a clear familial connection. Brothers, they had said, just like they’d been to the dead wolf.
But there were other things that made them very different. The wolf who’d first spoken – Reid – stared at me with sharp green eyes, still shooting me a mocking smirk. When he licked his lower lip, I caught a glint of metal in his mouth. At first, I thought I’d imagined it, but then, I realized it was a tongue piercing. He had studs in his ear shells, and in his eyebrows, too. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and I spotted several tattoos. There was a howling wolf on his right arm and a skull with roses on his left. As tattoos went, they were fairly plain, almost amusingly so. But there was nothing plain about the ink on his back. I couldn’t see that particularly tattoo clearly, because most of it was covered by his shirt. But from what I could tell, it seemed to depict a bound woman being… tortured? In a sexual pose? I wasn’t sure.
The brother who’d made the comment about my family was covered in scars. Most of them weren’t very visible, and I only noticed them because I was paying attention. But there were two that were pretty bad – one that looked like some kind of burn mark on his shoulder, and a claw mark on his right cheek.
The last brother was the only one of the trio who had long hair, but that didn’t soften his look any. Like his green-eyed sibling, he had tattoos, although his looked different. Black branches curled around his right arm, thick and strikingly beautiful, but terrifying as well. He had a tattoo on his back also, although I couldn’t distinguish it properly. And in the dim light of the cavern, his brown eyes looked stony and cold.
I swallowed around the knot in my throat and tried to come up with something, anything to say. It was pointless. My words died in my throat, and my tears dried, as if I was too scared of them to even cry.
Reid took another step forward, and the simple motion snapped me out of my trance. I yelped and scuttled back, trying to put as much distance between us as possible.
Reid laughed, a dark, cruel sound that echoed over the cavern and all the way into my heart. “Trying to hide now, bitch? You have to know that’s not going to help you.”
“Now’s not the time to play games, Reid,” his scarred sibling said. I would have been relieved, but I knew better than to think his intervention meant anything good for me.
“Who’s playing, Jax? Nothing about this is a game.”
“No,” his brother, now identified as Jax said, “it’s not. But she doesn’t know that yet.”
He stalked up to me and grabbed my arm, pulling me upright. I whimpered and stumbled when the suddenness of the motion put pressure on my hurt leg. He couldn’t care less. He sneered at me, displaying the same sharp fangs he’d used to tear my family apart.
“Listen up, human slut. Our brother’s burial will be tonight. And guess what? You’ll be the guest of honor. But to do that, you need to be clean and perfect.”
“C-clean and perfect?” I stammered. “I don’t understand.”
“You will,” Reid drawled. “We look forward to teaching you this lesson, bitch. Don’t worry. We’ll be very thorough.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, and I liked it even less when Jax grabbed me and draped me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I should have tried to fight him, but every inch of my body was paralyzed. I didn’t remember feeling so scared in my whole life.
As we left the cavern, the third brother eyed me with undisguised contempt. “You reek of fear, Isabel. They won’t kill you yet, remember?”
Thinking back, they had said that after the fight, but that conversation was so blurry now, I could barely remember it. Besides, I didn’t think that meant anything good for me.
Reid decided to confirm my worst suspicions. “Yes, but some things are worse than death, and I think our guest knows that. I mean… Why else would she encourage slaughtering other living beings and using them for decoration?”
“Maybe she enjoys it,” Jax said. “And if that’s the case, we should make sure she receives the same treatment. Death is too merciful. Don’t forget that, Thorn.”
Thorn didn’t argue with them, and I tasted bile in my mouth as I realized that the person