Angel/Hiss (Bayou Heat Box Set Book 7) (11 page)

Seemingly unaware of thick heat that threatened to choke her, Raphael moved toward the intruder while Angel once again placed an arm around her shoulders, tugging her tight against his side.

“Yes?” Raphael demanded.

The stranger briefly studied Indy before turning his attention to the golden-haired male.

“There’s a human female who we caught trying to sneak into the Wildlands,” he said, his voice a deep growl.

Raphael swore beneath his breath. “Another reporter?”

The newest Pantera shook his head. “She says her name is Dr. Chelsea Young.” A lethal smile curved the male’s lips, emphasizing the scars on his lean face. “She claims she can tell us where to find Hiss.”

HISS
by
Laura Wright
CHAPTER 1

“Hiss?”

“I’m here,” he uttered, his eyelids heavy, his heart nearly dead. “Another nightmare?”

She exhaled softly. “They’re coming all the time.”

Despite the debilitating weakness that lived inside him now, Hiss forced himself from his cot and crawled over to the bars of the cage. Gia’s hand was already through the metal, waiting for him. It felt cold. But everything felt cold down here. It was truly where his soul was meant to dwell.

“Tell me,” he whispered, desperate for the sound of her voice again. It kept him sane. Though Goddess only knew, he didn’t deserve it.

She entwined her fingers with his the way she had every night for the past twenty-two days. He knew it’d been twenty-two because each night before he collapsed, he’d scraped another line into the brick wall of his cage with his fingernail.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he told her. “Ever.”

“My weakness, my fear. I hate it. This isn’t me, wasn’t ever me. I was a water Hunter. Fought an alligator for prey. I hate forcing you to listen to my…”

He gripped her hand so tightly she gasped. Then released it. “Tell me, Gia. Talk to me. Use me. None of us are what we were.”

She was quiet for a moment. He hated when she got quiet. It scared the fuck out of him. When a Pantera got quiet down here it meant they’d either been moved or had perished…sometimes in body, sometimes in mind.

“The dream, Gia,” he pushed, his voice a harsh whisper. Had to be a whisper. Always. Forget about touching—if they were caught talking, they’d be beaten, and then separated. Hiss had seen it happen more than once. Whoever was running this freak show, torture chamber and laboratory wanted no connections made, no emotions shared.

It’s why they’d stolen his mother from him the night he’d first come here. If she truly was his mother. He wasn’t certain. More than once he’d wondered if maybe it was a plant, a fabrication to fuck with him, make him feel mentally unstable. Or maybe it was his imagination. Maybe he
was
mentally unstable.

“When they come to get me, I go with them. I don’t fight.” Gia was talking, telling him her dream. Hiss closed his eyes, let his head fall back against the brick. “I just walk out of my cage and go with them.” She tried to move closer to him, tried to thread herself through the metal bars. He felt her shoulder press against his. “It’s the same room they always take me to, and I’m docile, you know? I don’t fight like I have for the past eight months. I’m hoping it changes how they treat me. I lie down, offer them my arms, wait for the bands—wait for the needles to be shoved into my veins. But they don’t do it. They don’t want my blood.”

His chest tight, Hiss waited for her to continue. He knew where this went. Knew her greatest fear.

“It’s not going to happen, Gia.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m not going to allow it.”

She turned to face him. There were no windows in the Sub. It’s what they called the lowest level of wherever they, and at least ten other Pantera, were being held. The Subterranean Level of Hell. Where they were being used. Drained. Infected. Poisoned. Experimented on. Injected. Impregnated. It was pitch black. He couldn’t see the outline of her body. But he felt her warm breath on his cheek. He turned to face her too.

“How many times were you bled today?” she asked.

“Only three.”

She laughed softly, bitterly. Careful to not let the sound carry. They didn’t want to wake up the others. Although it was common for the rest of the Pantera to lie awake.

“We can’t even summon our cats,” she said. “There’s no strength for either one of us to drawn on. We’re at their mercy.”

“You can draw strength from me, Gia,” he said. “Always.”

“Oh, Hiss…” She played with his fingers. Reveling in his touch, his comfort. His valiant words. Not knowing who he was—what he was. The traitor to his kind. A base-level beast. She didn’t know because she was from a different sect of Pantera, a secret community set somewhere in Florida, from what he’d been able to gather. She didn’t speak of it much. It seemed to pain her to remember. And there was nothing Hiss wanted less than to give her any more pain.

“Tell me something good,” she whispered. “Tell me a story. About your Wildlands.”

My Wildlands
. Had they ever been his? He’d wanted them to be. Back when he’d been a cub, when he had a family, they were. And later when his family had disappeared, when the elders told him—lied to him—about their passing, he’d made some good memories. With friends. All while he plotted against them.

A buzzing started in his head. It came every time he thought about what he’d done. To himself. His family’s name. To all the innocent Pantera.

“Hiss?” Gia whispered, her tone desperate.

Yes. I’m here.
“You speak of your water often,” he began. “But let me tell you of ours. There is a place in the bayou where the water is so warm and so fragrant it lulls you to sleep. It changes you from cat to male at whim. And you let it because you trust it. I would swim for hours in it, floating among the Dyesse lilies, so calm, so peaceful.”

“What are those? The Dyesse lilies?”

“They’re these large, white water lilies. They turn purple when they bloom. And they make our moon purple, too.”

“Really?” she exclaimed softly, and he could almost hear her smile. “Oh, how beautiful. I’d love to see that.”

His gut ached. Not from the hunger that constantly plagued him. But from the knowledge that he would never be able to take her there. He wasn’t welcome. And odds were that he wouldn’t be leaving the Sub alive anyway.

“The lilies have this incredible scent,” he continued. “We believe…”
We
. His nostrils flared. “They have magical properties that create absolute happiness within us, and a kind of sensual euphoria.”

“Oh.”

The word came out breathy, warm, and his lips twitched ever so slightly.

“Did you meet your females there?” she asked tentatively. “In the pool? Among the lilies? Under that purple moon?”

“I have no female, Gia.”
I deserve no female
. “Where you’re from, did you leave a male behind?” It was something he’d wanted to ask the first night they’d ‘met.’ The night she’d been drained of blood so badly, she was having trouble breathing and couldn’t move off the floor. He’d forced his arm through the bar to hold her hand. He’d stayed like that until dawn, everything from his shoulder down numb.

“Yes, I have a male,” she said.

Rarely did the cat inside Hiss attempt to emerge. After all, he was out of the Wildlands, devoid of magic. It wasn’t possible for his puma to be released. But hearing that Gia had been claimed by another had the beast clawing at the walls of his chest.

“His name?” Hiss asked in a harsh whisper. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to know it—why he needed to know it.

“I call him Grandfather.”

It took only a moment to register, but when it did he felt her smile in the dark.

“Gia…” he said, almost pained.

“Keep talking,” she urged, her thumb moving over his palm in small circles. “Tell me more about the lilies and the pools, and your cat, and the Wildlands. Paint me a picture, Hiss. Just until I fall asleep.”

He would. Then he would have to ease his hand from hers and return to his cot. Having the guards find them locked together in the morning would surely be their demise.

Not that he cared about himself. He was destined for death, the certain path of a Pantera traitor. But not Gia. He was going to make sure she lived…and found a way out of here…found a way home if it was the last thing he ever did.

“When I was a young cat,” he began, “I foolishly tried to consume one of those lilies.”

“Oh no,” she whispered, laughing softly.

“Quiet now, female,” he ordered gently. “Close your eyes. Let me help you sleep.”

***

Gia woke, as she often did, to the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sounds of cage doors groaning open and Pantera being hauled out. The guards always started on Side A. Taking two at a time, while Side B got fed. It had been that way every morning since she’d arrived nearly eight months ago.

Since she was snatched off the streets of Miami after visiting her cousin.

Her eyes slid to the cage beside her. He was there, standing in the very center, as he always was, waiting. No matter how weary, how blood-drained he was, he fought them. Sometimes it seemed there was more blood on the floor of his cage than left in his body. Maybe that was why he did it.

Her gaze moved over him, as curious as she was coveting. He was very tall, and though he hadn’t had much to eat since he’d come to the Sub, he retained most of his thick muscle. His head was skull shaved most days now, but she knew his hair was thick and black. His face was starkly, brutally handsome, and she often wondered what it looked like when he smiled.

He was nude. The only Pantera who was. She’d seen why a few days after he’d come. Every time he fought the guards, the standard gray sweatpants all the males wore would either get ripped up or bloody or both. Finally, they stopped giving them to him.

He didn’t seem to care.

Gia did though. There were female guards, and a few male guards, who stopped to taunt him, stare at his incredible form, threaten him with more than just looking. Though she had no right to claim him in her mind, he was her male. He’d saved her from losing what had been left of her mind. He gave her hope that maybe, just maybe, she would see her Wetlands again.

He glanced her way then and though he didn’t smile, never smiled, she felt the deep longing—the need to connect—in his stark gray gaze. He was such a tortured male. In deep pain. And she knew it hadn’t just come from being here. He’d been that way when he arrived.

“Hungry, kitty cats?” The male guard called Dax who serviced their side of the Sub moved down the row with a stack of bowls. Though choked full of supplements, the food was barely palatable. But it was all there was.

After sliding Hiss his bowl, Dax walked straight past Gia without even glancing her way. Her stomach growled, then rolled.

“Wait,” she called out, despising how desperate she sounded. “I didn’t get mine.”

Dax looked over his shoulder at her, his watery blue eyes moving from her face down her body. “Oh, you’ll get yours, sweetheart.”

She shivered in the overlarge black smock that came to just above the knee. It wasn’t all that alluring, but to socially awkward, oversexed guards it might as well be lingerie.

“Why is she not being fed?” Hiss demanded.

Gia turned and gave him a shake of the head.
Don’t
.

He ignored her. He was at the front of his cage, thick fingers wrapped around the bars. “If you’re short a bowl,” he ground out, “she can have mine.”

The guard had finished passing out bowls now, and was making his way back to Gia’s cage. He took out his keys.

“You’re coming with me, sweet thing,” he said, strangely not using her lab name, Ca35.

“Why?” she asked, her insides starting to hum with anxiety. They never took her blood this early.

“Save your questions for the doc,” he said. “Now, are you going to be a nice kitten? Or does Dax have to use the cuffs on you?”

He looked like he really wanted her to act up. He was such a disgusting prick. She glanced over at Hiss. He was at the bars of her cage now, looking as feral and as close to a puma as she’d ever seen him. Her heart lurched. It was glorious. She wished she could see him in his cat form.

A cold, clammy hand wrapped around her wrist. Dax was in her cage, behind her. He shoved her toward the door.

“Don’t touch her,” Hiss snarled, banging on the bars. “Don’t you fucking touch her.”

“It’s okay,” she called back as Dax laughed. “I’ll be okay.”

But as she was being led away, toward the elevators, Hiss’s feral cries continued. They followed her. She could hear him, slamming himself against the bars.
Stop
, she wanted to scream.
You need your strength too
. But he knew, as she knew, that this was no cavy run.

She watched as Dax hit the third button. They always went to two. Never higher than that. Her heart slammed against her ribs.

“Someone’s in heat over you, sweet thing,” Dax said when the elevator door closed. “Can’t say I blame him.”