evil for him?" Roth smiled maliciously at her disgust. "Our revolution began even before I made the misjudgment of taking you as my mate. I should never have bothered wasting time on you, no matter how much it pleased me to know what I had taken from you and Reichen both. It might have been just as gratifying to me had I farmed you off to Dragos with the other females I sent to him over the years." Claire struggled to make sense of what he was saying. Other females. Roth was sending females--did he mean Breedmate females?--to Dragos. For what purpose, she wondered, but only needed to guess for another moment. From out of the ether of the dream, a wall of barred cells appeared. Dank, lightless, terrible prisons. And within them were captive women. Breedmates. Claire could see the teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark on a few of them even from where she stood. The same birthmark she bore. The same birthmark that denoted a human female capable of bonding with a Breed male and bearing his young. Good lord, there were upward of twenty women caged in those cells. Her stomach roiled even more miserably to see that some of them were pregnant.
"What's going on here?" she asked, appalled and sickened. "What the hell are you and Dragos doing?" As she said it, her voice rising in outrage, she caught the low howl of an animal emanating from somewhere deep within the place where she and Roth stood. The howl rose to a roar--a pained, keening cry that vibrated through the soles of her feet and straight into her marrow. It was unlike anything she'd ever heard before ... an utterly alien noise that put a knot of terror in her lungs. God, what was this place? What horrors were Dragos and Roth conducting in here? The terrible cry kept going, so loud it rattled the floor beneath her feet. Roth threw his head back and howled along with the unseen creature, mocking and sadistic. Then he smiled a murderous smile. "You're dead, Claire. Just like those Breedmates over there. He's going to tear you limb from tender limb. Unless I have the pleasure first. You think about that the next time you let Reichen touch you. The next time you let him fuck you, know that this is waiting for you. I'm going to kill you both and relish doing it." Then just like that, Roth and the chamber of horrors were gone. He severed the web that connected them in sleep, and Claire woke up shaking, panting under the warm spray of the shower.
"Oh, God," she gasped, putting her face into her wet palms. Bile rose in her throat. "Oh, God... what have I done?"
It wasn't until a few minutes after he woke that Wilhelm Roth realized the depth of the mistake he'd just made with Claire. At first he'd been shocked to see her in his dream--he hadn't expected the female to have that kind of guts, putting herself in close proximity to him, even in the realm of sleep, after having knowingly stoked his anger with her whoring for Andreas Reichen. After the surprise of her sneaking up on him had worn off, Roth had let himself indulge in provoking her, baiting her fear with a good hard look at what he and Dragos were capable of. He'd delighted in letting her hear the savage roars of the Ancient in his cage. Her horror over seeing the captive Breedmates that Dragos had been using in all manner of experiments had given him a deliciously sadistic thrill. Now that he was awake, he had time to consider the price of his little game. He had shown her the laboratory and underground bunker where Dragos kept all of his secrets. Would she understand what she'd seen? He hoped not. Claire had an inquisitive mind, but what could she do with this knowledge?
Tell the Order, of course, but the saving grace there was that Dragos was already anticipating a move by the warriors in Boston. He'd been banking on the Order eventually finding him out, ever since the gathering they had disrupted near Montreal. Dragos had been making plans, moving pieces on the chessboard of his master design. Still, Roth knew he could not let this slip go untold. If he did, he knew without question that Dragos would somehow unearth the truth in no time. He had to own up to the error and let the chips fall