Page 2 of To Catch A Rogue

A metallic echo vibrated through the doors to the hold. Malloryn's head lifted, bruised muscles aching through his back and ribs as he focused intently.

The doors began to slide open, revealing two bobbing lanterns. Malloryn flinched at the sudden increase in light and the portent that shivered through him.

"Well, well, well, Malloryn. Have you missed me?" Dido purred, sauntering into the hold. She tugged her black leather gloves from her hands, finger by finger. The gleam of her white-blonde hair was gathered into a neat chignon, and she wore gold epaulets on the shoulders of her blue military-style coat. A leather over-corset adorned her slim waist, and there were a pair of knives at her hips.

Elegant. Beautiful.

Lethal.

"Cannot say I have." Malloryn tipped his head back to stare at her arrogantly. He'd be damned if she'd see him on his metaphorical knees. "I prefer the whip to be in my hand, love."

Dido trailed a fingernail over his chest, pressing a little more firmly across his broken ribs. "I’m certain I can teach you to enjoy it. Maybe this time you’ll beg me for mercy."

"I don’t beg anyone."

"That just means we haven’t found the right sort of motivation. Yet."

Behind her, a second woman materialized from the gloom, her silvery hair cascading down her back and a black leather eye patch covering her right eye. Where Dido gave him a faint smile as if to say,oh, what fun we shall have, the otherdhampir'sexpression remained cold and forbidding.

Jelena, he presumed.

The Ivory Kraken.

Obsidian had told him about the pair of them."They serve Balfour with an almost fanatical obsession. And they are dangerous."

"This is the great Malloryn?" Jelena mused in a thickly accented voice. She poked him in his broken ribs, and Malloryn caught the hiss behind his teeth. "He does not look so dangerous to me."

Dido captured his face, her grip cruel on his jaw. "We have clipped his claws, I think."

"Have you?" Malloryn forced himself to meet her eyes. "So others have believed in the past."

Dido’s eyes narrowed, but Jelena merely smirked.

"Ah, brave man," she taunted. "We shall see how brave you are when I am allowed to toy with you. I am not as kind as dear Dido. And I have brought gift." She turned and snapped her fingers. "Bring my gift."

Two men wheeled an enormous gold box into the hold, shaped somewhat similarly to a sarcophagus. The man painted on the top of the lid was screaming. Jelena sauntered around it, and then flipped the latches. The lid rose, revealing dozens of spikes inside it.

Malloryn froze. Not a sarcophagus. An iron maiden.

Jelena turned a crank, and every spike vanished with a sharp jerk. With a malicious smile, she released the crank and they sprang back into being with a steely rasp.

Anyone inside it would be skewered with razor-sharp needles from top to toe.

"Do you know what I enjoy most about torturing blue bloods?" Jelena asked, producing a knife from the sheath at her waist. "They can survive almost anything."

The craving virus that made a blue blood more than a man could heal virtually any injury. He'd always thought of it as a gift before.

The knife trailed down his chest, its tip slashing through his nipple.

Malloryn sucked in a sharp breath.

"Nobody is coming to rescue you," Jelena said.

"I know."

He'd accepted that fact the first morning he woke, bound and gagged in the hold of the submersible.

The Company of Rogues he'd formed would know exactly what had happened to him, but this was the Crimson Court. This was Russia. His protégé, Gemma, might want to try and mount some sort of rescue attempt, but surely the others would talk her out of it.