Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“Thorn slept most of last night and into the day,” I say. “He can keep watch over her.”
“The boy is too soft,” Krall says predictably. “One of us needs to be awake from now on.”
“That will be exhausting. It would be easier and better to restrain her and break her more thoroughly. Another session when we reach Last Stop might help. We can tie her down and have her take our cocks in each of her tight little holes.”
“She’ll be sore from last night,” Krall says.
“Good. She deserves to be sore. Petulant little fuck toy that she is.”
I feel Krall’s eyes slide over to me, and I see the corners of his mouth tighten, his jaw flex just a little. He didn’t like me calling her a little fuck toy. He’s feeling possessive, and probably more than a little paternal. He can’t help it. As much as he wants to be a ruthless asshole, he’s a good guy to his core. That’s a pity, because good guys never see truly bad things coming.
Krall and I share a closer bond because we share a mother. Thorn and our little sister are from her sister. It is a family tree that looks more like a wreath, but a cursed lineage will do what it must to survive.
“She protected us last night,” he says.
I watch her rump move beneath the green dress she’s still wearing. She has a shapely ass. The memory of being balls deep in that snug little hole is giving me great pleasure even now.
“Yes,” I agree. “She did.”
“We owe her the same level of protection,” he says. “She doesn’t know what’s going to be good for her yet, but we can show her a world she has no notion even exists. Did you see that camp where they all lived?”
I did. It was a ramshackle shit hole with nothing to recommend it. An idle king at a dead hearth, surrounded by brides who seemed far too closely related to him to be suitable mates, trading off the daughter of some poor creature who was given to him in the hopes of finding favor.
Tabby’s father plays on his role as the Alpha at the End of the World to full advantage, but there’s nothing really in it for him. Nothing for him to spend his riches on, nobody to lord his power over. He is a haunted, hunted king, and we just took his crown jewel.
He won’t like that. We were supposed to die last night, and she was supposed to return to him with a belly full of pups. He might simply write our disappearance off as us all having perished, but I am certain I felt eyes on us as we packed camp to leave.
“Skor?”
I realize I forgot to reply to Krall.
“Yes,” I say. “It was fucking grim.”
“It was a hole in a rock,” he says. “She deserves more than that. There’s a nobility to her that transcends that origin.”
He’s putting a lot of polite and pretty words on the fact that she’s smart, fuckable, and of course, filled to the brim with magical energy that prevented her from becoming just another frostbitten mangy mountain wolf.
“She’s going to be happy with us,” he says.
By the gods of fang and fur, he is so determined to cast himself as her savior even as he forces her to leave her home against her will. I am aware that I am not a good man. I am not even adjacent to good. I am selfish. I am cruel. I have ulterior motives that make me untrustworthy. But I will never tell myself that I am doing my victims a favor. I am doing myself one.
CHAPTER 5
Tabby
“Is that it? Is that Last Stop?”
There are three squat, low-slung buildings crouching against the sunset, and a sort of spiky building that must be the church. Or maybe the candy store. Thorn has told me all about the various kinds of candy that can be obtained, and I am interested to try some before I inevitably escape.
“This is it,” Thorn yawns.
I pick up my pace, running toward the town. My mates follow in my wake. They are tired, but they are conditioned through battle and stuff, I guess. I don’t know exactly what they were doing before they came to get me, but the fact they wear uniforms makes me think they were doing some war stuff of one kind or another.
Thorn catches up, grabs me by the hand and leads me into town.
One of the buildings says Train on it. There’s metal tracks leading up to it, a and a big snorting metal creature standing outside. It is black and shiny and the size of a… nothing I’ve ever seen before. It looks like a building on wheels in some way. I suppose it could be alive, animated by a working of magic I am yet to experience.