Wolfen Domination (9 page)

            She stared at him blankly, unable to grasp what
he meant until he leaned over her and grasped the leg of her trousers.  Hooking
the knife under it, he drew it upward slowly.  She jerked instinctively and felt
a sting as the tip of the blade nicked her thigh.  “What are you doing?” she
gasped with a mixture of horror and outrage.

            He didn’t even glance at her.  His concentration
was focused on slicing her clothing off.  When he’d sliced the cloth through
the waistband, he moved around the bed and repeated the process.  Her panties
didn’t take even half as long to remove.

            “Jesse!  Stop!  Don’t do this!  Whatever you
think I’ve done, you’re wrong.”

            He ignored that, too.  Her blouse fared no better
than her pants.  She started struggling despite the warning when he grasped the
straps of her bra.  “You made your point!  Stop it!”

            Having cut the straps, he slipped the knife
beneath the part of the bra that connected the cups and sliced it before his
gaze met hers again.  “I haven’t even begun ta make my point,
chère
,” he
said in a low, menacing growl.

            Erin licked her lips, jogging her mind for
anything she might say to reason with him.  “I did the only thing I could.  I
knew they would shoot at you, but at least it gave you a chance.  There
was
no other chance.  I couldn’t get out of the facility myself.”

            His eyes narrowed as he studied her
thoughtfully.  “Me, I’m thinkin’ you didn’t care one way or the other,
chère
,
so long as I was gone.  I’m thinkin’ you figured that was the only way to make
sure they didn’t put you in with me again, because you’d realized you was
startin’ to like me fuckin’ you.”

            Erin felt the blood rush from her face that he’d
hit so near the mark.  It flooded back with a vengeance until her cheeks were
pulsing with color.  “That had nothing to do with it!”

            She might as well have saved her breath.  She saw
her reaction was enough to tell him a part of the truth she hadn’t been willing
to acknowledge even to herself.  The chances of explaining her chaotic emotions
at that time to him were pretty much nil, though, because she hadn’t completely
understood herself.  She still didn’t.  “What are you going to do?” she gasped,
struggling to stave off hysteria.

            “I made you a promise,” he said evenly.

            Erin stared at him, trying to recall everything
that had passed between them so long ago.  It wasn’t easy given that she’d
spent an entire year doing her utmost to submerge those memories.  That
particular memory surfaced without a great deal of prodding though.

            “You killed the others?”

            “Unfortunately for me, they were gone by the time
I recovered enough to look for them.  The trail was too cold to follow.  I’m
sure you know the cold bitch is dead.  That only leaves you and the rat bastard
that orchestrated my capture and torture.  But I’m thinkin’ you can give me
him.”

            “You didn’t kill Freda Dallas.  The guards did. 
I don’t believe you’re a cold blooded killer.”

            “Then you’d be wrong,
chère. 
She was
lucky.  It happened real quick.  Caught her by surprise when they lay down on
me and got her too.  I have to say I was very disappointed I didn’t get a
chance to settle things between us, but then maybe it was just as well.  Sick
bitch woulda probly enjoyed it.  I wonder if you will.”

            “I didn’t have anything to do with what they were
doing!” Erin cried out with a mixture of anger, fear, and desperation.  “They
brought me into the project later, after they’d captured you.  I didn’t even
know what they were doing until they sent me in there the first time.”

            His lips curled, but there was no humor in his
eyes.  “Then this is gonna be a real surprise for you, ain’t it,
chère?
”

           
Erin started fighting the bindings uselessly.  “Let me go! 
You have to let me go!  I don’t know where Dr. Wagner is.  I’ve been looking
for him since I escaped.  That’s why I came here.  I thought they might have
reopened the facility.  It was the only lead I had.”

            Something flickered in his eyes, but she could
see that he didn’t believe anything she’d said.

            “This is the way it works,
chère
.  Over
dere is the facilities.  You get to use them once a day.  Now I’m a soft
hearted son-of-a-bitch so I’m gonna let you tell me when you need to go instead
of takin’ you when I feel like it.  You need ta think real hard before you ask,
though, ‘cause that’s once a day, no matter what.

            “It won’t be a real problem for you long, though,
cause you only get food and water once a day, too--if you’re good and I’m
feelin’ charitable.  If you piss me off, you don’t get any ‘priviledges.’  You
just get to look at the food and water and think about using the facilities.”

            Horror filled Erin, not just because of what he
was suggesting he was going to do to her, but because she realized he was
telling her that that was what they’d done to him--for months.  Even she had no
idea how long they’d kept him chained in that cage, but she knew he had been
captured long before she came to the facility, and she knew she had been a part
of the experiment for over a month.

            “I want to find him as much as you do.  Let me
go!  I’ll help you.”

            Frustration filled her as he left the room,
closing the door behind him.  She tugged at the bindings after he’d gone,
twisting her head to look up at them.  Her fingers were already numb.  The rag
the others had used to bind her wasn’t tight enough to completely cut off the
circulation and she’d had her hands bound in front of her, which had allowed
some circulation.  With the binding Jesse had looped around her already bound wrists,
and the position of her arms, it hadn’t taken long for the numbness to become
more pronounced.  Concentrating, she wiggled her fingers and arms as much as
she could, not because she thought there was any real chance of getting loose,
but to keep some of the circulation flowing through her arms and hands.

            She was rewarded for her efforts with stinging
pain.  Gritting her teeth, she continued until her fingers didn’t feel so stiff
and swollen.

            If she could only pull herself up a little higher
on the bed, she thought, maybe she could get enough slack to slip her bound
hands from the loop?

            She discovered very quickly that there wasn’t
enough slack in the cords around her ankles to allow for it.  Even when she’d
stretched until it felt as if every joint from her groin down would separate,
it wasn’t quite enough.

            She subsided after a while, wondering if he did
mean to kill her.  Her throat closed at that thought.

* * * *

            Jesse strode through the front room and out onto
the porch, staring up at the night sky while he struggled to bring his heart
rate and breathing back to normal.  He felt more than vaguely nauseated.  For
several moments, he held his hands out, palm up, staring angrily at the tremor
in them.

            He hadn’t anticipated the things he’d felt from
the moment he’d set eyes on her.  He wondered if she’d been able to tell the
effect she had on him, or if she’d been under too much duress herself to see
his sorry state.

            After a few minutes, he plopped his butt down on
the edge of the porch and settled his feet on the lower step, struggling to
summon the hatred that had consumed him for so long, that had carried him
through the months it had taken him to recover from his wounds, that had kept
him from totally losing his mind in the months after that when he had searched
for her so frantically.

            Of all the stupid things that he had done because
of her, marking her was probably one of the stupidest.  The link alone had
tortured him.  It hadn’t been strong enough to help him find her and yet it had
been strong enough to taunt him.

            Propping one elbow on his knee, he speared his
fingers through his hair, propping his forehead on his palm while he tried to
remember, and sort through, the things she’d said.  Derisively, he realized he
didn’t remember a hell of a lot.  He’d been the next thing to mindless, roiling
emotion even before he’d stripped her.  From the moment he’d begun that, it had
been far more torture to him than her because he hadn’t been able to get his
mind off of his memories of stroking her soft skin, her taste, the way she’d
felt when he had sunk himself deeply inside of her.  The sounds of pleasure
she’d made.

            His mouth went dry.

            With an effort, he pushed the memories aside.  He
hadn’t waited all this time to allow himself to be sucked in by her again.

            The fury he’d been questing for rose inside of
him at that thought.  He hated all of them for what they’d done to him, but he
hated her worst of all.  Nothing they could do could touch him as she could. 
Nothing they could have thought of to do could have given him nearly as much
pain.

            He’d thought he loved her.  All she’d had to do
was be the one bright moment in that hell, the one person who offered him any
kindness at all.  He would’ve believed he was in love with her even if she
hadn’t been so beautiful he’d been almost willing to gnaw his arms off to get
to her.

            He might have been more than tempted if he hadn’t
seen that she was as afraid of him as she was fascinated by him.

            It made him cringe inside to know that even after
everything he’d learned about her,
that
was what had driven him to mark
her, not the half formed lie he’d told himself--that it would make it easier to
find her later.  In his mind, she was already his mate.  He had only had to
seal it with his mark.

            He dismissed those thoughts.  He wasn’t in love
with her.  He never had been.  That was only part of the mind fuck.  He’d
lusted for her.  He didn’t even feel that much any more.

            Not much lust, anyway.  Nothing he couldn’t
handle.

            All he wanted to do was to give her a taste of
what they’d put him through, just enough to make it as impossible for her to
ever forget as it was for him.  Once he’d toyed with her a while, she’d be
begging to tell him where that son of a bitch was and then she could go to hell
for all he cared.  Living with it would be more torture for her than a quick
death.

            But living with the expectation of death was only
a part of what he’d had to endure and she was going to get a good taste of it
before he let her go.

            Let her think he meant to kill her.  Let her get
a good taste of what it was like to be tied up and treated like an animal. 
Before he was done, she would hate him as much as he hated her.

            And that was what he wanted.

            He felt so nauseated at the idea that he thought
for several moments that he would be sick.  It pissed him off even more.  He
had a weakness for the woman.  He could deny it all he liked.  That wasn’t
going to change the situation.

            One way or another, he was going to get the
information he wanted out of her, though, he decided grimly.  If she decided to
make it easy on herself … he would just wash his hands of her and call it a
day.  The harsh truth was that getting what he needed out of her was probably
going to be more hellish for him, or as much anyway, as it was for her.

Chapter Five

            Jesse thought he’d braced himself for what came
next.  The moment he stepped into the room with her, though, her delicate scent
hit him like a ton of bricks.  It made no difference that fear laced it, that
he could see the uneasiness in her eyes.  There was just a trace of desire in
it, as well, and that was all it took to send his own libido into overdrive.

            Gathering his wits with an effort, he moved to
the drawer where he’d placed the device and removed it.  Her eyes widened when
he held it up and flipped it on.

            “What are you going to do with that?”

            He frowned, studying the device.  “It took me a
liddle while to come around to this.  Thing is,
chère,
part of what made
it so hellish in dere for me was that I was determined not to give them a part
of me and they was determined to git it.

            “Now wid you, it’s different.  There’s only one thing
you can give up that I want.”

            “I don’t
know
where he is!  I told you I
didn’t!” Erin exclaimed, staring at the tubular shaped object with a mixture of
dread, embarrassment, and revulsion as he settled on the bed beside her.

            “I’m thinkin’ if you’re still singin’ the same
tune come mornin’--well maybe you don’.”

            She jumped as he stroked the thing along her neck
and down to one breast.  The vibrations from the device sent a surge of
sensation through her.  Her nipples puckered as blood surged into them.  She
held her breath, trying to focus on anything other than what he was doing,
fearful that her body was going to give her away at any moment.