The story could be a lie. “Show me one of them. Prove what you’ve got.” What you’ve done.

“No.” Wyatt didn’t look back this time. “They don’t get out. They never get out.”

They aren’t real. “This is bullshit!” Ryder yelled. “You don’t have them—you’re just trying to get me to cooperate.” He yanked on the chains. Felt more rage building in him. They’d taken Sabine. More experiments. More hell. The chains were embedded in the stone walls. The stone began to crack as he yanked with all of his strength. “I’m not cooperating! I’m going to f**king kill you!”

The door closed behind Wyatt. He’d gone.

Ryder kept pulling at the chains. Pulling . . .

“You can try to kill me.” Wyatt’s voice drifted through the speaker. “But I told you, I’m poison.”

Then they’d both die.

“Now I have to go see about your lovely phoenix. If you won’t cooperate”—Wyatt sighed—“maybe she will.”

Then there was only silence. The frantic beat of Ryder’s heart, and the knowledge that Sabine would be hurt. She’d be killed. And all he could do was sit in this cage and wait.

The rage built within him. Grew. With every second that passed, the man he was lost more and more control.

I can be f**king primal, too.

Wyatt was about to see just how primal the first vampire could be.

CHAPTER SEVEN

They left him alone in his cell for three weeks. Ryder counted the moments as the hunger grew within him. Sabine had tried to help him by giving him blood, but it hadn’t been enough. Wyatt had taken too much from him during all of those long, desperate¸ draining hours.

Need more.

His fangs burned in his mouth. His gut clenched with a hunger that wouldn’t stop, and he began to wonder . . .

When he’d been out, just what had Wyatt done? Taken blood, yes, but had the bastard injected him with something? The hunger was stronger, so much more intense than anything he’d felt before. And it certainly wasn’t the first time that an enemy had tried to starve him.

But it was the first time that he’d hungered so completely for the blood of one person.

Need Sabine’s blood. He was salivating, wanting it—her—so badly. He’d yelled for her. Roared. But the jerks in white lab coats hadn’t come near his cell.

He’d tried to reach Thomas’s mind, and he’d made contact, right before a guard had blasted a bullet into the guy’s head.

So much for Wyatt’s talk about Thomas becoming an experiment. They’d exterminated him quickly enough.

Ryder paced back and forth in his cell. Rage and hunger built. Sabine. He thought of her too much. She was consuming him, just like the hunger. She was—

He heard the faint rustle of footsteps. With his teeth clenched, he whirled toward the observation mirror. Not watching. No one was in there. Ryder stared back at his twisted reflection as a faint odor drifted to him.

His nostrils twitched. That scent . . . “Fire,” he rasped. Sabine? His phoenix?

Then the footsteps were rushing away.

Ryder’s wild gaze darted to his door. The chains were gone. He’d smashed through them. There was a faint click and hiss from outside of his cell. The lock.

He lunged forward.

And a gun lifted. A woman stood in the doorway. Her blue eyes were big and frightened, and her dark hair tumbled around her shoulders. He ignored the gun as his gaze zeroed in on her neck.

Hunger.

“Don’t bite me!” she yelled.

His gaze jerked back up to her face. A pretty face. Pleasing. But . . .

I want Sabine. The woman before him was a means to an end. His ticket out. So he’d bite, he’d feed, and she wouldn’t stop him. Gun or no gun.

“I’m here to help you.”

His eyes narrowed. She sounded as if she meant the words, but he wasn’t buying her line. It was just another one of Wyatt’s games. Another lie. Like the twisted vampire story—primal vampires, his ass. “So says the woman with the gun aimed at my chest.” He tried to keep his voice even so she wouldn’t realize just how much fury surged in him.

She blinked and made the mistake of glancing away from him as she looked at her gun. “Look, that’s just to—”

He ripped the gun out of her hand and shoved her back. His hand fisted in her hair as he yanked her head to the side. The perfect position for feeding. “Hungry . . .” And he was. Starving. But he wouldn’t drain her. His control was there, hanging by a thread. He’d get power from her blood. Enough power to strengthen his body and get out of the pit.