“Rape?” he said aloud. “No, it won’t
be rape. There will be no need to take her against her will, for I intend to
make sure she wants me with every fiber of her being.”
Chapter Four
The dream came again as Marin lay slumped against the wall
of her cell, but this time, her faceless midnight lover not only had very
distinct features, he had a name and the horror of that brought Marin awake
with a thudding heart.
She shivered, experiencing the last of the deep quivers
inside her body that signaled a strong climax as she opened her eyes.
Marin buried her face in her hands. The feeling of being
lost, stripped bare of all hope filled Marin’s soul. She now knew that the
dreams had been sent—somehow—by her captor. That he could reach across time and
space and violate her so intimately, so thoroughly, lanced her to the quick.
The devastating knowledge that she had reveled in those shameful dreams, had
thrilled to her unseen lover’s touch, hurt her.
What was worse, she wanted that touch still. Despite knowing
it belonged to a man who hated her and had every intention of humiliating and
degrading her, she longed for the feel of those strong hands upon her. She
ached. She needed.
Against all reason, she was in love with her midnight lover.
“Why?” she whimpered. The last thing she wanted was to
desire the very man who had threatened to hurt her. Finding out Taegin Drae—a
very dangerous man—was the one behind the pleasures she’d been experiencing had
stunned her. Realizing she had fallen in love with him was a treacherous
torment that hurt her deeply.
A Tiogar, she thought with a
helpless groan. She had fallen in love with a being her mother had attempted to
make her daughter hate and fear. A man who completely destroyed those with whom
he fought, devouring their remains like the beast he was. Yet the knowledge of
what he was didn’t seem to matter now that she’d known her midnight lover and
knew him to be the same man her mother so loathed. Such was his nature and that
nature only exhibited itself when he was in the throes of Conversion, and she
intended to never be near him when that transition happened. She knew a
gentler, more sensual side of him and she thought perhaps that was the true man
and not the image he was striving so hard to make her fear—an image her mother
had helped to instill.
Her fanciful virgin dreams of a skillful lover who knew the
innermost desires of her untried body without being told and who could wield
her passions so adroitly had been the one bright moment of otherwise lonely,
bleak days. With an exacting curriculum taught by demanding instructors who
brooked no frivolity or enjoyment of the disciplined courses, the only pleasure
Marin found was in her dreams. Now even those had been taken from her. She was
facing reality now and that reality was stranger than any fiction she had ever
found in any library.
All because of a basket of eggs Simone had stolen from the
lunchroom…
“Rigel himself will be here on tour next week. I’ve a mind
to egg that bastard’s runabout. Are you with me?”
What had started as a prank to ease the frustrations of
repetitious days and nights spent cramming for stringent tests had become a
living nightmare that had seen those who had taken part in the act sent to a
detention center. The parents of the other girls came to the hearing that had
sentenced them to four months of community service at the women’s prison at
Fiáin. Marin’s mother had not nor had she sent an emissary.
“I am told your mother is very displeased with you, young
woman,” the magistrate informed a downcast Marin. “She says she has washed her
hands of you. You are no longer to consider yourself her daughter.”
“She ceased being my mother the day she sent me to
Laidineach,” Marin said defiantly.
“Well, I can see there is no love lost between you. Perhaps
that is best,” the magistrate commented.
“Does she know what will happen to me?” Marin asked. “Does
she even care?”
“One would presume the Lady Neala is embarrassed by the
situation and does not care to know the particulars.”
Marin wondered if her mother would even care that she was in
the hands of one of the hated Tiogars. As much as her mother hated the warriors
and had done her best to eradicate the entire race, she could not help but
think Neala Acet would be horrified to learn her daughter—her only child—was
now at the mercy of Seamus Drae’s son.
“Not only horrified but sickened, I’m sure.”
She had not heard him come in. She looked up listlessly and
saw him standing with his back against the door to her cell with his arms
crossed. She didn’t question how he had fathomed her thoughts. She simply
accepted that he had. If he was able to send subliminal dreams to her, he could
easily pluck her thoughts from the ether.
“What, no trembling today, wench?” he asked. “No pathetic
sobbing meant to soften my heart?”
She lifted her chin. “Do you have a heart, Tiogar?”
“Aye and it’s black as coal and a hundred times as hard,” he
replied.
She looked up at him. “Have you thought of what might happen
when you force me to have sex with you?”
Taegin cocked his head to one side. “Force you to have sex with
me,” he repeated. “What a cut-and-dried way of putting it, wench.”
“It’s a kindler, gentler expression than rape,” she said.
“Don’t you think?”
“Either way, you’ll still be lying
beneath me, my sweet, with my cock inside you.”
Marin steeled herself not to show any emotion whatsoever,
although his answer sent a chill down her spine. “Are you here to hurt me or
just taunt me?” she asked, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her
ears.
“Outside of war, I’ve never hurt a woman in my life, although,
if allowed, I’d make an exception for your mother.”
Marin saw true hatred gleaming in his dark gaze and nodded
slowly. “I have felt the same way about her over the years.”
“No love lost between you, eh?”
“I have never known any affection from her, no,” Marin
admitted.
“Why, then,” he asked, his forehead crinkled, “did she have
you? Why not abort you if that was the case?”
Again she shook her head. “She wasn’t allowed to abort me.
She wanted the man who sired me, but he didn’t want her and she blamed me for
it. If I had been a male child, most likely he would have stayed with her.”
“Who was he?” Drae asked, squinting. “Do you even know?”
“I never met him—never even saw him—but I know who he was.
He was a genetic engineer and a member of the Riochasian High Command. My
mother was given to him as an award for his great strides in genetics, for what
he helped to create. He used her for his pleasure then cast her aside.”
The golden eyes of the Tiogar flared wide. “Dearing Noah?”
he questioned. “Was he your sire?”
Marin nodded. “I am sorry for what he did to you and your
people. I…”
“Why are you sorry? You had no hand in what he did,” he said
brutally.
“He didn’t create that virus for it to hurt anyone,” she
said. “He created it to enhance, not destroy.”
“Oh, he enhanced us all right,” the Tiogar snapped. “I am a
warrior superior to all because of your sire. I have keen eyesight and
extremely acute hearing. My strength and endurance is that of twenty men. I
have acute psychic abilities that make it possible for me to read the thoughts
of others as easily as I can hear them speak. I can also communicate with and
influence other humans at a great distance. I also can track them wherever they
go if first I ingest a small portion of their blood.”
Marin blushed deeply as she realized that was exactly what
he had done with her over the last few months. She could not look up at the
hateful, knowing leer that had eased over his handsome face. “You took my
blood? When?”
“Do you remember your arrest seven weeks ago?” he asked. “A
sample of your blood was taken for identification purposes. I knew you were
Acet’s whelp and having your blood became a priority. Such samples are easily
available to Fleet Officers.”
Her stomach roiling at the thought of him ingesting her
blood, Marin put trembling fingers to her lips.
“Aren’t you proud of what your sire helped to create,
wench?” he sneered.
“No,” she said so quietly he barely heard her.
“You don’t think he was a great man?” he pressed, surprised
at her answer.
“To some I suppose he was a great man. He was considered a
national hero,” she said. “The Tribunal held him up as the definitive patriot
for creating warriors without equal with whom they could win any war. He was
given the finest quarters, the best of everything. As far as the Tribunal was
concerned, he was a god.”
“Do you know how he died?” he asked.
“It was an accident in his lab,” she said. When he remained
silent, she asked if that was a lie.
Drae knew the real story behind what had happened to Noah.
Despondent over what he had created, realizing the young boys into whom he had
inserted the virus he had created were suffering terribly for his sins, the bio
engineer had locked himself in with a Tiogar going into Conversion and had met
a horrible end—torn apart by unsheathed talons that had ripped the scientist
limb from limb.
“Sometimes when a man plays god, when he believes he is one
and things go horribly wrong, he can’t live with the consequences of his
actions,” Drae said. “Such was what happened to your sire.”
“His death wasn’t an accident?” she asked.
“It was suicide.”
“Captain?” It was a hail from the vid com outside the cell.
“What the hell is it?” Drae snapped.
“You are needed immediately on the bridge, sir.”
Drae cursed beneath his breath, turned and stormed out of
the cell without a backward glance.
Marin breathed a sigh of relief for despite the fact her
body seemed to be craving the attention of the Tiogar, her mind and soul told
her he was big trouble, warning her to keep out of his clutches for as long as
she could. She feared the man—and what he was capable of doing—so the
attraction she felt for him made no sense to her.
“Aye, well, it’s those knowing hands and that devilish body
you are hankering for, fool,” she said aloud.
Groaning, Marin stretched out on the uncomfortable bunk and
lay there with her knees up and her hands toying with the metal teeth of the
zipper at her waist.
How could a man with such a sensual nature as the midnight
lover who had visited her in her dreams turn out to be a wild beast, a murderous
assassin with a heart as black as pitch, she asked herself.
It was the dichotomy—the two totally opposite parts of the
same whole—that both intrigued and worried Marin. Such a man was completely
unpredictable and extremely volatile. Could she handle a man like that or would
he consume her in the crucible of his passions, she wondered.
“Not damned likely,” she said on a long sigh.
Turning to her side, she stared at the cell door and knew
she had to come up with a plan that would at least let her have some say in the
matter of her future in the Tiogar’s hands. She knew she could not allow him to
do with her what he planned. She had to find a way to make him change his mind
about ravaging her then discarding her to the prisoners aboard his ship.
She thought about her question to him and how he had neatly
sidestepped the issue of what might come about after he had ravished her. She’d
never known a man and hadn’t contemplated having one outside of marriage, so
there had never been any need for her to worry about birth control. She
certainly wanted children but didn’t even know if she could conceive. Lying
there thinking about the Tiogar impregnating her sent waves of despair flooding
through her soul.
She had to find a way to make him as
besotted with her as she was with him and she had to find that way quickly!
* * * * *
Taegin twisted the blade in his opponent’s body then
withdrew it, spilling the man’s entrails upon the already slippery deck.
Lifting his foot to kick his foe away from him, he barely had time to step
aside, spin around and meet the attack before another enemy struck out at him
with a wickedly curved blade. The clash of his blade against the honed edged of
the scimitar screeched like a banshee as the hilts of both weapons met.
“You are a dead man, Drae!” his enemy promised.
More than the foul breath washing over his face and the
malodorous body odor that made his eyes water, it was the sight of the oily,
pocked skin of his adversary that turned Taegin’s stomach. The infected skin
was dotted with thick blackheads and upraised red pustules. The man’s flesh was
a sheet of inflammation that bore witness to his disregard for his person.
Ridding the world of his useless presence would be a blessing to those who had
to look at his putrid face.
Easily dispatching his reeking foe, Drae paused long enough
before engaging his next opponent to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the
back of his arm. He assured himself his boarding party was handling their end
of the fight then with casual elegance met the frenzied attack of a new
attacker.
Studying the clean, determined face of the man with whom he
was parrying, the Tiogar knew this one would be for the Feasting. He drew the
scent of the fellow deep into his lungs, smiled brutally and made quick work of
ending the young man’s life.
By the time the vicious snarls began, the boarding party
from the
Revenge
had meted out the last measures of punishment to the
ones who had dared tried to overtake Captain Taegin Drae’s ship. Making sure no
life was left alive on the ship they had overrun, the boarding party
transported back to the
Revenge,
leaving their captain behind to finish
his business.
Tarnes looked up as the men began appearing on the transport
pad. “Was it Graham’s men?” he asked.