Page 54 of Claimed
He was right for most of them.
And those that weren’t—he swung around and faced off against three men, all of them reeking. One had picked up a length of pipe from the drive and lunged at him, swinging hard. Stefan neatly sidestepped the attack but not before the man who’d been defending Nicki lunged forward as well, blocking the pipe with his arm and stumbling back, shaking his head. Their attacker lunged again. Stefan decked him, hard, dropping him to the ground. Then Stefan picked up the pipe and swung it against the second and third men, who suddenly no longer seemed as interested in Nicki. Instead, they turned on their heels and ran from him, as he turned back to Nicki.
Only she wasn’t alone.
A wild-haired, darkly tanned man leaned over her, pawing at her body, speaking to her in raw, guttural gasps. Stefan’s gaze turned white with rage. He rushed forward, knocking the man back off Nicki.
“Hurt—!” the man said in English, though his accent was thick with a Middle Eastern inflection. “She’s—hurt!”
The garbled voice suddenly became clearer, and Stefan stayed the fist that had been poised to smash into the man’s face.
He blinked and stared, too stunned at what he was seeing to process it.
But his fog was cleared away as the man reached forward, grabbing his arm to pull him forward.
“Hurt!” Prince Aristotle Andris cried again, still in English, his voice barely a rasp as he pointed to the crumpled Nicki. “She passed out I think.”
Stefan spun to Nicki. While he’d been sure she’d been moving before, now she lay silent on the ground, her face slack. He pulled her up into his lap and growled to Ari. “Help me.”
Forty-One
Nicki jerked awake so violently her entire body convulsed. Her eyes snapped open as she took a swing at the man hovering over her. “Get away from me!”
“Nicki.” Stefan’s voice was intense, focused. It calmed her immediately, though she couldn’t understand the events going on around her. “You passed out. The mission is solid. You’re safe, but we have to get out of sight. I’m carrying you. Allow me to pick you up. Allow me. Stay awake.”
Distantly, Nicki sensed Stefan picking her up but she couldn’t control her arms or legs. He lifted her and there was another man beside him, both of them running as he clasped her to him. She filled her lungs with deep, blessed air. Then Stefan was jogging hard right and she felt cool stone beneath her legs as he laid her down again.
“No! I need to sit up—to sit up,” she gasped. “To breathe!”
That last part seemed to shake him, and Stefan crouched in front of her, allowing her to sit up while he whipped his phone out of his suit and held it to his ear. He spoke rapidly to someone, ordering them to come pick them up, and she blinked around, trying to make sense of where they were. It lookedlike a park and she frowned. “We’re still on the hill? Near the warehouse?”
Her gaze wandered to the man standing beside them, watching them both with a puzzled frown. “Is that?—”
Stefan’s sharp glance quieted her voice in her throat. “Tamas is coming. We’re heading back to the boat.” At her nod, he turned to the shaggy man beside them. “This is Ryker Stavros. He was a prisoner in that warehouse, but he is Oûrois. We’re bringing him home.”
“Ryker…” Nicki blinked as the man turned to her, an abashed smile on his face. He looked like a vagrant, but she didn’t care. He alone out of the wild men had stopped and stood with her—with her, not against her. “You helped me, back there. Defended me. Thank you.”
“Those men—they are not bad men.” The man spoke English, but his voice sounded rusty with disuse. Stefan stared at him with open admiration, however, and she suddenly knew. This man might think his name was Ryker, might have told Stefan that. But he wasn’t Ryker.
This was Crown Prince Aristotle Andris.
“They were penned up like animals,” the prince continued in his ragged voice. “The only relief was the work we did with the dirt and the trucks. It wasn’t hard work, but it was constant, and they—some of them—had families. They could never work off their debt. It always climbed higher. Some were sick, but they couldn’t get better, not in here. And some were merely unlucky.” His smile turned self-deprecating. “I was that. It was a very dark place, that warehouse. There were very dark things that they kept further in the back. We didn’t see them, but…we heard them.”
“Oh, right.” Nicki nodded, then rounded her eyes at Stefan. “One of the others warned me about monsters there. He seemed pretty sure that’s what they were.”
“Someone spoke to you about them?” Stefan asked sharply. He swung to Ari. “Did you see them?”
“Monsters…” Ari swayed on his feet, then stumbled a bit as he put a hand to his head. “I think…I mean I saw…”
Just as quickly, Stefan seemed to change his mind. “Never mind. Don’t try to push your memory. We’re taking you home.”
Ari stepped back, blinking, his thoughts just that quickly derailed. “Home?”
“I know your family.” He gave Ari an encouraging nod. “Oûros is not so big that we don’t notice when our countrymen go missing, my friend. You were missed. You have a family.”
“A family.” The idea appeared foreign to Ari, and he stared at Stefan with an earnest confusion that almost made Nicki forget about the monsters. Except Stefan had totallynotseemed surprised about them, which meant he was totallygoingto be explaining that piece of crazy as soon as she got him alone.
“You’re not my family, yet you came here?” Ari asked, his words slurring a bit. “Why?”