His claws prickled a warning deep inside that royal, sweat-damp armpit. The perfect place to loose a dozen tendons all at once. And then, pressing his nose behind Sinadim’s ear, where his scent was thickest… rich and untainted, Giaus took a breath that rattled and whispered, “Think you can do it with one arm?”
On a blink, Sinadim’s one-eyed gaze rolled back over his shoulder to find Giaus’ face. Awareness seemed to shimmer behind the sheen of madness for just a moment. “I’m dying,” he rasped, and dragged a wet breath into his lungs. “Give her to me once before I spill from my ears, you feral cunt.”
Giaus’ laugh was a cruel sneer of rejection, and he asked again, “Tell me what you see.”
Taking a steadying breath, Sinadim worked to focus. His gaze roamed over Giaus’ features before his lids fluttered shut, before his chin tilted back and he pulled a breath through his teeth. Filtering the damp air, forcing it to whistle along the roof of his mouth.
“She dances in the dark,” he whispered, and licked at the air. Wetting his lips before his tongue flicked back to paint his palate once more. “I can see her… draped in tendrils of floating, swirling gold as it spills from that honeyed slit.” He shivered, mane bristling for an instant before flattening out. “It’s not real. A ha-hallucination.”
It was Giaus’ turn to take a rattling breath, to force so called honeyed air to whistle over his dimpled palate… his eyes drifting closed so he could reallylook.
It was exactly as Sinadim said.
Renegade lay in a pool of gleaming ambrosia, her every breath a plume of swirling enticement Giaus could taste. Every faceted detail of her poor health spelled out in the twisting eddies of laced air.
Exactly as she’d been the instant he’d first caught her scent in that laced river water. Too diluted to do more than entice, but enough to draw him in from afar and command him to abandon everything he’d worked to gain.
But it was not his precious mate who’d captured Giaus’ attention. Not the realization that another shared his sixth sense, or that Renegade had done what he’d hoped she might.
It was the curious whisper of a male in rut.
A male who hadn’t had so much as a taste of their mate, but who was lost in the throes of savage rut all the same.
Sweating through what remained of his shirt, Sinadim’s skin was cool and clammy. His fever broken, despite his claims of delirious hallucination.
Pulling another rattling breath through his teeth, Giaus inhaled. Breathing deep, just so he could feel it when the other male cringed, he pressed Sinadim’s blind eye against their prison wall and ground a bulging threat against the prince’s tail-stump.
Arousal surged through his blood. Brought on by the scent of his queen, but a convenient weapon nevertheless. His unnatural heat was a subtle threat laid down an instant before he hiked Sinadim’s wrist higher, forcing him to stand on the balls of his toes or suffer a dislocated joint.
Before he issued a generous compromise. “Everything you do to her,” Giaus drawled, and made sure the other male could feel his intention, “I will do to you.”
A half-strangled sob sputtered over Sinadim’s lips, but that was all.
Cold, barking laughter burst from Giaus’ lips. “You’re thinking about it, aren’t you, general?”
Sinadim’s free hand thumped against the wall, his claws leaving deep furrows in stone as he snarled, “You don’t know what it’s like! The addiction! I cannot stop. I’ll do heinous things to sate this agony. Things I went to war to end. Things I’ve done a thousand times in my mind since she put these cursed marks on my flesh!”
Eyes narrowed, Giaus frowned. At the tone, at the desperate, vulnerable edge that lacked all sense of cutting humor. “Explain.”
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of heavy breathing. The patter of falling stone and trickling water. Two males trapped together in an uneasy alliance, neither making an effort to disguise their desire for spilled blood.
And then, “You’ve never tasted it, have you?”
Giaus’ silence was answer enough.
“Do everything you can,” Sinadim said through bitter laughter, twisting so he might see their mate once more. “Everything in your power to abstain, or she will enslave you just as soundly. Ineedit,” Sinadim whispered. “Slick. To be so close…” He shook his head, mane bristling against Giaus’ knuckles—and there, in the subtle arch of his lower back… the prince pressed against Giaus in a way that drew lewd, taboo interest. “I can’t… can’t help myself.”
A sneer tugged at Giaus’ lip, and he forced, “You’d risk her life for it?” through clenched teeth. “Even now, as she hovers on the edge of death? Knowing she could never handle the rut in her current state?”
Sinadim shuddered. “Even then,” he replied. “It’s in the air. Goldeverywhere.” He whined, mane fully risen, his pheromones broadcast in direct challenge to the king’s claim. “I can’t stop. Don’t care what it costs, or that it won’t be long before I join Balkazar in foaming madness,” he breathed and met Giaus’ glare with one that was crazed. Rimmed in white. “I’ll do anything, payanythingfor just one more taste…”
“Who is this Balkazar, and why has he got your royal ball bag in such a mighty twist?” Giaus asked instead, distracting Sinadim from his heated perusal of Renegade’s still form.
“My war chief,” Sinadim said, and offered a watery smirk. “The one who gave you that little love tap oozing between your ribs, if I recall correctly.”
Giaus chuckled and released his deadly grip, only to soften his touch. Stepping back. “Ah,” he hummed, and scooped Renegade back into his arms. “The shitrag. A male who threw you into the dark to suffer my mercy.”
“The very same,” Sinadim spat, and slid down the wall. Watching with that wary, one-eyed gaze that gleamed in the dark. “But let me offer you advice before I join him in ruin, and my brains begin to ooze from my ears—”
