Page 1 of Healing Creek (Arena Dogs #3)

Chapter One

Change was coming, again. Creek could smell it, even in the filtered air of the cursed slaver’s starship, and he welcomed whatever it would bring. He’d been a slave most of his life, but this time was different. Life in this particular slave hold had been cramped, painful, and worst of all—empty.

Never had his days been so full of nothing.

Sitting idly in a solitary cell didn’t suit him.

Always before there had been training and fighting and more training.

As an Arena Dog, he’d fought and killed his own kind for the entertainment of his owner’s patrons.

It had been a brutal life and one he despised, but he’d had little time to dwell on it.

Kill or be killed—that had been his world.

His new owner wanted only one thing from him, the location of the secret base of the people who’d freed him from that life—the resistance.

That he would not give and so his life here had been nothing but enduring.

Enduring beatings and drugs until his captor grew resigned to leave him alone.

Enduring being left alone by both his captor and his fellow slaves.

Until Jupiter. Jupiter refused to leave him alone in his thoughts.

“Today is the day.” Jupiter paced in his cell, full of pent-up energy and separated from him by a shimmering pulse field.

“Auction day,” Creek agreed.

“The day my mate and pack brother come for us.” Jupiter switched to the ultra-low frequency speech their kind often hid beneath soft growls.

Creek answered in the same manner. “They come for you .” He left unsaid that rescuing him had never been part of the plan.

Feeona, Jupiter’s mate, had been the one to sell him to the slaver, but she’d also promised to get him back.

Creek did not fully understand it, but Jupiter believed she would come.

As for his pack brother, that he understood.

Arena Dogs were designed to form packs that fought together.

They weren’t related as human siblings were, but the brotherhood of pack was sacred.

It was the only explanation for why Jupiter was so confident they would come.

Jupiter stretched in his cell. “I won’t leave you behind, my friend. You’re not going back to Roma.”

Roma. The thought made his gut clench. Roma was the world where he and all other Arena Dogs had been created.

Creek once believed it was the only place Arena Dogs lived.

He’d been wrong. There were free Arena Dogs thanks to the resistance.

Creek rumbled softly at the reassuring thought.

He didn’t belong with them, and it had been his choice to leave.

But knowing they existed soothed his battered soul.

“Is today the day you tell me how you came to escape Roma?” Jupiter had asked him this many times before.

“Same as you, I expect.” The resistance had surely freed them both, but Creek avoided speaking of them where interested ears might hear—even using the low speech.

Human technology was tricky—he couldn’t know what they could discern.

The resistance had given him two years of freedom and he wouldn’t repay that gift with betrayal.

The time he’d been free had made it impossible for him to accept slavery as his lot. One way or another he would be free again soon. If Jupiter’s mate could not free him, he would be sold back to Roma and he refused to live there again. He’d sooner die. And death would be its own kind of freedom.

He and Jupiter both wore gladiator garb meant more to show off their muscular bodies than to protect them in a battle.

Morgan St. Germaine, their temporary owner, had called them a matched set, but to Creek’s eyes they were more different than alike.

They were similar in size but set apart by their coloring.

Jupiter was copper skinned with short, reddish-brown hair and dark eyes.

Creek was bronze with lighter brown eyes and dark hair that fell to the middle of his back.

The sweet-scented oil they’d been instructed to use on their skin made their silvery scars stand out more than usual. They both had scars from claws and lash. It made them look dangerous and fierce. They would be sold as fighters and St. Germaine would do anything necessary to drive up their price.

Before Jupiter could speak again the guards arrived to take them to the auction room.

They were not the only ones to be auctioned off.

Some of the Dreat males Creek had been captured with had also been selected for the sale.

The large green men smelled like the jungle where he’d lived during the first year of his freedom.

With their barrel-chested bodies and muscular limbs, the Dreat made excellent laborers.

They’d been hired for construction on a new colony settlement—until their employers had sold them to the slaver instead.

He and Jupiter were forced to put on shock collars, and they were all shackled before being released from the cells.

Heavily armed guards monitored them from an overhead walkway while others directed their movements out of the holding area.

Slowly they trudged along the unadorned corridors of the lower level, leg shackles scraping against the decking, until they reached the lift that took them up to the auction room.

The space had been lavishly decorated to impress the guests that would be attending.

Creek and Jupiter were secured inside a gilded cage for display which gave them some space to move.

The Dreat were simply left in their shackles and secured to the floor by an elaborate magnetic locking system that flowed down the middle of the room like a silver stream.

Jupiter considered the space with a scowl and a scoff. “St. Germaine wants to make this auction a real spectacle. Is he trying to impress his other guests or Roma, do you think?”

A Roma representative was expected to attend, but beyond that Creek couldn’t guess.

He shrugged then rolled his shoulders, glad to be free of the shackles.

These days his body ached if he moved too much and it ached if he stood still too long.

Too many brutal fights, too many vicious beatings, had left his body a wreck.

He still looked solid enough on the outside, but inside he was all crumbling joints and fraying tendons.

“The slaver must realize he can’t outdo Roma when it comes to putting on a show.” Jupiter paced as he spoke. He’d been a gladiator in the main Roma Rex arena, the biggest spectacle of them all, so he would know.

Creek spaced his feet in a stable position for standing and settled in for a long, painful wait. Enduring—maybe he’d become better at it than he thought.

Hours later he’d decided putting up with the hungry looks and vapid comments of Morgan St. Germaine’s guests was every bit as excruciating as the pain in his body.

Jupiter’s pacing did serve to make the humans nervous about standing too close to the cage.

He was debating joining him when Jupiter froze, and his pheromones shifted.

“I take it that change in your scent means the female came as you said she would.” Creek strode over to stand at Jupiter’s shoulder.

At first, he saw only the servants wrapped in white togas offering food and drinks while the Dreat prisoners watched them with their eye stalks and scented the treats with their flexible snouts.

Then he saw her. The curvy brunette with gold-dusted, caramel skin. She wore a barely-there black dress and colored stones in her hair and navel. She could raise the libido of any male. He barked a low, brief sound of interest. “ That is your human?”

Jupiter growled in warning, but Creek didn’t take it to heart. It was natural for a male to be protective of his mate. But his pack brother, Seneca, was also supposed to be with her.

Creek moved to see better. His gaze followed the chain the woman called Feeona held in her hand. It led to something he never expected to see. “You didn’t tell me your pack brother was a pleasure slave. How is that even possible?”

Seneca stood just beyond her shoulder—the chain clipped to a silver circlet around his neck.

Heavy violet lined lavender eyes, making them look large and exotic.

They were framed by his silky white hair left loose around his shoulders.

The Arena Dog oozed sensuality and submission.

A painted-on animal leapt across his muscled torso, covering his sleek body above tight black shorts.

He was beautiful in a masculine way, but on closer examination, Creek decided the Dog was too powerful for the pleasure houses. A predator in disguise.

Jupiter wrapped his hands around the bars of the cage and squeezed.

He threw back his head and howled. The guests went silent as the howl went on and the other Arena Dog joined him.

Creek followed—the sound pulled from him—unable to resist the call.

Howling was a genetically innate trait for Dogs and had been the only sign of unity the owner who’d raised him had tolerated among the Dogs of his house.

Finally, their howls fell away, and they endured the many stares of those who thought to own them.

As Feeona and Seneca made their way through the guests to where the slaver stood entertaining his audience, Creek’s attention turned to the room around them.

The arrival of the woman provided new possibilities, and his expectations changed.

He noted the doors that led deeper into the ship.

Those would be heavily guarded. The large door on the opposite side of the room through which most of the guests had entered led to the shuttle bay.

“That was impressive.” An old man stood in front of the cage, addressing Jupiter, who bared his teeth and growled to back the man off, but the man showed no fear. “I’ve seen you fight in the arena.” His tone softened. “With my Seneca.”