LITMIR.BIZ

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of letting the rage he influenced in her come through. When he turned, shifting back his massive shoulders to glare coldly in her eyes, his pain was obviously ebbing. She gasped, skidding on the carpet to stop the forward motion that would carry her right into him. She stopped, but one massive arm swung out to her, black claws rending the skirt of her gown as he seized hold of it and used it to drag her forward.

      “Mine,” he growled. “Forever.”

      Then he shoved her back, allowing himself and the awful little man to exit unimpeded out of the door. It was slamming shut as she flung herself against it.

      She screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

      Adrian staggered down the grand hallway, the effects of her attack not so easily shaken off this time. He needed his mirror. He needed to lose himself in the comfort of its darkness. There he would hide until Aerlyn could recover. It was she who had kept him from feeling these agonies, he knew that now. She was such an eager receptacle for good that it had never had a chance to touch him before.

      So this was what happened when it did, eh? It was horrible! He had never thought such a fate could be his. But it served as justified penance for the sin he had committed against his sister.

      Another wave of pain crashed into him suddenly, more painful than anything the little conniving creature in his treasure room had given him.

      What she had given him was secondhand. His present feelings of remorse and repentance were his own, and the fact that such good could be born so suddenly in one so black made it a powerful thing.

      He was at the head of the stairs when it hit and he lurched forward and over, tumbling helters-kelter down the curving staircase.

      Hours later—or was it days?—Kathryn sobbed in exhausted despair, her cheek pressed to the smooth wooden door as if it could bring her closer to the other side. She was crumpled upon the floor, leaning heavily against the sickeningly lovely portal of her prison.

      “Please!” she cried hoarsely, her voice rasping weakly from overuse. “Let me out. Please!”

      She had used a hundred, a thousand, similar pleas. She had begged and cajoled with insane single-mindedness for her freedom, exhausting every resource of appeal or possible influence she could come up with.

      Why was this happening to her? What had she done to deserve this particular unbearable hell?

      Had she somehow sinned? Had she been somehow complacent in her gift of freedom that she must now have it so brutally torn away from her? She had never kept a pet; she had even shied from catching fireflies as a child when other children seized and kept the poor things bouncing madly in mason jar jails.

      “Why are you doing this to me?” she screamed suddenly, rising to her knees and pounding her fists on the massive wooden gateway before her. She wailed in frustrated misery, pummeling the doors with the same hazed mania she had used against the monster’s body earlier. She continued until her bruised skin began to split and bleed. “Let me out! Let me out! You don’t own me! I won’t let you own me! I will die first!” She was screeching at the top of her vocal cords, but that had come to be a sound barely above a rasping exhalation due to the abuse they had suffered. “Do you hear me? I will die first!”

      She collapsed to the floor then, her body too weak with exhaustion and despair to maintain her battle. She wept piteously, her face pressed into the delicate woven textures of the rug. Her head ached, throbbing from inflamed sinuses and the sounds of all her screams still echoing in her ears.

      She had never known such despondency. She could not find her usual fortitude, which had always seen her through all kinds of difficult situations in her life. The unknown but well-imagined path of her fate had robbed her of her will to be strong. The fight bled out of her, her spirit ailing and falling away into murky grayness.

      She would never be free again, she thought over and over again. She had seen kidnappings on crime shows and they never ended well, especially the longer they went on. And with her family ill, there was no one to even report her missing. They would never find her.

      She was doomed to live out her life trapped in this gilded cage. She would die and decay until her polished bones were all that would be left. Then, even in death, her skeleton would be hung amongst these other treasures to be mused and mulled over like any museum piece with a fascinating tidbit of history or gossip connected to it.

      Lost.

      Forever lost.

      She would never see her father or sister again, and this, above all, pierced her heart. For all she knew they had likely died alone and uncared for in their beds because she, their last hope for life, had been spirited away to this monstrous place, wherever it was.

      Any distance that took her from her family’s bedsides was too far away.

      Slowly Kathryn drifted even farther away into the gray void of her thoughts.

      She would never have a husband, would never be wife to a man she loved more than life itself.

      She felt her dreams of romance drift into dust. She would never know the answers to those secrets of love between a man and a woman. There would not be holding or being touched with infinite caring and tenderness by the hand of a strong male who loved her. Where was the wondrous kinship of sharing her life with a husband and family? Dying. All these dreams were no longer hers to have. This also meant she would not be a mother, would not feel a new generation of Macdonough blood quicken in her body, and would not labor to bring that life into the world.

      Kathryn finally was slipping into sleep again as exhaustion robbed away even her ability to think.

      Tears slipped from her eyes when a distant, subconscious thought realized that there would not even be dreams in this sleep to allow her escape.

      Chapter 3

      Aerlyn’s eyes fluttered open to darkness.

      She sighed in consternation. Truly, she thought, her damned fool of a brother had ventured much too far this time!

      She sat up quickly, glided off the bed and onto her bare feet as if she had never been injured at all. She paused to take a mental inventory and was perturbed to realize she had been unconscious for three days and nights.

      Three days and nights where her brother had most likely run amok without her to censure or balance his damages. The impact of the imbalance would be phenomenal, no doubt. There would likely be a great deal of repair work to be done on her part if she was to set this disruption to rights.

      She was halfway down the hall when an eerie sensation crept into her.

      Something was amiss.

      “Adrian?” she called warily, her resonant voice echoing like music into every corner and cubby of the entire fortress. “Adrian! I am awake and truly in a rare fit at you. Adrian! Answer me!”

      Aerlyn felt a sudden sense of foreboding creep over her, twisting around her like ivy that smothered the very life out of an unfortunate tree.

      …Aerlyn…

      The voice that came to her mind was accompanied by a sheet of falling blackness. She was in his mind, or maybe just the place between their minds, she couldn’t be positive.

      “Adrian.” The relief in her voice was enormous, if short-lived.

      …I think I am dying, Aerlyn. There is so much pain….

      Aerlyn caught her breath. The idea of someone of her brother’s strength and power dying was ludicrous, but for him to think so could only mean that he was in inconceivable agony. Adrian was not supposed to feel pain like she did. He was a master of pain and fear; therefore, they never touched him. Adrian felt at home in his normal darknesses: his rages, his hate, and other similar emotions. These were natural things, comfortable things to him.

      Whatever in the universe would cause him pain? She should be the only source that could theoretically cause such a phenomenon. But she had been in blank repose for

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