Mark of Love (Love Mark #3) - Linda Kage Page 0,160

water from a rag, so what portions didn’t spill out the sides of my mouth pretty much tried to drown me instead, and Qualmer had to roll me onto my side to keep me from choking further.

“Christ, you’re almost not worth the effort. But I can’t leave you here to die; they’d probably find a way to use the blood left in your corpse to make a new tracking map. And I honestly think the two of us are the only Graykeys left in the Outer Realms—besides my children—so I urgently need your reproductive plumbing to help me start my new generation.”

Say what now?

“After I find a man willing to fuck you and get you with child—thrice, of course—I’ll merge your three offspring together with my remaining one, and we’ll raise the next wave of Graykeys to take back this world, ruling it like we were always meant to.”

Okay. So cousin Qualmer had gone from being a vile, frightening bully as a kid to growing up and becoming a straight-up, cracked-in-the-head, determined-to-breed-a-super-race-and-dominate-the-Outer-Realms tyrant.

Good to know.

Thank God my womb was closed, and he’d never be able to reach his goal. If I were able to, I probably would’ve laughed at him. He truly was the biggest idiot I’d ever known. But then, he’d also just saved me from this prison, so maybe I shouldn’t mentally degrade him too much.

“Damn, how could your captors stand looking at you in this state? It turns my stomach.” Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he whirled his finger in a circle, and that crawling sensation I got when Melaina always glamoured me began to cover my skin. “And what did they do to your hair? Jesus.”

I could tell he was covering my scalp with a mop of hair so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at the nicked and bruised bald head I had now. But when he stepped back to inspect me after he was finished, he sighed and shook his head. “No, you’re right. I should probably make you a male.” And he spun his digit again, giving me another makeover.

“There.” Satisfied with his accomplishment, he smiled and nodded. “Now…” He glanced around the room. “How the fuck do we cart you out of here? I can’t imagine you can walk, can you?” When I didn’t even try to move, he sighed. “No, I didn’t think you could. Damn.”

I passed out for a while, letting him figure out how to sneak me from Everett’s dungeon. The last thing I remembered thinking was that he’d probably just leave me here to die. My body was too broken and worthless to bother with, anyway. But he must’ve had his heart set on starting that new race of evil Graykey babies because when I drifted back into consciousness again, I found myself wrapped and mummified in an old worn rug and tied to these poles that kept me upright on a wooden platform with wheels connected to it.

Son of a bitch, I realized dazedly. In his desperation, Qualmer had rigged up what looked like a medieval-type dolly. I’d seen them on Earth but never here. It was actually interesting what kinds of inventions were bred from such determination.

And I must have a mad fever right now to even be intrigued by such a notion. I should be thinking about escape, survival, and finding out for sure what had happened to Indigo.

Indigo.

A breath hissed from my lungs. Grief flooded my system and my eyes filled with tears.

God, I missed him. But realistically, I knew he couldn’t still be alive.

I could sure go for a dose of his irritating optimism right about now, though. Except, I couldn’t even bother with wishing for survival. My body seemed to have gone numb with pain. I barely felt anything anymore. And my thoughts…

They were beginning to follow the same path, ideas blurring in my head, becoming duller and darker. The prospect of dying didn’t even scare me.

I blinked around the room as Qualmer snapped his fingers, and the guards who I thought had entered with him—but actually had never been there—popped back into reality while he transformed back into King Tomrick.

Damn, that was surprisingly smart. Faking a dozen armed guards to surround yourself with in order to keep people intimidated and held back? Maybe he wasn’t quite as stupid as I always took him for.

Positioning himself behind me, he grabbed the handrails of my dolly and began to wheel me toward the door. As we rolled past the rotting corpses of Everett