Circus of Death - Candace Wondrak Page 0,6

near, a lot closer than the others, but he was giving Trey space to… to kill me? Fuck.

I should scream. I should fight. I should do something other than lay here and take it, but I couldn’t. Though I didn’t want to die, I was remarkably at ease with it all, like I knew, deep down, this was inevitable. That this was my fate and I could not fight it.

Trey said nothing, but he did give Nigel a nod. And then, with his eyes on me, he started shedding his clothes, piece by piece, dropping them to the grass below, stopping only when he was naked, just like me.

The moonlight danced across his muscles, six tiny squares resting on his abdomen, his manhood twitching with a hunger that made me turn my gaze away. So, in the end, I’d definitely be killed, but first, I guess Trey was going to have his way with me while everyone else watched. If there was a worse way to go, I hadn’t heard of it.

Leaping on top of the table, Trey positioned himself over me, those golden eyes carrying pupils that were almost too wide to be real. He lowered his face to my neck, breathing me in, and I stared hard at Nigel, as if my glaring would make him stop Trey from doing this, as if I could get him to snap back to reality and stop this madness.

Nope. Come whatever may, it was too late to turn back, too late to stop this.

“It’ll be easier if you close your eyes,” Trey whispered against my neck, and it was then I realized I felt no heat coming from his body, either. He felt cold to me too, just as Nigel had. Even his breath on my neck wasn’t warm.

“I think I’ll keep them open, thanks,” I spoke dryly, my voice finally returning to me. As much good as it did me, which was none at all.

Trey sighed, lifting his head from my neck, allowing me to turn and glare at him. “As you wish,” he murmured, his voice tinged with regret.

And then… and then something unbelievable happened. I watched something that could not be real, and I wondered if there was something in the air, if this was all some big hallucination or drug-induced coma, because what I saw right then could not have happened.

Trey turned into a tiger.

Like, his muscled form twitched and morphed, bones cracking and skin growing fur. Trey turned into the fucking tiger I’d seen on the stage earlier, the tiger with a bedazzled collar, the tiger who’d looked nothing more than a wild animal that had been trained its whole life to do as its handler asked.

He literally shifted into a tiger, as if magic was real. As if he’d always had the tiger with the golden eyes laying inside him, deep down, dormant until he brought it out. I was too freaked out at this whole thing to think about it for long; all I knew was a tiger was now positioned on top of me, a tiger with fangs that could easily rip me apart.

The tiger breathed down on me, and I could not tear my face away. I probably should, knowing what was coming; it wasn’t like a tiger on top of me, giving me the look a starving animal would give to a bloody, juicy ribeye meant they were going to change their minds about this and let me go.

Beside the table, Nigel stood, unfazed by the transformation, by Trey turning into a tiger.

“Trey was correct in saying you should close your eyes,” Nigel said, holding his hands behind his back, as if he was studying a painting in an art museum and not my naked body tied down beneath a tiger under the moonlight. “You should close your eyes, and you should accept your fate. It will hurt less that way, dear Thana.”

I had no idea why he kept calling me that; I was not his dear anything… though I supposed I was about to become his dead Thana, but that was a far cry from the caring and gentle way he’d said it.

Needless to say, I didn’t close my eyes. At least, not right away. I had to see what was coming, and even though my heart beat like a drum in my chest, even though the adrenaline pumped through my body with a force unheard of, I was scared. For the first time in my life, I was scared.