Desire Unchained Read Free

the one and only medical treatment facility for demons.

    Shade and Skulk had gone out on a call, an injured vamp at a New York meat packing
    facility. They’d entered the building, but from there, his memory took a leave of absence.

    “Was anyone else brought in with me? A female?”

    “The Umber demon?”

    His heart thundered like a trip-hammer. “An Umber came in with me?” Runa nodded,
    and he didn’t stop to think about how she even knew what an Umber demon was. “Where is
    she?”

    “You sleeping with her?” Her sharp tone cracked in the dank air.

    “She’s my sister, and I don’t have time for your jealousy.”

    “Seems to me you have nothing but time,” Runa said, but her voice had softened. “I’m
    sorry. I don’t know what they did with your sister. They took her away a little while ago.” She
    shifted away from him, and he realized she was at the very end of her chain. “You don’t look like her.”

    He didn’t offer an explanation for the fact that he and his sister were different species,
    and she didn’t ask. Instead, she watched him as he eyed the bars in the door to their cell and
    wondered how sturdy they were. Then again, they could be paper for all it mattered if he
    couldn’t break the chains that tethered him to the wall.

    “Our best chance to escape won’t happen until they come for us,” she said.

    “You said they feed you.”

    “Yes, but they push the food and water in with a stick. They won’t come close.”

    “Who are they?”

    “I think … I think they’re what you demons refer to as Ghouls.”

    Shade’s blood pressure bottomed out. “What? How do you know?”

    “That’s what someone in another cell called them.”

    Ghouls. Not the kind humans feared, the flesh-eaters of lore. No, Ghouls were what
    demons feared—well, second to Aegis slayers, anyway. Ghoul was the name given to
    anyone—demon or human—who kidnapped vampires, shifters, and demons to harvest body
    parts for sale on the underworld black market. The Ghouls had always been vicious, but their
    operation had taken an even more sinister turn in the last couple of years. Now, instead of merely
    taking body parts, they did it while the victim was alive.

    Last year, Shade and his brothers had crippled the operation. Eidolon’s mate, a half-breed
    named Tayla, had helped root out humans who had been secretly working with the demons
    heading the organ-harvesting ring.

    The demon population had enjoyed a few months of breathing room, and then suddenly, a
    couple of months ago, the disappearances and mutilations had started up again, as bloody as
    ever.

    A door at the end of the dark corridor burst open, and the sound of footsteps echoed
    through the dungeon. Shade braced for a fight, but the intruders stopped before they reached the
    cell where he and Runa sat quietly. Waiting.

    It wasn’t until the screams started that Shade truly realized just how much trouble he was
    in.

    Runa Wagner sat on her little pile of straw, listening to the screams of some female as the
    Keepers dragged her away to what would probably be a horrifying death.

    Shade’s rugged, masculine features gave nothing away, such as how he felt about what
    was going on around them, and she carefully schooled her own expression to match. Except
    there was no way she could make her eyes go as flat and cold as his nearly black ones could, no
    way she could make her jaw do that grating, rigid thing that made him appear as if he was
    sharpening his teeth on bones.

    Menace radiated from him, as palpable as the danger surrounding them. He tugged on his
    chains, but discovered, as she had, that they were designed to take more serious punishment than
    either of them could dish out.

    He turned to her, and though his perusal of her body from toe to head was anything but
    sexual, she felt a stirring in places she’d long thought dead. Dead, because he’d been the one to
    kill them.

    “Have they hurt you?”

    “Not since