Tempted by a Rogue Prince (4 page)

What had he ever done to deserve such a brother?

He had murdered thousands. He had destroyed lands. He had ignited wars. He had done unspeakable things.

He didn’t deserve forgiveness, so why did a sliver of his heart cling to the hope it might be his?

The female stopped in front of him and he looked up at her, caught off guard by her sudden appearance and unable to mask his pain before she saw it. Her incredible blue eyes reflected it back at him, laced it with compassion that he couldn’t bear.

He closed his eyes, shutting her out, and lay back on the cold slab, no longer caring what she did to him. Loren would never give up. Vail had given up centuries ago.

His beloved brother was so much stronger than he could ever become.

The female dropped to her knees beside him and he tried not to squirm under her attention. He clenched his hands together and battled his instincts and the need to harm her. It wasn’t Kordula. He opened his eyes and stared at her when his mind refused to believe that, forcing himself to see that the one tending to his wounds was someone else. Someone with compassion. Someone beautiful.

This little wild rose was nothing like the dark witch who had driven him mad by degrees, destroying every part of him and building a monster in its place.

“What species are you?” the female whispered and eyed his mouth. “Are you a vampire?”

Vail snarled at her again, exposing his fangs, and didn’t answer her. He needed his strength and was using what he had to keep his veil in place while she healed him. It was difficult to maintain mortal eye colour and the human appearance of his ears while she was funnelling power into him, causing spasms in parts of his body, making him twitch and sending pain ricocheting along his nerves.

“Did you serve on King Thorne’s side in the war?”

He stared blankly at her as memories swirled together in his mind, a mixed up replay of that battle. He had seen Olivia in danger and had lost his head, had slipped into a killing rage and destroyed any who had dared to come near her.

He would have killed King Thorne too if Loren hadn’t appeared.

The sound of his brother’s voice had grounded him together with his presence, the comforting sense of him standing nearby. Loren had brought him back from the abyss, giving him a reprieve, like a shaft of purest sunlight penetrating the blackest boiling storm clouds.

His silence didn’t deter the female.

“Did you fight there and were captured like me?”

His eyes narrowed in suspicion on her. “You are no warrior.”

She was too slender. Too weak and fragile. Captivity hadn’t stripped her of muscle and physical strength. She had always been this way. Slender. Delicate. Not a warrior.

The effort of lifting a sword would most likely see her falling flat on her face from the weight of it.

She shook her head, her blonde locks dancing across her shoulders. “I drove the witches back. I was taking down a few demons with my spells when they grabbed me.”

Vail batted her hands away from him and growled at her.

His head swam, the cell turning with it, and he blinked hard, trying to focus on her as pain tore through his body, her healing spell going haywire inside him without her to control it. Witches. Spells.

“
Witch
.” He flexed his fingers, filled with a black need to wrap his hands around her throat.

The sharp sound of metal on metal shattered the thick silence and two demon males prowled into the cell. Vail fought the agony eating away at him as he lay on the stone slab and silently bared his fangs at the witch. A stay of execution. When she next crossed his path, he would kill her.

The males grabbed her and he took satisfaction from her gasp and the frightened looks she cast at the demons towering over her.

“Time is up. You did not manage your task,” one male said, a grim smile tugging at his lips as he raked his gaze over her. “You must be punished.”

She immediately reached for Vail, abject fear in her round blue eyes. It drove the darkness from him and something compelled him to rise from the hard slab and punish the demons who meant to harm her. He tried to move, wanted to snag her wrist and pull her to him, needed to protect her but every cell in his body screamed in agony. He was too weak.

He had been too weak to stop these vile creatures from stealing his armour and now he was too weak to protect the female. He was the vile one. Despicable. Pathetic. He had given up and now he needed to fight.

He wouldn’t let them take her from him.

The two males roughly dragged her past him.

“Leave her,” Vail yelled and tried to move again.

He managed to fall from the slab this time, landing on his belly, and fumbled for one of the demon’s ankles. The male was too strong for him and easily broke free of his grip on his boot.

The female fought them, a wild feral creature as she clawed and kicked, and even attempted to bite them. She flailed in their grip, fear etched on her delicate features, terror that dug sharp claws into Vail’s heart and tore at it. They chuckled at her futile attempts to harm them.

They would pay for that.

Vail forced himself to move, refusing to let pain cripple him and stop him from reaching her. He would fight the limits of his body and his mind and wouldn’t stop until he passed out or death embraced him. He would bleed himself dry and destroy himself if only it would save her.

He crawled across the grimy damp dark flagstones towards the cell door, driven to reach her and unable to ignore the instinct to protect her that ran deep in his blood.

Little Wild Rose.

The demons slammed the cell door in his face. He tried to teleport to the other side but nothing happened. He cursed the cuffs binding him and banged them against the bars, desperate to reach her, the need so intense that it overwhelmed him and brought the darkness within him swiftly rising to the surface.

They dragged her out of sight and Vail roared his anger, eliciting whimpers from the occupants of several of the cells surrounding him.

The female shrieked in agony, the sound sending a chill skating over his arms and down his spine, and igniting his rage.

He was only vaguely aware of the world as he snapped the chain between the manacles, launched to his feet and attacked the magically reinforced bars of his cell, filled with a primal need to reach and protect the female.

His Little Wild Rose.

R
osalind sat in the corner of her cell, staring blankly at the wall opposite her, her focus turned away from herself and her surroundings. She had fixed it on the man when the guards had dragged her back to her cell and dumped her into it, leaving her to curl up on the cold stone floor and fight the pain pulling her to pieces. Threatening to shatter her completely.

The moment she had thought about him, some of that pain had faded. He kept it at bay together with her fear. She didn’t know how, or what power he had that allowed him to do such a thing, and she didn’t care. All she cared about was shutting out the pain while she healed and the memories of the whip. She flinched away from thoughts of it and focused on the man again.

He was handsome, despite his gaunt appearance. His tall body was too lean, as if ravaged by hunger, leaving his bones on display beneath his dirty skin, but there was strength there still, a hint that he would outshine the incubus if he fed and put on muscle and fat again.

But he also held darkness within him that outshone the darkness in any male she had met before him, even the cruel demon king of this realm. He was violent and dangerous. A wild beast in the form of a man.

And the whole cellblock had heard it during her punishment.

The thunderous bellows of rage that had echoed around the dungeon as the guards had cut her back to ribbons with the whip had been his. He had gone into some sort of rage. Because of her?

Her last moments with him offered her little in the way of understanding him. He had snarled ‘witch’ at her as if it were a curse word, and the vilest one available to him.

She hadn’t liked how he had looked at her either, cold and detached, yet calculating, as if he had been plotting terrible, painful things for her. Things far worse than the guards had done. There had been a wildness in his steel-blue eyes, a dark malevolence that promised pain and suffering. But all the while his expression had remained calm, placid, and unreadable. Only his eyes and his aura had given away his dark intentions. The steady current of danger he constantly radiated had reached startling heights and her magic had wanted to rise to protect her.

She had wanted to run from him and never look back.

But when the guards had come to take her, he had been a different man. He had turned all of that violence and darkness on the demons instead, and had looked at her with eyes that left her feeling he had wanted to protect her.

Mother earth, the whole affair confused the hell out of her, but she did feel certain of one thing.

He despised witches.

Rosalind hugged her knees to her chest and winced. One of the demons had busted a few ribs. Bastard. She felt them and wished she could heal them, but the demon king had made sure that she couldn’t use her power on herself. She had discovered that after her first beating. If she tried to use it on herself, she only experienced agony, fire that burned her bones to ashes and left her even weaker than before.

He had also put a stop to her rather poor attempt at escaping. She had been healing one of his warriors in the infirmary when she had accidently lost her connection to the spell, leaving the demon in crippling pain. She had then touched every demon she could before they realised what was happening, unleashing a healing spell into each of them and then severing her link with it. It had been working, demons dropping like flies around her, and then she had discovered a massive flaw in her brilliant plan.

She had turned to escape through the arched doorway and found herself facing a dark witch.

The witch had gone to town on her, battering her with spells that she had no way of countering or protecting against. Before Rosalind had lost consciousness, the blonde witch had loomed over her and told her it was payback for her sisters.

Rosalind had slipped into nightmarish replays of killing the witches on the side of the Fifth King, seeing their deaths over and over again in gory detail.

She shuddered and weakly rubbed her arms, her manacles clanking with each sweep of her hands.

If the black-haired man despised witches, he wasn’t going to be very happy when he discovered the Fifth King had a whole harem of them living in the castle above.

Rosalind crawled to the bars of her cell with effort, each shuffling inch forwards causing agony to ripple through her. She collapsed into the right corner and leaned her head against the cold bars, breathing hard as she stared left along the corridor towards the man’s cell.

Her head swam, pain and hunger combining to turn it light and spin her thoughts together into a blur. She tried to focus on the man again, letting everything else drop away.

Why did he despise her kind so much?

Heavy footsteps sounded along the corridor at her back, coming from the direction of the dungeon’s torture chamber.

The thick leather boots stopped outside her cell and she managed to tip her head back and look up the towering height of their owner. The dark-haired demon stared down at her, his emerald eyes devoid of feeling, filled with cold indifference.

“Your healing is needed,” he said in a gruff, deep voice, and opened her cell door.

Who needed to be healed? One of the demons? She was too afraid to mention to this man that she was too weak from her punishment to be of use to him. She doubted she could muster the power to heal anyone right now.

The demon grabbed her roughly by her arm and hauled her onto her feet. He dragged her from her cell and along the dank corridor, moving too swiftly for her legs to keep up. She gave up trying to walk and let him pull her along, her bare toes bouncing off the gaps between the stone flags and her body hanging limp from his strong hand.

Only one guard. If she could channel her healing power into him, she could take him down. She might be able to escape. She almost laughed at that, the flicker of hope in her heart quickly dying. She couldn’t walk, let alone run. She was never escaping this hell.

She wasn’t powerful enough without her magic. These demons were one hundred times stronger than she was on the best of days. In a physical fight against one, she would last less than a second.

How strong would the man be when he healed?

He should be better by now. She had flooded him with all the healing spells she could manage, and the highest level ones available to her. It struck her that they were heading in the direction of his cell. She could sneak a glance at him on her way past to the infirmary at the end of the corridor.

Rosalind stared ahead, her eyes fixed on his cell to her right as they approached it.

The demon stopped outside it and her eyes widened in horror.

What had happened to him?

The man’s injuries were worse than ever, and his wrists bore a new set of cuffs, heavier ones that had been bolted to the end of the stone slab where he lay. They had shackled his ankles too.

And was one of the steel bars of the cell bent?

Her demon escort opened the door to the man’s cell and shoved her inside. Rosalind looked around it, unable to believe her eyes. There were deep bloodstained grooves in the stone walls beside the bars. Her eyes darted to his fingers. His nails were gone, broken off, leaving scabbed tips behind.

He had attacked the walls of his cell when they had taken her and during her punishment. Why?

A soft noise reached her ears and she stared down at him. Not unconscious as she had thought. He muttered things in an unknown tongue.

“You will stay until the moonrise. The king wants him lucid for questioning. Do not fail this time.” The guard slammed the cell door and stalked away.

The moon in this realm was the weird light that emanated from the portal the elves used to bring sunshine into their kingdom. When that light shone in the seven demon realms, it meant it was daylight there, but the demons in this realm thought of it as the moon. It meant night to them.