My heart pumped deep in my chest and I groaned, lifting my head to stare at the guard who had carried me. He was good looking in a He-Man sort of way: all bulging muscles and brown eyes, staring at my chest. I looked down to where he was gawking and saw that the buttons of my shirt had come undone—almost to my navel. Blushing, I glanced at the other three men and saw they were staring at the same thing, their faces tight with lust. My chest was only covered in a bra. With trembling fingers, I pushed the edges of the shirt back together because the buttons were now gone.
I backed three steps away from them as the four men took a step forward in my direction. Holding my arm out behind me, I swiped my hand around trying to find something to protect myself with, but only found the door. The door that was too heavy for me to open.
“What’s going on here?” a female voice demanded, authority deepening the tone.
The men stepped away from me, grumbling in disappointment as they glanced up at the woman who was standing on the floor above at the top of a stairway. When she glared at them, lifting her upper lip to show a hint of fang in a snarl, they stared down at their shoes as if they had been caught misbehaving like little boys. As much as four hulking men could have been mistaken for little boys.
“Take her up to a fourth-floor cell in the women’s section. Make sure she’s in her own cell. I have someone to introduce her to,” she instructed, her eyes narrowed to blue lasers as she glared at them.
They nodded up and down vigorously as they murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” over and over.
She gave them one more sweeping glare before sailing back the way she had come.
The guards now glowered at me as if what had transpired was my fault and not theirs for being horny assholes. The one who’d greeted us swiveled around muttering, “Follow me.”
One of the other three guards grabbed me by my arm again, yanking me hard enough to make me stumble. Good thing I wasn’t human or they would have broken me by now. Another of the guards had slipped on a pair of heavy gloves—where he got them, I hadn’t noticed—to tug on the chain leading from my wrists to the shackles on my ankles. Every tug brought blinding pain as the silver in the shackles burned my skin.
I hurried as fast as I could, but I had to take short steps due to the damn shackles. Instead of hauling me up four flights of stairs, we turned right toward an elevator. One of the men touched a button and a grinding noise assaulted us. As we waited, I glanced around me, but it was as silent as a tomb except for the thudding noise in the distance. The men looked everywhere but at me. I was invisible again.
A thump, and the doors whooshed open for us to enter. The guy with the gloves tugged on my chains until I moved forward following him into the box. I had never been in an elevator before. I had heard about them, and now knew what being confined in a coffin felt like. Clanging and clanking didn’t give me a lot of confidence that this contraption would make it up four floors, so I curled my hands into fists and counted off the seconds in my mind.
“In two hundred years this thing hasn’t broken, so I don’t imagine it will this time. This elevator isn’t the worst of your problems… it’s the least right now.” The vampire holding my chains grinned at me without amusement, his yellowed teeth and bad breath making me try to edge myself away.
“The guards always get a taste of the newbies. We’ll have a party tonight.” He wet his lips as he stared at me hard enough to make me feel his gruesome touch. A smirk touched his lips as he continued his unkind amusement with a bark of laughter.
I shuddered at the visual touch of his eyes as they roamed over me again, then all four men’s eyes swept my body. The one wearing the gloves yanked the chains until I was flush against him, and he ignored the sting of the silver reaching through our clothes.
“It might be fun to remove these chains and release you, little rabbit. A chase before we feast might be fun.” His head lowered until his mouth hovered near my ear, his foul breath wafting to my nose.
Wrinkling my nose, I said: “And all four of you should brush your teeth and shower first. True advice.”
They burst out in loud guffaws as the elevator ground to a clanging halt—the doors creaked, crawling open. I exploded out of the coffin like I was lit on fire, taking great gulps of air and thankful to be out of that tiny space with those massive men. I continued running, forgetting about the shackles in my hallucination of being free and fell against a wall, bruising my back and barely saving myself from falling to the floor.
Continuing to laugh at my expense, they gathered my chain, dragging me along to my cell. We passed a multitude of cells stacked floor by floor, housing both men and women. They took me to one on the end that was a bit larger than the other cells with a bed. An actual bed that none of the others had.
Inside, a man turned, and I gasped as Virel revealed himself to me. I rushed to the bars of the cell, my hands reaching to grip them when Virel yelled, “No!”
I jumped away, holding my hands out to the side, palms up, positive my eyes were wide with fright.
“Scarlette, these bars have silver in them,” he said gently. “More than the chains.”
One of the guards, the one
