hooves driving him into madness.
Wheeling around on Benloise, he bared his fangs and hissed like the vampire he was—
In spite of being shot, the drug wholesaler recoiled. “Madre de Dios!”
Assail scrummed down, getting in the man’s face. “That is right! I am nightmare come upon you!”
There was only one chain hanging from the wall. The other was coiled on the floor inside the locked cell, the blood that painted the links proving it had been the murder weapon Marisol had used.
It would be put into service yet again.
Assail dematerialized through the bars and picked up the sticky, copper-scented links.
Oh, Marisol, would that you had not had to be so brave.
As Assail dematerialized back out, Benloise was no longer the in-control businessman who was used to holding all the cards. Unlike the dead bodies and the blood or even the loss of his brother and the threat to his own life—all of which he had been able to mostly retain his composure around—learning Assail’s true identity sent him over the edge.
Whimpering, crying, praying, the man lost control of his bladder, urine pooling out of his shrunken cock onto the concrete floor.
Assail stalked over to the wall and reattached the chain. Fortunately, there was nothing fresh upon the stained surface. There was going to be, however.
Manhandling Benloise’s shrieking, flopping, pissed-on body off the floor, Assail bit through the duct tape tethers at the man’s wrists, and cuffed him to the wall Christ-style by shortening the lengths until his hollow torso was pulled flat.
Assail shucked his backpack and unzipped it. As he looked at the amount of explosive he had brought with him, he knew it was more than enough to blow the facility sky-high. He glanced at Benloise. The man was crying all over himself, shaking his head as if he were hoping to wake up.
“Indeed, you are truly conscious,” Assail gritted. “That shall not last, however.”
Pivoting to face the cell, he pictured his Marisol in there, terrified … and worse.
His heart thumped in his chest. If he blew this place up … Benloise would be home free, dead and gone—mayhap to Hell, but as one could not be sure of the afterlife until one got there, it seemed far more prudent to err on the side of real-time suffering.
He had intended to kill the wholesaler first. Then set the explosives and detonate them from a distance.
But that was not as equitable as it should be. Marisol had suffered—
A growl vibrated up through his chest … as though his very body were protesting at the prospect of being cheated of the death.
“No,” he told himself. “Better this way.”
Too bad only part of him believed it.
Assail rezipped his backpack and strapped the thing on again. Going to first one and then the other of the chains, he inspected them for security. Indeed, they were well and truly placed. The same was true for the cuffs upon those wrists.
Snapping out a hold, he took Benloise’s chin and forced the man’s head back.
With another hiss, he bit into the flesh by the carotid, ripping a hunk out and spitting it onto the floor. The blood tasted good in his mouth and his canines tingled in anticipation of more. Except they would be denied.
The bite was but a symbol of what as a male he was driven by instinct and custom to do in the protection of his female. And he would have torn the neck fully open if Benloise himself had not been into torture.
As his prey spoke in a rush in that foreign tongue, Assail fought the battle to leave the man alive. Cruelty was going to require self-control in this circumstance—and ordinarily that was not a problem.
Nothing involving Marisol had been ordinary, however.
Assail slapped the man into silence. Jabbing his forefinger into that face, he growled, “She was not yours to take. Do you hear me? Not yours. Mine.”
Before he lost his hold upon his temper, he stalked off to the stairs, leaving the lights on so that Benloise was fully aware of where he was: a prison of his own making with naught but the remains of one of his bodyguards to keep him company.
Mounting the steps two at a time, Assail knew there was a possibility someone could come and free the wholesaler, but it was remote. Benloise was notoriously secretive, and with Eduardo dead, the only people who would miss him were guards and staff—and given the cagey manner in which the man operated, there would be a lag before