The Black Dagger Brotherhood Read Free Page B

hand. “Did you.”
    As he came in and put the tray down on the bureau where Nalla’s clothes were kept, he didn’t look at his daughter. She, however, knew he was in the room. The young turned her face in his direction, her unfocused eyes pleading, her chubby little arms reaching for him.
    Z stepped back out into the hall. “Have a good meeting. I’m going out hunting.”
    â€œI’ll walk you to the door,” Phury said.
    â€œNo time. Later.” Z’s eyes met Bella’s for a moment. “I love you.”
    Bella hugged Nalla closer to her heart. “I love you, too. Be safe.”
    He nodded once and then he was gone.

TWO
    A s Zsadist came awake in a panic, he tried to calm his breathing and figure out where he was, but his eyes weren’t much help. Everything was dark . . . he was enveloped in a dense, cold blackness that, no matter how hard he strained his vision, he couldn’t see through. He could have been in a bedroom, out in a field . . . in a cell.
    He’d come out of sleep like this many, many times. For a hundred years as a blood slave, he’d woken up in a panicked blindness and wondered what was going to be done to him and by whom. After he was free? Nightmares caused him to do the same thing.
    In both cases it was such bullshit. When he’d been the Mistress’s property, worrying about the who and the what and the when hadn’t helped him. The abuse was inevitable whether he was faceup or facedown on the bedding platform: He was used until she and her studs were sated; then he was left to lie degraded and leaking, alone in his prison.
    And now, with the bad dreams? Waking up in the same terror he’d been in as a slave just validated the past horrors his subconscious insisted on burping up.
    At least . . . he thought he was dreaming.
    True panic hit him as he wondered which dark owned him. Was it the dark of the cell? Or the dark of his bedroom with Bella? He didn’t know. Both looked the same when there were no visual clues to decipher and only the sound of his pounding heart in his ears.
    Solution? He’d try to move his arms and legs. If they were unchained, if they were not shackled, it was just a case of being caught in his mind’s choke hold once again, the past reaching out through the graveyard dirt of his memories and grabbing him with bony hands. As long as he could shift his arms and legs through clean sheets, he was okay.
    Right. Move his arms and legs.
    His arms. His legs. Needed to move.
    Move.
    Oh, God . . . damn you, move.
    His limbs didn’t budge, and in the paralysis of his body the clawed truth ripped through him. He was in the damp darkness of the Mistress’s cell, chained on his back, thick iron cuffs keeping him on the bedding platform. She and her lovers would be coming for him again, and they would do to him whatever they wanted, staining his skin, soiling the inside of him.
    He moaned, the pathetic sound vibrating up from his chest and breaching his mouth like it was relieved to be free of him. Bella was the dream. He lived in the nightmare.
    Bella was the dream. . . .
    The footsteps approached from the hidden stairwell that ran down from the Mistress’s bedroom, the sound echoing, getting louder. And there were more than one set on the stone steps.
    With an animal’s horror, his muscles grabbed and pulled against his skeleton, fighting desperately to get loose from the dirty binding of flesh that was about to be fondled and invaded and used. Sweat broke out on his face, and his stomach seized, bile marshaling an assault up his esophagus to the base of his tongue—
    Someone was crying.
    No . . . wailing.
    A young’s cry sounded out from the far corner of the cell.
    His fight stalled while he wondered what an infant was doing in this place. The Mistress had no offspring, nor had she been pregnant during the years he had been owned by her—
    No . . . wait . . . he had brought the