yeosin.”
And I’d make Yeosin watch the man who had tried to torture her get tortured himself.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
YEOSIN
My arms are bound behind my back to a metal pole planted in the ground. Fire, ash, and smoke surround me in the barren field that once was part of the forest. I desperately try to escape the binds.
