Warriors of Poseidon 05 - Atlantis Redeemed

was trying to mind-probe him. Some definite psychic power there.
    “Stay out of my brain,” he growled.
    The man laughed. “You’ll wish it was me in your brain after Litton gets done with you. Crazy bugger is a menace. It really ought to be him locked up in here like an animal, but he’s the one that signs the checks.”
    “Is money all you care about?” Tiernan called out. “You’re willing to torture your fellow human beings for that monster—and all for money?”
    The guards started laughing, but the British one did not. He simply trained that dead, measuring stare on Tiernan. “I’ll do a lot of things for money. Nothing else matters, does it? And if you think your boyfriend here is human, well, I’d guess you’re going to have a very interesting honeymoon.”
    “Yeah, Smitty, if they live to have a honeymoon. Odds are bad,” one of the guards called out, to the loud amusement of his colleagues.
    Smitty, if that’s who he was, aimed that dead stare at the loudmouth, who quit laughing immediately.
    So. This was the one of whom to beware. Brennan carefully noted everything about him. The time of reckoning would come, and soon. Smitty must be first in line to die. He was the biggest threat.
    Smitty walked around the outside of the cages until he reached Tiernan’s cell. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but take your clothes off.”
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    “What?” Tiernan moved away so fast that she nearly backed into the bars. Brennan called out a warning and she stopped, only a breath away from a massive jolt of electricity.
    “You’d survive it,” Smitty told her. “Once.”
    Brennan found that he was cursing; a steady, virulent stream of ancient Atlantean that should have singed the flesh off the man’s bones. He switched to English. “Touch her and die. I will hunt you down, peel the skin from your body, and eat the beating heart from your chest if you touch so much as one hair on her head.”
    Smitty’s head jerked up at the icy menace in Brennan’s voice, and he, too, seemed to mark Brennan as the one true threat in the room. “I don’t respond to threats, and I don’t hurt women,” he said flatly. “But these morons almost certainly didn’t check you two for weapons, and I’m not going to wake up dead because your fancy piece there slipped a switchblade in my carotid artery, the way she did to that idiot upstairs.”
    “Carotid artery?” Tiernan repeated, and her face drained of all residual color until she resembled a ghost or, worse, a vampire.
    Smitty grinned, displaying large, crooked teeth. “It’s the artery—”
    “I know what it is,” Tiernan shrieked, an edge of madness in her voice. “I didn’t do it, though. I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean it.” She abruptly sat on the floor, pulled her knees up to her chest, and dropped her head down on them. “I’d like this day to be over now,” she whispered, but Smitty heard her.
    “Right. You can get some sleep in a few minutes, but first I want those clothes,” Smitty said, producing a large and deadly looking gun from somewhere. “Do it now, or I’ll shoot your boyfriend in the leg.” He cast a dispassionate glance over at Brennan. “You’re next, cupcake, so you may as well strip down now.”
    Brennan’s rage consumed him, and he hurled himself at the bars, desperate to get at Smitty.
    The jolt from the high voltage seared through him, knocking him back several feet.
    “Brennan. Brennan!” Tiernan was standing up now, pulling her shirt over her head. “Stop. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. We just need to get through it.”
    He stood there, his body shuddering with the force of the electrical shock and the fury, fighting to control himself, but when he raised his head, gasping for breath, he met Tiernan’s gaze and the connection between them locked into place with an almost audible snap. He’d seen inside her soul, and he knew what she needed now.
    She needed him to be in control—for her. There was no way in the nine hells he’d let her down.
    The fury cooled to ice, and he nodded. “Yes. None of this matters.” He yanked off his own shirt and then stripped out of his jeans as Tiernan did the same. The sight of her, trembling in her Atlantis Redeemed – Warriors of Poseidon 05
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    undergarments, triggered his rage again but he simply funneled it into the ice, to be carefully preserved for later. For when he fought his