Unchained (Men in Chains Book 3) (33 page)

When? How?

Her questions hit his mind like swiftly thrown daggers. He moved his arm to his side and stared at her. “Shayna, I just told you I didn’t want to talk about this in detail.”

She clamped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. The questions slipped so fast through my head that I must have shifted into telepathy without thinking. Pretend I didn’t ask. And you know how I am with the questions.”

He nodded and settled into the pillows. “I think that’s all I can tell you, but that’s the guilt you keep feeling and it’s the main reason I’ve fought as hard as I have. I’ve been trying to make up for this for the past four hundred years.”

“Do your brothers know?”

“Of course they know. They were punished for what I told Daniel.”

“So this happened when you were a child?”

He nodded, but nothing else would come. “Let it go, Shayna. Just know that I’ll never be free of the remorse I feel.”

“It’s impacted your life, hasn’t it? I mean, that’s why you’re not married, why you haven’t found someone to share your life with.”

“I’m sure it’s one of the reasons.”

He glanced at her and the odd thought went through his head that maybe another reason was that he’d been waiting for her all this time. Even Gabriel must have felt it, how special she was. Why else would he have opened up the secret vault of tablets just for her, a human?

But the weight of his guilt had settled in hard and he rolled from bed.

Wish I could help.
Her voice, full of sympathy, made him cringe.

He didn’t turn to look at her as he headed to the bathroom, but let his thoughts fly.
Wish you could as well.

The next moment, he heard running feet and before he reached the shower, she caught him from behind, wrapping both her arms around his chest, holding him fast.

His throat tightened painfully.

He overlaid her arms with his own, holding her fast just as she was holding him. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. All the air had rushed from his lungs, and his eyes burned. He wished like anything that this woman would stay, this lovely, eccentric question-riddled human, with her long white-blond hair and light-blue eyes, with her tenderness of heart, her love of other cultures, and her beautiful willing body.

God, yes, he wanted her to stay.

*   *   *

An hour later Shayna sat on a park bench deep inside the Catskill system in the state of New York. The cavern was one of the more massive ones she’d seen and had been cloaked in an intricate layer of disguises that not even Marius could detect, let alone see through—Gabriel’s handiwork, no doubt.

The Catskill refugee center housed five thousand former female slaves and even a few men, mostly human but with a smattering of vampire slaves as well. She and Marius had learned that Gabriel and Rumy together had built and paid for about a dozen of these centers throughout their world, all hidden, and they’d filled each to capacity. Apparently they’d had several black-ops forces working in secret over a long period of time, stealing slaves out of a number of sex-slave organizations around the globe.

She sat facing a large park, where a number of women wandered about and talked in groups. A massive complex, built into the adjacent cave wall, formed the dormitories and gathering rooms, as well as several classrooms that served the refugees.

A couple dozen of the latest refugees that Gabriel had recovered from the Dark Cave system sat with her. The women had told her all about the rescue mission, that a hundred male vampires had suddenly just shown up and that the extraction had taken less than two minutes.

She kept shaking her head in between all the comments. Something wasn’t adding up, which was why she kept pelting the group with her questions. She just couldn’t seem to get to the center of something very important, something critical to the vampire world.

She asked the group at large. “So if I’ve understood correctly, what you’re saying, especially those of you who had been enslaved for over a year, that neither Daniel nor his two sons Quill and Lev was even in residence for most of that time?” She had always supposed that Daniel would have spent most of his time in the Dark Cave system, engaging in the orgies he sponsored and sold.

A murmured ascent went around the group. An Indian woman spoke up. “You could always tell when they were gone. The vampires left in charge became more relaxed, and there were fewer assaults. Some of the guards even protected us from customers who became too rough. Daniel would have been furious at such leniency and more than once he beheaded vampires for treating us kindly.”

Everything about that statement spoke to Daniel’s character, but something else as well. Was it possible that the Ancestrals, which all three men of these men were, enthralled those vampires around them? Although sheer intimidation could make vampires and humans alike behave in ways they might otherwise not. This was a cross-cultural condition: Faced with the prospect of torture and/or death, most will succumb to the required behavior.

Of course she left her supposition open to further study, observation, and analysis. She resisted drawing absolute conclusions, life being an absurdly dynamic process, always changing. Even her presence here in the vampire world had given new meaning to the concept of change being the only constant.

But the larger question remained. “So where did Daniel and his sons go? What were they doing when they were gone? Were there rumors?”

A fair-haired Russian slave, more emaciated than most of the slaves, responded. “More than once I heard he was building something in one of the largest caverns in this world, but I do not know where it would be or what it was.”

Others confirmed the rumor.

She mentally reviewed all that she knew about the horrors of the Dark Cave system, leading her to pose a question for which she expected no particular answer. “Were any humans ever given special treatment, so they didn’t have to work as sex slaves?”

To her surprise, the response was an overwhelming affirmative accompanied by a shocking bit of information: Most of the women were put through a series of tests, and the brightest were actually administered standard IQ tests. As she continued asking her questions, she became increasingly alarmed since the consensus seemed to be that at least five and maybe as much as ten percent of the arrivals of the past year were sent elsewhere, presumably not to work in the clubs.

“And the rumors about where they went?”

The Russian responded once more. “To the same system, the one with the enormous cavern.”

CHAPTER 14

“So what happened when you set off the explosion?” Marius sat at a distance from Shayna. Rumy sat beside him on one of dozens of benches scattered throughout the park.

Rumy shook his head. “I’d hoped Daniel would buy it, but no such luck. I think he read the light in my eye before I shifted to altered flight and the room blew.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted you. I don’t know what bug crawled up his ass, but he seems determined to get you and not necessarily to kill you. I didn’t see this with either Adrien or Lucian. I think he wanted to get all three of you to join forces with him, but he honestly didn’t give a rat’s ass if Lucian died out there on the lake. No, he seems to want you for something.”

“Well, he can go fuck himself.”

Rumy chuckled. “Tell me how you really feel.” He smoothed down his tight curls. He kept his hair cropped and oiled. “The thing is, Marius, there was something different about his security detail.”

“How so?”

“They wore something new that looked like real uniforms. It just seemed odd.”

“In what way?”

He shifted toward Marius. “For one thing, there was a line of weird-looking marks above a silver emblem. The emblem was a hawk. I’d never seen anything like it before. Have you? When confronting Daniel? It had, I don’t know, a professional look, a branded look.”

Marius shook his head. “No, I can’t recall ever seeing anything like that. I know he kept his men in black, but hell, that’s what we all wear to remain invisible when we fly through any city at night. Black is standard and sensible. But, no, I’ve never seen a hawk emblem before.”

“What do you think it means?”

Marius crossed his arms over his chest. “Haven’t got a clue.” His gaze was fixed on Shayna. He purposefully kept her in sight and right now he felt a new emotion from her: She’d changed from anthropologically curious to pretty anxious. Something the women had said was distressing her.

“So what the hell happened in the Dark Cave system? I heard some of the refugees say they thought Shayna was committing suicide when she threw herself off some kind of catwalk.”

Marius told him about her ploy and how well it had worked.

Rumy’s eyes went wide. “And this woman isn’t trained military?”

Marius had to laugh. “No, not even a little.”

“She sure has guts.”

Marius nodded. “That she has.”

Rumy elbowed Marius. “You’re into her.”

“Shut your trap.”

Rumy laughed. “I could hardly blame you. She’s gorgeous. Quirky, but beautiful. And those breasts, a vampire could—”

He got no farther, because Marius moved like lightning and now had hold of Rumy’s throat. “Don’t ever go there again.”

Rumy’s eyes widened and he nodded slowly. He coughed and sputtered when Marius released him. “Sorry. My mistake. Won’t happen again. But you’re not into her, right?”

“Cute.”

“Just sayin’.”

Marius resumed his seat, settling his gaze back on Shayna. He felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t explain and rubbed the back of his neck. Something was bugging him. Maybe it was Shayna’s distress or what Rumy had told him about the new uniforms that Daniel’s men were wearing.

Or maybe that Rumy had it exactly right: He was so into Shayna.

*   *   *

An hour later Shayna sat next to Marius in a quiet part of the Catskill system, in a private room within the complex. She sipped iced tea and kept rubbing her forehead. Rumy sat opposite her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together.

She’d been trying to express her concern over Daniel’s activities, but felt her data was too vague to make a strong enough impression on the men. “All I’m saying is that I think Daniel’s been up to something for the past year. I think that’s why he’s been absent so much from the Dark Cave system.”

Marius sat next to her, but shook his head. “The women can’t know that for sure, that he was rarely there. It seems completely out of character for him. The man loves to spend a good portion of his time hurting his slaves.”

“I’m not saying he didn’t do that. All I’m telling you is that the women knew when he was in residence and when he wasn’t. The guards’ behavior alone would tend to confirm their side of things.”

Rumy glanced at Marius. “She has a point.”

Marius met Rumy’s gaze for a long moment, then shifted to stare at Shayna. “So you think Daniel’s in this unknown cavern of massive proportions, but doing what?”

Shayna shifted, angling her body toward him. She even put her hand on his arm. “What if he’s building infrastructure.” She then related what the women had told her about the IQ tests. “Maybe he’s been using the most intelligent slaves to help him do basic accounting, manage projects, order building supplies, that kind of thing. That way he could definitely keep his whole operation on the down-low.”

Marius stared at her. “He administered tests to the women? Why is this the first I’ve heard of anything like this?”

Shayna shrugged. “Maybe nobody thought to ask the refugees.”

Marius laced his hands behind his head and released an exasperated huff of a sigh. She could feel that his head had started hurting and that a kind of oppression had taken him over. She tried to imagine yet again what his life had been like, what it was to be a vampire in this culture, all the ramifications, and to have fought against Daniel for four centuries.

Everything was still so new to her that even with her trained mind, she couldn’t quite fit the pieces together. Of course she’d only been exposed to the most violent aspects of this world for an extremely short period of time. How could she possibly understand either Marius or his world sufficiently to make a real assessment of what she’d learned tonight?

Rumy leaned back in his seat, folding his arms over his chest. His tongue made an appearance, touching the inside edges of his ever-present fangs. “You know, I hate to say this, but I’ve always wondered about Daniel. What a waste of talent to build a massive sex-slavery operation when he could have put his abilities to use on behalf of our world. Hell, he could have founded his own university.”

Shayna couldn’t help herself and started to giggle, which turned quickly into full-out laughter the more she thought about what Rumy had said.

“What’s so funny?”

She slapped at the air a couple of times. “I don’t know. Daniel as the founder of a university? What would the classes entail? Basics of Abduction One-oh-One, How to Create Propaganda for the Complete Sex-Slavery Operation, an Introduction to BDSM, Including Tools of the Trade? Of course those sound more like community college trade classes than university-level. Maybe more like, Ethnography and the Use of Torture as a Form of Sexual Expression.” Maybe her fatigue from having been battling in Marius’s world almost nonstop had begun showing or perhaps her youth, because neither of the vampires cracked a smile.

“Shayna, are you all right?” The sound of the slight lisp that Rumy used in her name—and all because of a vampire version of Viagra—set her off again.

She laughed herself out after a few minutes during which time Marius brought her a cup of what turned out to be fairly weak coffee. He sat down beside her again, occasionally patting her knee.

She sipped the warm brew and suddenly missed Seattle and an espresso that had real weight. She sniffed the air. She could smell the water from either a nearby underground river or a waterfall, both of which were in abundance in this world. Seattle was a very damp environment as well because of the city’s thirty-eight inches of rain each year and the proximity of Puget Sound.