“Sina!”
“Let this be a lesson,” his father said, and turned to go. Two fingers raised, Hadim looked to the guards at the wall. “Grant no mercy to the infected unworthy, boy.”
Sina watched as the guards took aim, but he didn’t cry when the spears began to fall…
Soaked in sweat, gagging, Sinadim jolted awake. Choking on the horror still mocking him behind eyes squeezed firmly shut. But despite the flood of bile, he pressed a fist to his good eye and worked to separate past from present. To divorce fevered hallucination from hopeless reality.
For if Renegade was ruined… her muscle and bone disfigured as he’d seen so many times before…
He shuddered, mane bristling, claws dimpling damp palms.
And for a moment, he was distracted from the thirst. His attention pulled away from the slicing anguish of a throat left ravaged by infection, by the need to plunge his head beneath the surface of the river and drink it down to the silt.
Distracted long enough to realize an altogether different need rode him now.
The claws of addiction had burrowed deep. Here, in the dark where his willpower had crumbled away to nothing and left him starving for a taste.
Slick.
It was a monstrous craving fit for one with royal blood, one who’d been born into outrageous privilege. And it returned with a rush that made his head spin and his cock weep.Achingto set his knot in a quality Omega and make up for every hour he’d been without his harem, as only a Sultan’s son might.
Cracking his good eye, Sinadim dared to look. Squinting through the fog of delirium—through the blurred veil clouding his vision—he tried to catch a glimpse of the female haunting his every waking thought.
She was waiting there in the dark.
A queen dancing in silhouette. Beckoning him to sink deeper into the fog.
Her sinuous form writhing across thick, male thighs, she called to him from her perch. Begging to be knotted. Her pretty, weeping cunt creamy with want as she sheathed herself over and over and over again. Stretched to the limit where she was stuffed full by another male…
Cast in exquisite detail, she was perfection despite the blurry edges. Every sinful inch a symphony for the senses. Whole and without corruption.
The mere sight triggered his knot to swell, no matter that it was laced with something… else. Something sour and wrong and oh so terribly dangerous.
Groaning, Sinadim squeezed his eyes shut once more. Cock pulsing where it was exposed to damp air, he gushed in answer to her call. A salty prequel he ached to bury inside that sweet, Omega warmth, even as she was spread across another.
A beast who let her ride as Sinadim himself had never thought to do.
On top.
Pert little nipples jerking in a lewd display of female dominance, he indulged himself in the taboo. Watching a phantom twirl in the dark, where none could see his secret want.
He didn’t blink until the ravenous dark sucked him back under and left him senseless. Head heavy where it lay against unforgiving granite damp with a carpet of slime and algae, he floated in a tepid mist. Oblivious, until a vicious headache bloomed behind his eyes and sent little poison barbs into the jelly. Shattering the rich illusion he wasn’t sure had ever been real.
“Fuck,” he whispered, because it was the sort of headache he knew. One he’d recognize under any circumstance without the need to question.
His addiction.
It would be worse this time, he could feel it. And, shifting to ease the ache of desiccated kidneys shriveled by fever, he twisted against the heat of another. His lower back tight with pain that had no outlet… his cock stiff with the sort of need that would get him killed, given just who he shared this prison with.
Despite the dancing queen, his working eye cracked open to look upon the beast.
Crossed at the ankle, long, powerful legs stretched out before him, Giaus appeared to sleep. His head tipped back, resting against a wall of loose shale.
A trap.
Sinadim recognized the pose of one who knew what it was to fight for survival, who knew the danger of sleep and had learned to exist without. Not quite awake, but neither was he truly at rest. It was just there, evident in the tension humming in broad shoulders. In the spread of white knuckles that were folded tight around a tiny figure.
Renegade.
