TWENTY-THREE
ANNABEL
“Please… gods, no. Please…!”
“Saga?” I said, blinking against the shadows draped from every corner of this dark, dank place. There was a smell to it, not blood or urine, but just as acrid.
Fear. It was the smell of fear.
The hairs on my nape came to attention. My chest clenched as a moment later, a scream, raw and jagged, shattered the cadence of heavy sobs I’d been following for what felt like an eternity.
It was that pain that had led me here—Saga’s pain. I didn’t understand it. I hadn’t the first clue what had happened. All I knew in the very mantel of my bones was that one of my mates was is agony, and it was the kind that would have killed a lesser man by now.
That was what he was begging for, in fact—death. An end to his suffering. To a torment neither of
