Where is he? Please tell me he is alive. Please, Donovan, punish him if you must, but do not kill my son. Please, let him live..." For the first time in her life, Scarlet had been reduced to begging.

And Donovan seemed to be relishing seeing her in this state. She did not enjoy providing him with the pleasure of watching her squirm, but she was too tired to be proud. Too well-hypnotized to be disrespectful. And too desperate to know what had become of her son to care much at all about anything else.

Donovan threw a pointed glance at Scarlet to silence her. "Do not worry," the vampire said, imitating a tone of soothing reassurance. "Your son is alive. And it is my intention to return him to you.

But Caius is quite insistent that the boy must first be punished. Thoroughly."

Scarlet hadn't seen her son since he had opened his big mouth and offended Caius by asking about the vampires' daytime resting place. Lucas should have known that was an off-limits topic; his mother still couldn't decide if the young man had only let those words slip carelessly, or if he'd actually thought he would get an answer... an answer that he could then somehow use to betray the vampires to Alexander.

At least they had not killed her son in front of her.

That had been her greatest fear. But Donovan, seeming rather pleased to have the opportunity, did bite Lucas quite brutally and feast on his blood while she was forced to watch. And then Lucas had been deemed an enemy and hauled away, and Scarlet had returned to their double suite on the fourteenth floor of the now eerily quiet luxury hotel alone, tortured with dread over her only child's unknown and surely doomed fate. "Is he still here?" she asked. "In the hotel? Please tell me the truth, Donovan. Will I ever see my son again?"

The vampire whispered out a breathless chuckle, shaking his head smally. He reached out and stroked Scarlet's hair. The light touch sent a shiver down her spine.

"Scarlet, Scarlet," he muttered, his tone playfully reproving. "Yes, your son is in the hotel. But here's what I wonder. Why do you doubt I would be honest with you? Hmm? What reason would I have not to tell you the truth? In all the years that we have known each other, have I ever lied to you, or not kept my word?"

"No," she answered quietly.

"I don't suppose you have been dishonest with me?" the vampire drawled. "Are you keeping secrets, my dear? Telling lies, or half-truths?"

"No," she said again, this time more forcefully. "Of course not. What would I have to lie about?" Donovan narrowed his dark eyes and stared down at the werewolf queen challengingly.

"Where do we go from here?" she asked, breaking a long, tense silence. "What's next?"

To Scarlet's surprise, the vampire's pale face broke into a wide, toothy grin. "We only go up from here.

Next, we kill that detestable stepson of yours, and win this war."

"I have told you everything that I know." Scarlet was back to pleading. "I have tried to be helpful. To prove myself. If there is anything more that I can do, I will do anything..."

Donovan's smile held, his lips curling even more at the sound of her whimpering. He stroked her throat upwards with a single finger and lifted her chin. " Hush, my dear. We have a new plan for Alexander.

All you need to do now is be patient."

The steady, constant drip, drip, drip of water leaking onto stone somewhere in the chamber was a special kind of t*****e.

The irritating sound was one thing. The drips were timed perfectly to match the seconds passing. It was like a ticking clock. A ticking clock counting down to imminent death.

But the drip was also a cruel, relentless reminder of Lucas's desperate thirst. His tongue, textured like sandpaper, felt hard and foreign in his mouth. His throat ached; it was as dry as the desolate desert sands that stretched for hundreds of miles in all directions from this hellhole where he was being held captive.

The vampires were keeping Lucas and the other werewolves down here alive, providing just enough food and water each night for survival... so that they could keep feeding on them.

Lucas had only been here a few days. He'd been fed on three times. Some of the others, though... they had been here much longer. Their clothing was in various stages of tatter, their abused bodies thin from blood loss and starvation. Lucas shook himself awake, his sit bones shivering painfully against the rough stone floor.

Or had he been asleep? The dripping sound rang in his ears and his mind whether or not he was conscious. It was the ticking clock counting seconds when he was awake, and a metronome clicking in the background of his dreams.

Yes, he must have been asleep. He didn't remember leaning back against the wall, with a jagged stone digging right into the base of his spine.

He must have passed out and slunk back into this awful position, from which he slowly shifted forward now, wincing at a sharp, stabbing pain between his shoulder blades.

The sound of Lucas's chains dragging across the hard, uneven floor echoed throughout the quiet chamber as he shifted his weight, trying to find a seated position that was a little less painful.

A whimper sounded nearby. Lucas looked to his leftand discerned the shape of two figures huddled together against the wall about ten feet away from him. The prisoners had both stretched to the furthest reaches of their chains in order to get close enough to touch each other. "Shh," came a hoarse, quiet voice. "Shh. The sun is rising. They're gone."

The whimpering quieted gradually.

There were no windows in this basement prison, but it was poorly insulated and from just the few top inches of the underground chamber leaked in tiny, blessed slants of sunlight in the daytime. In this moment, pitch dark was just starting to give way to daylight, revealing the lumpy shadows that populated the long, cold room. They were all starting to move and sigh and groan in pain. Lucas had begun a chain reaction, waking the two prisoners on his left, whose whispers in turn roused others from their fitful slumbers. Who knows how much later it was when the prisoners started talking more, mumbling to each other quietly. It was full light by then. Lucas might have dozed off again. Or maybe not. The seconds ticked on endlessly all the same, the dripping water like a hypnotist's acoustic trick, making his mind a blur... until....

"It is him. It's the prince -the younger one.

Scarlet's son. It's him!"

Lucas's mind snapped to attention. Someone was talking about him. He turned toward the whisper, looking for the speaker.

"Oh, my gods," came a gravelly, grumbly man's voice from about the same general direction. "It is."

"Isn't his name..." whispered the woman uncertainly.

"Lucas," said the man, gaining volume.

Lucas found the source of the voice and met the man's gaze. It was dim in the chamber still, but the man happened to be sitting in the vague glow of a nearby errant sunbeam, and Lucas could see his face clearly.

The man's eyes were dark and glaring. His frame was big but he was skinny from malnutrition, with sagging skin on his shoulders and hairy chest. He looked about fifty years old.

He might have actually been much younger, though. Torture and starvation had a way of making people look very old, Lucas was learning. "You're the prince, aren't you?" Now the man was talking directly to Lucas and practically shouting, his deep, rasping voice filling the room. "The son of the fugitive queen? And you're here. Why? It's true, isn't it-you really are traitors! You were working with them!"

"My mother," Lucas interrupted, shocked at the crackling sound of his voice. "She is the traitor.

She's the one who worked with the vampires."

"You left when she did," the woman whisper-shouted. That seemed to be as loud as she could vocalize. "That's what they said on the news. You're both wanted for war crimes."

"Yeah, I fled," Lucas croaked. "But I had no choice, she'd already done what she did and I'd just be blamed if I didn't-"

"But did you know?!" demanded another voice, a louder female voice, from closer by.

Lucas swiveled his head and easily spotted the woman as she continued to rage.

"Did you know she was going to do it?" The skeletal woman's hair was so filthy with grime and dried blood, he could not tell what color it would be clean. Her neck and chest were a mess of gruesome bruises and scabs in various stages of healing. "You could have told Alpha Alexander! You could have stopped her!"

The woman thrashed against her chains as if she wanted to get up and come running at Lucas and fight him. She bared her teeth, looking absolutely animal, and like she hated him. Like she would shift and attack and kill him in a second flat if her limbs were not chained to stone.

"They killed my baby!" she shrieked. "They killed my little girl! They ate her!"

"Yeah!" came the man's voice again. "You coulda stopped her! If you knew and you didn't stop her, you're as guilty as she is! You're a traitor to your own kind!"

"Traitor!" came yet another hoarse, pained voice.

"How could you?!" Now the shouts were all around him.

"Traitor!!!"

"TRAITOR!!!"

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