Throughout the next fifteen or twenty minutes, they stitched his wound, cleaned the others and took a sample of his blood, a full pint. He kept his eyes closed. He couldn’t stand to look at Logan again.
Only when Logan spoke to him did he reluctantly open them again. “I’m going to feed. The doctor will make a small incision on your arm. Just relax.”
A moment of bright pain was followed by the sweet feel of Logan’s lips on his skin. Logan looked down at his dark hair, streaked with lighter shades of brown. He wanted to caress his cheek, to hold him in his arms once more, but he knew that was over. Logan’s eyes fluttered open, and his beautiful eyes sparkled at him. Pain clutched at Ian, and he had to close his eyes again.
Logan finished and told the guards to release Ian so he could stop the bleeding on his wrist. Ian sat up on the table and brought his wrist to his mouth, thinking how Logan’s lips had been there seconds before. He licked at it a few times to stop the bleeding, and stood, swaying a bit.
“When did he eat last?” Logan asked the guards. Ian gave a short bark of bitter laughter, and Logan turned his gaze back to the guards. “Feed him at once, idiots. He won’t be of any use to me if he dies of hunger.” He gave Ian a strange look as he swept out the door, the doctor trailing behind him.
The guards took him back to the same cell, but they left the lights on. In a few minutes they brought back a big plate of some kind of stew and a huge chunk of bread. They threw in a blanket, too, and brought fresh water. Ian was so weak after he ate, he had to lie down. He closed his eyes and thought about Logan for the few minutes he had until the weakness took him under.
The next day, spent in the locked room, only seeing the guards when they brought his food, Ian tried not to think about Logan. The anguish of his betrayal was too great. He wondered again about Marco and Casey and cursed himself for not asking Logan about them. The guards opened the door, but didn’t speak to him, just slid his food inside and quickly locked the door behind them.
The next day they put something in his food. He could tell by the smell and didn’t care. He spent most of the following days sleeping. Two days later the guards came to take him out of the room again. He was taken into a small interrogation room a few doors down. Inside, sitting at a table, was an older man with very short white hair and Logan.
Both men were expressionless, though Logan’s eyebrows raised slightly when he caught his first sight of Ian. His gaze moved up and down his body as if taking stock of his condition. Ian knew he was filthy, bruised, and his clothes were in rags. He could only imagine how he must look. No doubt as bad as Logan had looked the first time he saw him.
The guards pushed him into a chair at the opposite end of the table and securely tethered his arms and wrists behind him, tying them tightly to the metal rails of the chair. Elias Winters got to his feet and walked around to him. The blow, when it came, was sudden. Ian didn’t have time to brace for it. Elias struck him with his fist, in the middle of the stitches on the side of his head. The pain was stunning. Logan was on his feet in seconds, pulling his father away.
“What are you doing?” Logan pulled his father’s arm around and pushed him away from Ian.
“What I’ve wanted to do since I first heard what this filthy bastarddid to you!” Elias’ chest heaved with emotion, and he pushed back against Logan, to strike Ian again. Logan put both hands on his father’s chest and pushed him hard enough that he hit the wall behind him.
“Enough, damn it! Leave him alone!”
Elias straightened up slowly, giving his son a poisonous look. “It seems to me you would hate him even more than I do. Or did you enjoy what he did to you? Turning you into some freakish abomination having to drink blood to live!”
Logan glared at his father. “Don’t be an ass! I hate his guts, but I need him—just like you said—to stay alive. Now sit down and let me handle this.”
Elias gave Ian one more hate-filled look before going back to sit down. Logan turned to face Ian. “Are you all right?”
From what Elias said, Logan had managed to hide their full relationship from his father. He didn’t think Elias would have missed a chance to mention sex between them, in the most derogatory way if he knew. “What do you care?”
He was surprised to see a flush darken Logan’s handsome face. He rubbed a hand over his jaw and sat down next to Ian. “So far the doctors haven’t been successful in creating a synthetic substitute for your blood. It looks as if you’ll be here with us indefinitely.”
Ian stared at Logan and said nothing. Inside his heart beat hard in his chest from being so near, but he couldn’t allow his feelings to show.“And if I refuse to give you my blood?”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do about it. If you won’t allow it, we’ll have to take it from you.”
“What happened to Marco and Casey?Are you holding them too?”
He shook his head. “They escaped.”
“Ran like the coward dogs they are,” Elias interjected.
Ian sagged a little in relief, ignoring the old man. The only smart thing for them to have done was run. He would have hated to think he had been the cause of getting his friends killed. He’d been foolish enough to believe in Logan. He should have known. He should have been able to sense his insincerity and deceit.
He turned his head to gaze directly into Logan’s eyes. “Your doctors better hurry with their experiments. Wolves don’t live long in captivity.”
Logan’s face registered surprise and alarm, worried about himself and how Logan would live if he died, no doubt. Ian turned his head back to stare straight ahead, trying to keep his expression neutral. The guards stepped up behind him, clamped a steel ring around his neck and steel cuffs around his wrists attached to the collar with short lengths of chain before they released him.
“That will ensure you don’t change unless you want to strangle yourself,” Elias sneered.
“Make sure that collarisn’t tight enough to strangle him otherwise,” Logan said.
He gave the word a twist in reminder, Ian was sure, of the one he’d made him wear.
“Logan? Your father wants you in interrogation room threeright away.” Logan gazed at the guard at his door in confusion. Interrogation room? He’d never been assigned to interrogating prisoners, never been trained in it, and had no idea why he was being summoned. Interrogate who?Surely it wasn’t Ian. Ian had nothing to tell them that Logan hadn’t already told them, at least as much as Logan would tell them.Maybe they’d picked up another prisoner. Logan nodded to the guard, hoping it was nobody he had ever met.What if they’d managed to capture Marco or Casey after all?
He closed the door behind him, took a deep breath and headed for the interrogation room down the corridor. The general had put him in a room in this hallway, ones usually reserved for important visitors. Logan had always lived in the enlisted men’s quarters in barracks with little to no privacy. He figured the new accommodations were so Elias Winters could keep his eye on him. No matter what he’d told Elias, the general was suspicious of the relationship he had with Ian. From the second he woke up and realized what had happened, he’d lied his ass off, saying Ian had bitten him, changing him to Werekin, making him dependent on him for his wolf blood, but nothing more. Not that the last mattered. The general hated him for even what he’d admitted to.
When he found the door to the room, he hesitated, taking a deep breath. He had no idea what he would find inside, and dreaded whatever confrontation was about to take place. He swung open the door and froze.He’d heard rumors from the other soldiers, but refused to believe them. The evidence was in front of him—a torture room, plain and simple. Throughout the room were the instruments—a flogging bench, a rack of whips, and an assortment of blades on one wall.Logan’s mind registered them and shied away from what they meant. Yet only one thing grabbed his attention and held it. At the back of the room, a huge X-shaped affair was mounted to the floor. Ian hung from it, his chest raw with whip cuts, blood running to his knees. Naked, his skin filthy and covered with bruises, Ian held himself proudly erect as possible, his glorious body unbowed. His eyes went straight to Logan. The look of hate and anger made Logan’s heart turn over in his chest.
His father startled him by laughing aloud. “The look on your face, Logan. Haven’t you ever seen aSt. Andrew’s Cross before?”
Beside Ian, whip in his hand, was Dawson, his father’s right hand man. He slapped the handle of the cat o’ nine tails against his thigh, impatient to use it more.
Ian’s breath caught in his chest. “What? What are you talking about?”
“I thought you might like a little payback for the bastard who tortured you. You look a little sick instead.”
“You’re damned right I am,” Logan snapped, going back into character. “You’re killing him,and you know I need him to live.”
“No, not killing him, not yet. A tradition from our ancestors to teach those bound to it humility.” He tipped his head at Ian.“These animals can take a lot more punishment than this.” Elias Winters stepped forward and looked Ian up and down with hatred and contempt. “Bastard. Let’s see how you react to more pain and how long it takes you to heal. Sit down, Logan,and watch how a real man takes his revenge.”
Ian was attached to the cross by the collar, his wrist cuffs, and additional cuffs at his ankles, his legs stretched apart obscenely. His heavy balls, the ones Logan had held in his hands and sucked into his mouth, were hanging low between his legs. His magnificent cock, that had been insideLogan’s ass too many times to count, drooped limply. Logan had to hold onto himself tightly not to rip the fucking whip from Dawson’s hand and use it on him.
Ian made no sound or struggle, waiting stoically for more of his skin to be ripped apart by the whip. Dawson drew back his arm,and Logan couldn’t prevent himself from moving. He caught Dawson’s arm and whirled him around to face him.“Stop it, damn it! Do you want to kill him?Look at the condition he’s already in! He won’t survive the beating you plan to give him and then what will happen to me?You’ve made your point! End this!”