##WARNING This story will contain. Strong sexual content, strong language, dark scenes about human trafficking. ##
Fear instantly overcame my senses. I had been trafficked. They’re selling me to shifters. Shifters paid irresistible money to own human girls as sex slaves. 
**
Everything was shaking all around me as if I was in the back of a moving car. An unpleasant smell that could have woken me from even my darkest dreams filled the air and convinced me that I was wide awake.  Fear instantly overcame my senses.
 Where was I? 
What was I doing here? 
Who took me? 
“Help…” I tried to shout. My torn throat wouldn’t allow it. 
In my mind, images flashed of barbaric shifters standing outside that door. Big, tall and rough creatures that knew no manners and only wanted to claim things. I’d heard stories since I was old enough to understand that they favored pretty human girls and plucked them off the roads as if they were all free for the taking.  
**

Patara tried to move back away from the handsome young man, but he held her firm. Squeezing her chin a little harder to keep her in place. His blue-grey, beautiful eyes looked over her every feature as if he wanted to burn the image in his mind. 
“Would you like me to take you away?” He asked in a husky voice. His words made her skin litter in goosebumps. She couldn’t speak, only nod desperately.          
“And what do you offer me in exchange for your rescue? Would you like to follow me?” 
Slowly, she nodded her head and put her hand in his. 
“Remember your promises,” he said against her ear.  She held her breath. “The last person who betrayed me got to see what his insides looked like before I slit his throat.” 

Captured By The Dragon

I nearly crashed the car when I first saw it. It was still running when I jumped out and ran to see the black spot where my dark house once was. I smelled it from miles away, but I tried to imagine it wasn’t this. I tried to imagine that my home wasn’t gone.


The ash made its permanent mark up my nose and I knew I would never forget the smell no matter how long I lived. It looked like I was standing in a long abandoned graveyard—not the house I had grown up in. Not the house my mother loved even though she had died here.


I looked through the ashes and found bones upon bones. My soldiers? My maids?


No. She couldn’t have been here, I would have felt it in our bond. She wasn’t dead yet. Even though I couldn’t find her, I felt her heartbeat steady somewhere out there.


Chapter 34