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Chapter Eight

Jagger

I strode past the pit, hellfire licking up from the edges and heating my skin.

This was home—maybe this was where I needed to be for a while, until things with Sutton cooled off.

A growl slipped free as I hefted the stag higher on my shoulder, and I tried not to spill the bucket of hot water I carried in the other hand, and strode deeper into the tunnels.

Another growl, low in my chest, rolled from me out of nowhere.

I couldn’t seem to stop it for some reason.

No, that was bullshit. I knew the reason.

It was every time I thought about Sutton and the way she’d looked at me before she shut the door in my face, locking me out of her house—which meant I was growling constantly.

I still didn’t know how I’d lost the grip on my control so thoroughly.

Seeing her hurt like that. In danger. My control had started corroding the moment I realized she was in trouble.

My snarl bounced off the stone walls on either side of me. Somehow, I’d sensed her fear that night, I’d known she was in serious danger. A hound used scent to track, and the animal part of me wouldn’t let go of Sutton’s, her scent was fucking imbedded deep inside me.

I’d tried to shake off the pull toward her, the sense that she was in trouble, because I didn’t believe it.

Why would I feel that? How? But a hound never ignored his instincts, and not following where they led me, where her scent led me, was impossible.

They’d taken me straight to Dogwood—to Sutton in that fucking van.

After that, instinct had taken over, had driven me to snatch her from that wolf, put her on the back of my bike, and take her home to tend her wounds.

Seeing her afraid, injured, the beast had demanded I take care of her.

The beast and the man were one and the same—we were of the same mind in all things—and that part of me wouldn’t let me forget the taste of her lips, and now—fuck—there was a growl of mine , constantly in my head.

Animal instinct was pulling me toward her, making me feel things that should be impossible, my stomach was tight, and my hands fucking shook and my head was full of confusing and persistent thoughts, and I was afraid I knew why.

I’d barely resisted tearing the heads off those wolves.

If Warrick and Rome hadn’t been there, I’m not sure I could’ve stopped myself.

Yes, those fuckers deserved it, but it would’ve caused all kinds of problems with Draven and the rest of his pack.

I was War’s lieutenant, given that position because I could keep my shit tight when I needed to.

It was Draven’s job to reprimand his pack, but as soon as I’d seen Sutton, afraid and bleeding, I hadn’t cared about that, I would have happily started a war.

I thought I had the hunger, the desire for Sutton, under control. I thought that seeing her hurt, licking her wounds, tasting her blood had caused some kind of fucked connection to her, was behind these overprotective feelings I had for her, and that I could easily handle them. I was wrong.

The scent of her blood had roused the beast until that part of me had been shoving against my skin, rolling under my flesh, desperate to take over, to hunt down those who hurt her and put them down.

As soon as I’d run my fingers through all that soft, gorgeous, fucking honey-blond hair stained red, I’d been back in that basement with her. I’d seen her the way I’d found her three months ago, so close to death that she’d almost been lost to all of us.

After that, washing the blood out of her hair, getting rid of the smell, had been all I could think about, and the more I’d touched her, the more I’d smelled her, and the more time I spent with her, the more I lost control—until I was nothing but beast.

Being near her was too dangerous. I couldn’t be in the same city, the same house, and definitely not in the same fucking room.

Which meant this wasn’t just some protective feelings I was dealing with here, this was something else, something that should not be fucking possible.

Fuck.

Her wounded face, injured, and not just from the beating she’d taken but from the way I hurt her, flashed through my mind.

You’re not the male I thought you were.

I gritted my teeth, remembering her parting words, but they were nothing I hadn’t deserved.

I finally reached the large steel door at the end of a cave, one that I’d carved out myself several years ago.

My blood and sweat were in every gouge along these walls, and in the archway I made for this door.

The door itself had been forged in hellfire by my own hands, because it needed to be strong, secure. Safe.

Pressing my hand to the steel, I let my powers pulse through it, allowing the seal I’d created to recognize me. I felt the barrier drop.

Then taking the key from my back pocket, I unlocked the massive padlock and slowly opened the door.

A vicious, bloodcurdling snarl ricocheted off the walls as I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. I turned to the massive hound standing across from me, mouth foaming, black fur matted, and red eyes blazing.

I was the only one who could approach Kurgan. I was the only one he let near him.

The thick steel cuff around his throat was attached to a long, heavy chain, stopping him short so he couldn’t attack anyone else who came in here, but he didn’t need it when he was with me. He wouldn’t attack me.

“Be easy, Kurgan. It’s Jagger.” I strode closer, lowering the stag to the floor in front of him. “You’re okay,” I said as his snarls and growls increased in volume.

I hadn’t been here for a couple of weeks.

I hated staying away so long. Maddox had brought his food to him in my absence, but that meant in all that time, Kurgan had no real interactions other than Mad throwing him food from the door.

Only a few of us knew about Kurgan—me, Lothar, War, and Maddox—because Lucifer insisted he be kept a secret.

Holding out my hand, I stepped closer, nice and slow. Sometimes, when I was forced to stay away for longer periods of time, the madness took a firmer hold and only my scent brought him back. His snout wrinkled as his growls increased and his fangs extended, longer than any other hound’s I’d seen.

He finally caught my scent and instantly calmed.

“That’s it. It’s just me.” I ran my hand over the matted fur on his head, and he lowered it, letting me scratch him more vigorously. “Eat your supper.”

Kurgan ripped into the venison, making short work of the huge stag.

Water trickled down the stone wall in the corner, filling a large basin, giving him a constant supply of clean drinking water, and he drank from it now, washing all that meat down before he finally turned to me and sat on his haunches.

“Got you some warm water for a wash.” He didn’t like to shift for anyone else—War occasionally, but no one else—so he wouldn’t have washed while I’d been gone. I took the rag and soap that I’d tucked into my back pocket and the towel that I’d slung around my neck and put them down by the bucket.

His red eyes came to me, more animal than any other hound I knew, then he tilted his head back and with a painful howl shifted. He did it so infrequently that when he finally did, his shift was slow, like his joints were made of rusted steel needing to be freed up with force.

Finally, he stood across from me, his gaze on the floor, his dark hair just as wild as his fur had been. Kurgan wasn’t just the biggest hound I’d ever seen in his animal form but in his human form as well.

Kurgan rarely spoke, though when he did, his voice was so deep and blended with the beast that he terrified most beings.

He dragged the bucket closer and proceeded to wipe the dirt and blood from his skin with the rag, dipping it in the water, soaping up, and slowly and methodically cleaning himself.

He paused suddenly and turned to me, and his eyes had changed, shifting from red, to green.

I knew what was coming, what he always asked every time I came here.

“Female?” he asked, his voice impossibly deep and rusty.

“Your female’s safe, son.”

“Meat?”

I nodded. “I took her a stag as well. Steaks and a few roasts and left it on her doorstep. Her house is safe,” I said, telling him what I told him every time. “She has blankets, and locks, and your brothers are guarding her?—”

He growled another of those bloodcurdling growls, and I lifted my hands. “From a distance, they watch her from a distance. No one’s getting close to Lenny, son. I won’t let anyone get close to her.”

He nodded, grunted, and continued to clean the dirt and blood from his skin.

I sat leaning against the wall, and when Kurgan finished, he did the same. He sat against the wall, his legs out in front of him, ankles crossed, imitating me. It happened occasionally, these moments of lucidity, but again, only with me.

It wasn’t supposed to matter. Hellhounds were brothers, all of us. We weren’t separated into families, at least those of us not mated. That’s not how we were. Lucifer created us—that made us his children, that made us brothers, pack, family, if that was the word you chose to use.

But somehow Kurgan understood on a deeper level that I was his.

That he wasn’t Lucifer’s creation—that he was mine.

His family.

His blood.

That I was his sire.

Did he know that I was the reason he was broken as well? That it was my fault he was locked away, separated from the female chosen for him? That I’d done this? That he suffered this way because of me?

I was the poison in his veins.

Relic wasn’t the only hound to come from Lucifer’s experiment all those years ago, but Relic was the only success.