WolfeBlade: de Wolfe Pack Generations by Kathryn Veque (top 20 books to read .TXT) 📗

of them full of people. The more Gavriella wandered, the more disoriented she became. She tried to find her way back the way she had come, but she just ended up going deeper into the labyrinth of Gomorrah. She had just entered another small chamber when a man grabbed her from behind.

“Come ’ere, girl,” a man slurred. “Come ’ere and give us a kiss, you tasty morsel.”

He was big and smelly. He also had a lot of hair, because when Gavriella put her hands up to stop him, all she could feel was hair.

He was too close, too sweaty, and too nasty.

His mouth clamped down over hers.

Gavriella let out a scream. Suddenly, she was back in the north, in that little village where she had been cornered by men in mail and weapons. They had sighted her like a hunter sights prey, and they had followed her until they trapped her.

And then, she had been grabbed.

As the big, hairy man tried to kiss her, Gavriella was taken back to the worst moment in her life. At the time, she had been shocked and confused. She had lived on the borders her entire life, a peaceful existence, and she had never been fearful when out of her father’s home of Falstone Castle. She had taken weekly trips to town to go to the marketplace or to visit the various merchants. She had lived her entire life with relative freedom and had never feared for her safety.

Until the only incident she’d ever experienced became the biggest event in her life.

Now, the amorous man smothering her brought it all back.

Helpless…

Terror…

Her composure vanished.

Gavriella began to scream and fight for all she was worth. She hit the man in the face, dislodging the bear mask he wore. As he grunted in pain and his hand flew to his nose, which now had a trickle of blood, Gavriella took off running. It didn’t even matter which direction she was running, only that she was.

Only that she had to.

She had to flee.

Dark and angled corridors confused and terrorized her, but she continued to run. She was running wildly, banging into people, smashing into things, but still she ran. She didn’t even know where she was going. Somehow, she ended up in another room where men were drinking heavily; she could smell the alcohol in the air. There was a minstrel playing a harp and a woman singing softly which, given the chaos of the rest of the establishment, seemed oddly out of place.

The chamber had a small alcove off it, only Gavriella thought it was another corridor. She ran into it only to smash into the wall and hit her forehead, which knocked her back. The alcove was apparently another one of those cells where people could go off and do things that were all part of the fantasy world because there were cushions and furs on the floor.

It smelled like innocence lost.

Head spinning and ears ringing, Gavriella ended up on her behind, having fallen on one of the cushions. She could hear gasping, realizing that it was her own. There were tears on her face and she ripped off the mask, tossing it aside.

She was, literally, in hell.

There was no escape.

She could feel something in her left hand, realizing that it was a blanket of some kind. Frightened to death and unable to run any further, Gavriella pulled the blanket up over her head, huddled against the wall, and wept.

She just wanted to go home, but she couldn’t find her way out.

She was going to die here.

CHAPTER FOUR

Andreas hadn’t led a particularly sheltered life. At least, he hadn’t thought so. He’d fostered at some of the most prestigious castles in all of England and he had served, in his youth, with some of the most experienced warlords around. He’d been to York, Carlisle, Manchester and Liverpool, Nottingham, Oxford, Cardiff, and London. Several times. He didn’t think of himself as a country simpleton. Hell, he had even been to Paris and Madrid. Nay, he wasn’t some fool who had never been out of his village.

He’d lived a little.

But given what he had already experienced at this place called Gomorrah, he was starting to feel like an infant who was still in swaddling.

Upon entering the mysterious establishment, they had masks put on their faces and were told that at Gomorrah, every man lived a fantasy. That meant you weren’t to give your real name, nor were you to ever remove your mask. This was a place with no names, no past, and no future. A man, or a woman, could do as he, or she, pleased. Nothing was off limits.

Andreas was about to see just what that meant.

It wasn’t just the lavish food that impressed him. He’d been to plenty of feasts that had been far more lavish and better attended, although he had to admit that there were dishes presented that even he had never seen before. He’d managed to taste quite a bit of it before Theodis had dragged him off. Then, they had passed by the cells where prostitutes were doing what prostitutes did and men were enjoying every minute of it.

After that, they’d moved into a rather large chamber that was filled with people who were dancing to very good music. But it wasn’t so much dancing as it was publicly fondling one another. Sure, they were dancing in the literal sense, but he saw more than one man grab a woman’s breast uninvited or another pull a woman into his embrace so he could suckle on her neck.

It was sexual debauchery without restraint.

As they watched the dancing, they had been brought drinks by a servant dressed in transparent clothing who had served them a heavily mulled wine that, Andreas thought, had something else in it that made his head swim. When he realized that the wine was spiked with something unpleasant, he went for ale that seemed to be free of any kind of stimulant. Tor and