Page 16 of Prey

“Mine.”

Footsteps from the kitchen, and Damon appears in the doorway with a glass of water, takes in the scene, then takes in me, then takes in the woman over my shoulder. His pale eyes sharpen with interest and a flicker of amusement.

“She’s not one of ours.” He says it slowly, eyes moving over her. “I’d know the face. So you went out, off the books, and came back with a woman.” His head tilts. “That’s not like you.” A beat, the amusement sharpening. “She’s pretty, though. Sharing, or is this a solo thing?”

“No.”

The word comes out harder than I intend. Flatter. Like a door shutting.

Damon raises an eyebrow.

The feeling spreading through my chest is foreign enough that it takes me a full second to identify it. Possessive. The word surfaces like a word dredged from the depths of the ocean, and I don’t know what to do with it. I hold her closer and walk past them both toward the corridor.

The elevator to my quarters requires my thumbprint, a six-digit code, and a retinal scan.

I shift her weight to free my right hand and press my thumb to the panel. The scanner reads it. Then I key in a code. The light sweeps across my eye. The door opens.

My quarters are what they are—functional, minimalist, the bed made, and nothing on the surfaces that doesn’t serve a purpose. I don’t stop here. I cross straight to the far wall, to the second elevator panel set flush with the concrete, nearly invisible unless you know where to look.

This one requires a different code. A longer one. It’s slower than the others. Heavier doors, reinforced walls. It descends two full floors below the building’s listed basement, the air cooling noticeably as it drops. She doesn’t stir against my shoulder.

The doors open into dim lighting that brightens automatically on a motion sensor, flooding the corridor with low amber light. Climate-controlled. Soundproofed. The walls are poured concrete, twelve inches thick, and beyond them is nothing but earth.

The holding rooms are to the left. Eight of them, each identical. Each with a reinforced door, a narrow observation window, and a keypad entry system keyed to all nine of us. Inside each room: a cot bolted to the wall, a stainless-steel toilet and sink, and a camera mounted high in one corner. No windows. No natural light. No way to determine what time it is.

I push open the door to the first room with my elbow and carry her to the cot.

I set her down carefully and straighten her legs. Her head tips to the side, hair falling across her cheek, and I find myself reaching out.

My fingers brush it back from her face.

I pull my hand back.

She’s unconscious. She’ll be unconscious for another four hours. I have no reason to be standing here with my fingers still warm from touching her.

I’m still hard.

That’s the part I can’t square. I’ve been hard since I kidnapped her, and I’m still hard now, standing at the edge of her cot in a clinical prison cell, staring at an unconscious woman.

Something is wrong with me.

I’ve put people in rooms like this one before—the ones who ran the program, who did what they did to children and slept fine after—and felt nothing but the cold satisfaction of a name accounted for. This woman is objectively attractive—olive skin, dark hair fanned out across the thin pillow, her face slack and open in a way it never is when she’s awake and counting threats. I documented all of it over eleven days. I know the precise shade of her eyes and the way her jaw tightens when she’s scanning a crowd.

I reach down and palm myself through my tactical pants, pressure against the ache, and exhale through my nose.

Then I do something I’ve never done.

I get my cock out. The weight of it in my hand is both a relief and a problem. I look at her—the slow rise of her chest, the curve of her shoulder where her jacket has slipped down, the soft part of her mouth—and I work myself slowly, jaw tight.

Eleven years of acquisitions, forty-three targets, and I have never stood over an unconscious woman with my cock in my hand.

The fact that I’m doing it now tells me something and I’m not sure I like what it tells me.

My grip tightens. The heat of it moves up my spine, and I keep watching her. She’d hate this. She’d hate knowing she was this exposed, this vulnerable, that she’d missed me entirely until it was too late.

The image that surfaces isn’t gentle.

Her on her knees. Those gray-green eyes open, watching me the way they watch everything, except this time there’s nowhere to go and nothing to count but how deep I push into her throat. Her mouth stretched around me, that pretty throat working, those hands that check every lock and every window gripping my thighs because I’ve put them there.