CHAPTER 1
Sage
Sharp pain in my arm jerked me awake and my eyes snapped open. I was almost nose to nose with Wells, his lips pressed against mine, and his fingers painfully pinching the underside of my arm.
What the?—?
How did I end up… wherever I’d ended up?
Then the memory of Wells and Crane cornering me in the alcove rushed through me. Just like Bramwell had easily subdued me, Crane had gotten ahold of me and I hadn’t stood a chance.
Now my hands were tied above my head and Wells was pressed close. Water poured down my back, the rough surface behind me dug into my skin, and I was thigh-deep in water unable to reach the bottom with my toes.
“That’s better,” he purred, the look in his eyes making my stomach churn. “You should be awake for this.”
He smashed his lips against mine and painfully squeezed my breasts. Instinctually, I jerked back to evade his kiss and cracked the back of my head against the wall behind me. The sudden spike of pain made me gasp and Wells shoved his tongue into my mouth.
I heaved against his grip, my body screaming in pain from my rotation of hard labor and extra laps around the running trail in the Black Tower.
This wasn’t happening. Please. First Durand? Now Wells?
I had to fight just like I had against Durand. Except I wasn’t just being held. I was tied up, unable to get a hand free, and I couldn’t move my legs fast enough against the water and my wet dress to kick or knee him with any kind of force. That, and he stood at just the right angle that even if I could strike, I’d only hit his thigh, and I doubt that would make him stop.
Somehow I’d gotten lucky when Durand and the others had attacked me. Ambrose had disarmed and hit me, but he’d thrown me into the stream instead of letting Durand go ahead and rape me. But now it looked like my luck had run out.
One of Wells’s hands dropped and he cupped my mound, and my panic surged.
No. Please no.
I bit down on his tongue as hard as I could. The metallic tang of blood flooded my mouth as he jerked back and slapped me, striking the bruise Ambrose had left.
My head jerked sideways and my other cheek scraped against the uneven rock behind me as stars flashed across my vision.
“Behave yourself,” he snarled. “I don’t like it rough. Addax does.”
He stepped back, giving me a full view of the room, his arms spread wide, his grin darkly satisfied as if I were supposed to recognize where we were.
The space was a vast chamber with a ceiling that disappeared into shadows. A majestic crystal and silver chandelier with fae lights bathed the center of the room, a strange mix of temple, cave, forest, and pool, leaving the rest in darkness.
The walls were rough stone but the floor was a polished mosaic of gray, white, green, and gold tiles set in a swirling, intricate pattern. Two pillars of fae women, similar to the pillars around the courtyard, stood at the side of the pool as if welcoming those in the room to step into the water.
They were veiled, the stone so delicately carved it looked like sheer fabric, and wore flowing gowns, the hem swirling into the pool at their feet. The pink and white flowering vines that were all over the Garden curled around them and trailed over the walls and into the water, adding their soft glow to the chamber’s illumination.
The water in the pool at the women’s feet — and my own — undulated from the stream pouring down the rough rock behind me and reflected the soft glow from the chandelier, but held a darkness within its depth that suggested it was deep. Three steps were carved into the edge of the pool down to a platform where Wells stood — and I hung over — but I couldn’t see through the water behind him and suspected the platform quickly dropped off.
Two other female statues, also veiled, stood at the entrance, their arms raised creating the arch over a dozen shallow steps leading up to… I had no idea where.
I could only presume with the statues’ similarity to those in the courtyard and with the bracelet Wells had snapped around my wrist that prevented my soul from returning to my body that I was still in the Garden.
I peered into the deep shadows at the back of the chamber but couldn’t tell if there was another way in or not. If by some miracle, I got a chance to run, I had to go for the obvious exit. I couldn’t risk hoping there was an entranceway at the back and get cornered.
Except escaping was going to have to be one hell of a miracle because Wells wasn’t the only one in the room. Lined up at the pool’s edge were Crane and six other men. They were all beautiful, muscular, and tall like every fae man I’d seen so far, and they all looked at me like I was their next meal.
The biggest guy in the group had a dangerous wicked gleam in his eyes. He had to be the aforementioned Addax and everything within me yelled that he’d be worse than Edred ever was.
“I’d rather have you naked,” Wells purred as his gaze raked slowly down my body, making me feel exposed and dirty. “Naked, spread wide, and tied to my bed for me to fuck whenever I feel like it.”
“Stop playing with her, Wells,” one of the men said. “My shift guarding the pool will be over in a couple of hours, and we don’t know how long it will take for each of us to be bound to her.”
Each of them?
My pulse lurched, my panic churning hard and frozen in my gut. One man who I didn’t want was bad enough, but eight?
I wrenched harder against my bonds. But my wrists were bound tight and I hung from a rope looped over a chunk of rock jutting from the wall. The rock was angled up so I couldn’t just work the loop off. I had to lift it first.
Except I couldn’t get a good enough grip to climb up the rope, and the rock beneath my feet was scoured smooth from the waterfall and I couldn’t find a foothold to lift myself up.
“I won’t do it. I won’t mate with you.” Surely I had a say in this. Everything I knew about the mating bonds said it was the woman who bound the men to her…
But Crane had said they had a spell.
Wells threw his head back and held up a dagger with swirling fae words carved over the blade. “The beauty of this spell is you don’t have a choice.”
“You can’t keep me here. I’ll need to return to my body,” I said, guessing that if I didn’t return, I’d eventually die and they wouldn’t want that. What would be the point of binding their souls to mine if I was just going to die? If they just wanted to have their way with me, they wouldn’t bother with the spell. “I won’t tell you where I am.”
“You won’t have to,” Crane said, jerking his thumb to the man beside him. “As soon as Thunder is bound to you, his spirit will be able to follow yours back to your body.”
With a sneer, Wells swept the blade across my chest. For a second I thought he’d missed because I hadn’t felt anything. Then my skin parted, the slice cutting across some of my marks and a strange green liquid that should have been blood trailed into the valley between my breasts.
The pain burst to life a second later, and Wells swiped his fingers through the strange green blood and watched it ooze down his fingers toward his palm.
“The eight of us have magic,” he said, turning his hand and letting the light shimmer in the gold flecks caught in the green liquid. “We’re entitled to a mate and we’re tired of waiting and prostrating ourselves in the hopes that one of you will look at us.”
He submerged his bloody hand in the water. Green light flickered over the pool’s surface and the red light and heat in my marks flared.
“The human men don’t wait for fate to give them what they want,” Crane said from the edge of the pool. “They make their women obedient and they take it.”
A pressure swelled around my heart and my stomach bottomed out.
It didn’t matter that these men thought I was fae. I was still a thing, an object for them to take and use as they saw fit, and these men were going to treat me just like all the other men in my life had. Probably worse.
“But it would be great if you weren’t obedient right away,” Addax said, the gleam in his eyes darkening in anticipation.
No. Never.
My breath seized and my heart pounded, struggling against the pressure in my chest. There had to be a way out of this?—
There was a way or I’d never have had the vision of me dead in the Gray.
Except seeing myself dead in the Gray didn’t mean I wasn’t also bound to these men. It only meant that my identity hadn’t been discovered by the time I’d been killed… and only if these events didn’t negate my vision.
I’d never had actual visions before, only a sense that something bad was going to happen. I didn’t know if big events could change what I’d seen, but I was hoping they could because I was trying to change Sawyer’s future.
Wells murmured something in a language I couldn’t understand and brushed the blade against his fingertip. Real blood welled from the cut and he submerged it in the water.
Green light flashed over the water again and the light and heat and pressure exploded inside me. I gasped, fighting to breathe, my marks so hot it felt like my skin was burning. Tears streamed down my cheeks and the chamber started to spin.
“Please.” The word slipped out and the hunger in Wells’s eyes grew.
Shit.
He grabbed my face, his thumb digging into the bruise on my cheek. “Say that again.”
“No.” Begging never worked. It hadn’t worked with Edred nor with Durand. I shouldn’t have even tried.
“Say it and maybe I’ll stop.” But there was no remorse or uncertainty in his eyes. He wasn’t going to stop. He was just playing with me. “Say ‘please, master .’”
“No.”
He slapped me again. Pain exploded in my cheek and flashes of light and darkness crashed across my vision. “Say it.”
“Never.”
“It’s going to be so much fun to play with you,” Addax said, his voice dark and dangerous and barely audible against the rushing in my head.
“Finish it,” the impatient guy demanded.
Wells said more words and green light burst to life in the water and swept around him. It curled around his torso, up his neck, and down his arms. The shape of a green flower spread over his heart and sank beneath his skin, while the light around his arms contracted into bands around his biceps.
The fire and pressure inside me grew, the pain ripping a scream from my clenched jaw. It was burning me up, and I didn’t know if it was because I wasn’t really a fae and couldn’t make soul bonds or if this was just how the spell worked.
And none of that mattered. I had to break free. I couldn’t let him finish the spell. Please no. I didn’t want to be trapped in a soul bond with him or any of them, and if they did find me in the Black Tower, all my suffering to keep Sawyer safe would be for nothing.
“No,” I screamed. I refused to accept that this was my fate. It couldn’t be.
I heaved on the rope, not caring that it bit into my wrists, and dug my toes into the rock behind me, desperate to find any kind of lip or crack so I could lift myself up.
Wells raised his hands, tipped his head back, and laughed. The green light around his biceps contracted into green marks, just like the marks around Lark’s mates’ biceps.
He yelled another word I didn’t understand, and I was thrown into the center of a blazing sun. Darkness swarmed my vision and I fought to stay conscious. If I passed out, I was done for.