His lungs were full with a queasy breath of one edging ever closer to death.
But there was a fragile layer of something else there, too. A whisper of hope that promised great change.
Giaus could smell it—tasteit—a secret hidden beneath a greasy film of putrid infection.
Ambrosia.
A whisper of her incredible potential, for in her tiny, fragile body, the Trax had become something new. Something that might turn the tides of these feral wars and grant Giaus an everlasting rule.
Not a Sultan, but a King.
And she was dying.
“I’ll kill them all if you die, my sweet Renegade,” Giaus rumbled, and pressed his forehead to one that was at once tacky and dry. Too hot beneath the chill. “My precious mate.”
He got no answer from her beloved lips. No sign that she could hear anything at all where she’d gone.
Heart pounding inside his massive chest, Giaus allowed himself a moment to endure the blistering panic churning in his gut. To succumb—if only for an instant—to the terrible knowledge that she might never open her eyes again.
And it was his fault.
Hisstrain of Trax that worked to unmake her.
The very same variant that had rendered Balkazar a walking pustulence, brains all but leaking from the war chief’s ears.
If such a thing were to happen to Renegade…
Giaus pulled her closer, trying to force his indomitable lust for life into her fragile body.
“More than either of us,”Sinadim had whispered, forcing the words through a parched and bleeding throat,“she needs to drink to replace what is lost in slick as she produces for two mates…”
Giaus scowled at the other male who shared their dreary prison. The interloper who dared to touch what Giaus had claimed.
And in his frantic need to pacify her, Giaus himself had fed her what little Sinadim had to offer. Despite the way it burned in his chest, he’d turned her lips toward that pillar of flesh and bade her drink. Watching as she nursed at Sinadim’s cock, seething as she gulped down a few meager swallows of brine that couldn’t possibly suffice.
Not for long.
Not here, abandoned in the dark with no food or water. Forgotten at the bottom of a dreary prison with no support, no pack coming to save them from the squalor where they’d been forgotten.
Eying the ceiling of their dank pit, Giaus sneered at so flimsy a confinement. It would be nothing for him to scale the crumbling walls, to reach and dismantle the pathetic lattice keeping him contained, were he not nursing his own wounds. Tied to not one, but two ailing mates.
The word gave him pause.
Unspoken, yet profound, it echoed in the space between his brain and skull. Leaving tiny, unsettling marks deep on the surface of his very nature.
Golden, feral eyes slipped over to the other male once more. Seeing the swelling that marred Sinadim’s royal features in a new gloomy light.
Mated.
Not in the same obsessively proud way Giaus bore Renegade’s mark, but mated nonetheless. Bound together through a female neither were worthy of, a tiny slip of a girl who might well succumb to the virus and take them both with her.
And for a moment, as he watched the former prince strain to draw breath, Giaus considered the risk of calling that bluff… to reach through the distance between them and simply… snap Sinadim’s neck.
His claws extended, dimpling his palms.
From above, a shadow fell across the floor of the pit. Dust, pebbles, and a shower of loose shale pattered the tops of Giaus’ shoulders, coating him in a fine ruddy layer he didn’t bother to brush off. Instead, he glared at the silhouette standing high above. Eying the bulk of a hybrid male whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn.
“Supper,” was all the hybrid said before dropping a bundle over the edge.
