“That’s all right,” he assured her, drawing her seductively close, his lips finding hers again, nibbling, nudging, enticing her back, fingers trailing up her inner thigh. “They always do.”
Wait, what? Discovering renewed resolve, she pushed him away firmly, managing to duck out from the sensual cage of his knowing embrace.
“What does that mean?” she demanded, putting her back to the far wall and thrusting out a hand to stop him as he pursued her. “Stay back, Jadren. I mean it.”
He halted, offering open palms, though his gaze drilled into her with obsidian fire. He simmered with magic now, bruised and swollen face healing almost before her eyes, the power of it making him more compelling than ever. He crooked his finger at her, beckoning. An instinctive, newly yielding part of her leapt to respond, and she squelched it with ruthless desperation. “It doesn’t matter,” Jadren coaxed. “Come here.”
“No.” Everything in her screamed yes. “And it does matter. Tell me.”
“Then I’ll come there.” Easing closer, he stalked her with sinuous grace.
“I swear, Jadren, if you come any closer, I will fight you and I will never forgive you.”
Some semblance of sanity returned to his eyes, replaced by wary resignation. “It’s pointless. You can’t resist the bonding for long. Even now your instincts are screaming that you belong to me, aren’t they?” His lips curved in satisfaction at her shock that he knew that. “You are mine, Seliah, like it or not. More, you want to be, in every way.”
She did want that, did want his hands on her again, even as her rational mind—never all that reliable since the madness anyway—quietly whispered of future regrets. “Just tell me this what you meant, that they always watch. I deserve the truth. I need the truth, Jadren,” she added, holding his gaze and silently beseeching the part of him that had been her friend. If that had been real.
“You have no idea.” He glanced around the enclosure, seeming to register the glass window and people moving beyond. “You really don’t want to know,” he added on a sigh, sliding her a rueful grimace.
“I not only want to know, I think I should know. What do you mean always? Am I not the first woman who’s been confined in here with—” The ugly truth dawned on her. “That’s what your mother meant about your fertility being confirmed. They’ve put other women in here with you, waiting for the healing frenzy to send you into raping them.”
“I never raped anyone,” he bit out. “They were all willing. In fact, they were downright eager to have my wizard babies.”
“Or familiar babies.” The correction didn’t matter, but she was struggling to wrap her mind around this revelation.
He shrugged, as if that didn’t matter. “A roll of the dice for everyone.”
“How many?”
“How many babies? I have no idea. No one keeps me apprised of the results of those particular experiments. Well, really any of them. I’m not exactly in charge here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“How many female familiars did they breed you to?” Selly ground out, struggling to comprehend the monstrous enormity of the bog she’d fallen into. False bottom.
“They weren’t all familiars,” he corrected, a curious dullness coming over him. “Wizards, too. They were all happy enough to be pleasured. You will be, too. If nothing else, I’ve learned to do that much. Dozens,” he offered, and it took her a moment to realize he was finally answering her question. “Could be a hundred or more. They blur together and I wasn’t exactly in my right mind much of the time.” Lifting fingertips to his temples, he massaged them. “Trying to remember is painful. What I think is real isn’t always.”
“Oh, Jadren…” She wanted to comfort him. She didn’t dare go near him. “Don’t think about it. I’m sorry I asked.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, then dropped them, staring at them for a long, fraught moment. His gaze traveled their sterile prison, lingering briefly on the pile of parts extruded from his body, then returned to meet her eyes, expression taut, a disturbing edge to it. “Seliah.” He sighed her name, drawing out the syllables. “Who are you, really?”
She hadn’t expected that. “You know who I am. You met me at House Phel. We’ve traveled together.”
He snorted. “It’s quite the flimsy cover story, don’t you think? In what world would I have been at House Phel, if it even exists? House Phel perished from the rolls ages ago. And why would this Lord Phel let me travel with his sister, an unbonded familiar?”
“I…” This was bad. He didn’t seem to be playing a game with her. “Don’t you remember?”
“I remember plenty.” He placed odd emphasis on the word, casting it into doubt. “But I can’t trust those memories. It could be that I never left this place, that everything I think I remember about the time out in the world was a delusion. Perhaps this is some new trick of Maman’s to entice me to do what she wants.” He grinned crookedly. “It’s working, too. I like you better than all the others. Where did she find you?”
He cornered her easily, especially as some wild and willing part of her didn’t truly want to evade him. Had they been alone, she’d have yielded utterly at that point. Laying one splayed hand over her collarbones, he lightly clasped her throat, the way he seemed to like to do when certain dark moods were upon him. His wizard-black gaze drilled into her. “I can feel the bond between us.” His magic caressed hers, like an intimate stroke on the inside of her skin. “I think you really are my bonded familiar.” His other hand unerringly found the slit in her gown, caressing her naked thigh. “I have an image of you branded into my brain. You, naked, kneeling at my feet. Mine. That’s real isn’t it?”
His fingers found the nest of curls at the juncture of her thighs. Though she squirmed, he held her in place with that commanding hand at her throat and the power of his gaze. She clamped her thighs firmly together, but he slipped a finger into the gap, the slickness there making it absurdly easy for him. They both groaned, the stark pleasure reverberating through them physically and magically. “Seliah,” he murmured, finding the swollen peak of her helpless arousal, “you’ve been lying to me.”
“I haven’t,” she gasped.
“You have,” he asserted, circling that peak with an insistent fingertip, sending ripples of enervating pleasure coursing through her. “You’re so wet, swollen, hot with need. You want me. You want this.”
“I don’t.” The denial came out ragged, his clever fingers strumming a desire unlike any she’d ever experienced. There was truth to it—she did want him. Wanted, craved him. She gazed into his compelling face, his black eyes so intense on hers. It would be easy to give in, to drown in him, to give herself over, to hand him those final keys to her heart. And they’d both be lost forever.
Realizing she’d been clinging to his shoulders, she lifted her hands to his face, framing it. “Jadren.” She spoke his name with all the quiet ferocity she could muster. Trying to reach him at the bottom of whatever bog of insanity he was drowning in. She understood what that was like—and she had new insight into why Jadren had always seemed to understand that about her. He knew what the suffocating depths of magic-induced insanity felt like. He’d been there. He’d also risked his life to drag her out. She could do no less. “Jadren,” she repeated, losing his name on a gasp, her eyes nearly rolling back in her head as his finger found the portal to her most intimate self and pressed up inside her. Somewhere along the way she’d forgotten her resistance and opened her thighs to him.
