Siren Awakened - C.R. Jane Page 0,4

metal barred entrance. I sat unmoving as flashes of memories came back to me, bursting across my mind.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Prison. I tried to remember everything.

The word hovered in my mind as all the pieces slotted back into their place in my mind like a puzzle. I closed my eyes and leaned forward, waiting for a faint buzzing sound in my head to stop. What was that? I glanced around, reminded of a fly trap that constantly hummed, but couldn’t see what caused the noise.

My tongue snaked out and licked my cracked lips while a deep hunger roused in me with a heavy craving for a cheeseburger. Salivating, I pushed my legs out of the bed, and my feet touched the cold floor. Typical that the one thing I craved after dying was a burger. It must be said that if the afterlife didn’t have greasy burgers, well, that would suck just as much as me not remembering a single thing from the afterlife.

I’d died!

The reality crashed into me, wave after wave, and it was hard to make sense of how to deal with that.

I’d been dead, they told me, the three men who ultimately lead to my death. Three men who I had no intention of wasting another second on after everything they did to me.

I sighed and looked out through the bars of my locked door to where another inmate strolled past, minding her own business. She looked upset, probably for good reason, this whole institution had a way of draining every thread of happiness out of all of us. I grounded my teeth, hating this prison, hating Julian for putting me in here, hating every day I had to push myself out of bed in this hell.

That was when I noticed the stainless steel tray with food on the table at the end of my bed. I hurried over and brought it back on the bed with me, needing to gorge myself and forget everything.

I’d never been so hungry in my life. I scooped the mac and cheese into my mouth with the plastic spoon. The tastes exploded over my tongue like somehow my taste buds had been reawakened as well. I ate faster, unable to get enough. The chocolate pudding melted on my tongue, and I closed my eyes as the delicate taste flooded me. This had to be the most incredible thing I’d ever eaten. Had the prison gotten a new cook?

“That good is it?” a deep voice asked.

I jerked my head up to find Alaric outside my cell, one hand gripping a bar, the other deep in the pocket of his orange prison pants. His dark hair sat swept off his face, bringing out his piercing steel gray eyes. I couldn’t deny everything about him called to me, especially how strong and broad he stood. He was the epitome of the ideal man no woman could deny, except I refused to give in to him and his incubus allure ever again.

Just seeing him again tightened my stomach, and the pain behind his eyes betrayed his cool demeanor.

Like everyone else in this place, he’d betrayed me. I’d heard him in the warden’s office, talking about Seth’s scepter. And funny how just earlier, he had asked me about the same artifact. His words spun in my mind. If Seth says anything about the scepter, come to me before you say anything to the warden. What game was he playing? Did he want it for himself or to present it to the warden as a favor to get something? Either way, I didn’t care. He’d used me, and there was no way in hell I would tell him anything I found out.

That same heaviness twisted through me again to know I didn’t mean as much to him as I had initially hoped. I hated that he made me feel this way, or that I let myself believe his intentions. Except he was there when I woke up with the other two, he’d helped me…somehow. But did that make him less guilty of using me?

I eyed him and spooned more pudding into my mouth. “What do you want?”

“I was worried about you, gorgeous.” His words sounded genuine, but were they really? I wasn’t sure what to believe.

I lowered my head back to my empty tray. Damn, where had all my food gone so fast?

“Can I get you more pudding?”

I met his gaze again, those stunning steel gray eyes that always make me forget myself…they were always getting me in