Page 113 of Jagged Souls

I move faster this time. I’ve sparred blindfolded before with Dayne and other members of the Blacks, and although I was never great at it, I wasn’t terrible either. But that was in a gym, where I knew the only things to get hurt by were the things that moved. I could feel the air shifting, hear the fabric of their clothes as they tried to strike fast. There was knowledge to pull from, but in this room, with him standing still, there is no input for me to use.

“Stop,” he says, and I do instantly.

There’s the sound of a chair being moved backwards. It isn’t far in front of me. I reach forward.

“Put your – A bit further. Down…”

I touch the back of a cushioned chair. It isn’t straight. It’s curved, posh. Too big for me to pick up and hit him with.

He chuckles. Then the clutter of silverware sounds. “Now you get to eat with your hands,” he says.

It irritates me that he’s able to read me, especially when I don’t have any fucking eyes to decipher.

“I was in your place not too long ago,” he says softly, and a flare of hope ignites in my chest.

“We could work together.”

He snorts. “You can’t even walk across the room on your own. What good are you to me? The only way I get out of this is if I get you pregnant with a hybrid.”

“Antonio will want you more then,” I say, wary about how little that makes sense.

“It’s not Antonio I’m trying to escape. I have no life on the outside, no family or pack. But Eduardo’s ‘hybrids’ are infertile, so I’ll be pulled from the experiments if I’m more useful elsewhere. Now eat. At least one of us is to rape you every hour until you’re pregant.”

Panic hits me in the stomach, and my knuckles whiten on the back of the chair. I want to lash out at him – kill him and escape, but I need to be smarter about this if I’m going to survive. I’m only going to have one chance to pull this off, and doing it before I know the layout of the room, let alone the boat is suicide. And where would I even go? I can swim, but I doubt we’re anywhere near land. Vampires can phase to where they can see.

Begrudgingly, I feel my way around the chair, then sit down. He taps the table in front of me, showing me where the plate is.

“Can I at least have a spoon?” I ask, not wanting to dig my hands into the rice. My right one touched Sadist’s balls and is still covered in his blood, and my left is covered in Grubs’.

He taps the silverware on the table twice before laying it down, the clinking of movement deciphered by my guess of what he’s doing. I reach for it slower than I actually need to. I don’t want him to know how confident I can move without my eyes. As long as I have sound or movement, I can map it easily thanks to my assassin training. I know he’s being nice by deliberately making noise and that if it came down to a fight, I would lose, but I want him to drop his guard around me.

Antonio isn’t going to be on this boat all the time. He has things to do, evil plans to put in place, the Shadow family to fuck with. So I’ll be left with the men who rape me, the men who aren’t as paranoid or as terrifying as he is. I’mgoingto survive this place.

I just need to pick my moment.

“So how did you end up here?” I ask as I grab the spoon and awkwardly aim for my plate. The Cajun spices tickle my nose, and my stomach growls in approval. The flavors explode on my tongue, utterly delicious, and I struggle to eat like a lady rather than scoffing down the rice. It doesn’t matter that IknowSau isn’t here; the constant ‘corrections’ I got from her makes me wary to break her rules even in hel.

Can’t get a fucking break anywhere.

Oddly, that brings a small smile to the hollow part inside of me. Outside, my lips don’t move except to eat and talk.

“I was a lone wolf sniffing around without permission.”

Males are often run out of their packs a few years after their ascension. The majority of packs are female, with an alpha at the top (normally male, though twenty percent of them are matriarchies) and a few beta males ranked under the women. Breeding is allowed throughout, unlike in actual wolf populations, but this set-up gives them the best chance of having a large pack without an excess of testosterone causing fights and allows the troublesome males a chance to actually make it to adulthood without being killed by the alpha or one of the women they annoy.

But it also means lone wolves don’t have the safety of a pack. There’s no retaliation if you kill one – or kidnap it and use it as a test subject for your experiments.

“How long have you been here?”

“Two, three years? So believe me when I tell you there’s no way out of here. The sooner you give up your hope, the better your life will be.”

That might’ve worked for him, but it’s not going to work for me.

I’m going to get out of this place.

I’m going to see my niece or nephew grow up.

I’m going to be at Dayne and Quinton’s wedding – or the latter’s funeral, whichever way that goes down.