Mica whimpered at the pain. She couldn’t cry, she couldn’t scream. There was no breath for it, the pain screaming through her body.
“Do you have nightmares?”
“Yes,” she wheezed, her hands jerking from the wall to the powerful wrists of the creature holding her so effortlessly.
He was Phillip Brandenmore, yet he wasn’t.
God, Kita Engalls, his niece, must live in hell knowing what her uncle had become.
“What nightmares do you have?” He seemed to pause, his nails now digging into the flesh of her neck as another little whimper slipped free.
Behind Brandenmore, she could hear Navarro growling. That low, almost unconscious growl Wolf Breeds used when pushed to their last, enraged nerve.
If Bradenmore gave him so much as a single opening, then he would be dead.
“Monsters,” she answered, fighting back more tears, fighting back the fear and the panic, the knowledge that she would die if one of the Breeds didn’t figure out how to get their hands, or their weapons, on the monster holding her. “Monsters find me.”
It was the truth. That was her nightmare, a dream pulled from the bleak, horrifying night she’d spent lost in the mountains around the ranch her parents had owned in Kansas, just after Cassie and her mother had been there with Dash Sinclair.
She had had a Coyote stalking her, playing with her, assuring her that her father was dead when he hadn’t been.
Once again that fear was tearing through her sense.
Navarro. Why hadn’t he made a move yet? Why wasn’t he saving her?
“I’m the monster,” he whispered at her ear, his fingers straightening until they were wrapped around her neck too snugly for comfort.
Her eyes closed for a moment, the labored breathing finally taking its toll as she felt herself weakening.
She was clawing at his fingers, but they didn’t loosen.
“You’re hurting her, Phillip,” Jonas repeated, his voice too calm as she began to struggle, desperate to escape now.
“I want to hurt you,” he snarled at her ear.
There were too many sounds. Jonas was suddenly snarling, a snap of fury behind Phillip, Callan’s voice suddenly entering the fray as a sharp command. “Mica, stop fighting. If he kills you, his niece Kita will never forgive him.”
Kita? Kita wasn’t here. Mica had only met Brandenmore’s niece once; she was the same niece he had tried to kill when he learned she had mated with a Breed last month.
Behind her, Phillip tensed again, but his hold loosened. His fingers unclenched just enough for her to take a deep breath, to prepare herself.
And then all hell seemed to break loose.
Navarro struggled with the order Jonas gave to hold back, to wait. He could sense the insanity inside Phillip Brandenmore, the demented animal born of the Breed serum he’d injected himself with, clawing with feral rage as all semblance of his humanity crashed beneath the wave of fury.
The hunger for blood, for death and vengeance was a dark oil scent, putrid and abrasive to the senses.
And it was focused entirely on Mica.
Her pain and fear reached out to Navarro, tendrils of them wrapping around his senses like a scream born of desperation.
Where the wisps of hunger and emotion born of evolving love had warmed and aroused him, this sensation tore across his senses and seemed to awaken the animal slumbering inside him to full, enraged consciousness.
It came to awareness with a suddenness he couldn’t have predicted and damn sure hadn’t expected.
Clawing talons of fury raked across his senses as a furious snarl pulled his lips back from his teeth and had him crouching, preparing to spring.
He would have only one opportunity. If he failed, God forbid, if he didn’t take the monster down with that first try, then Mica would pay the cost.