Angel/Hiss (Bayou Heat Box Set Book 7) by Alexandra Ivy, Laura Wright Page A

move off the floor. He’d forced his arm through the bar to hold her hand. He’d stayed like that until dawn, everything from his shoulder down numb.
    “Yes, I have a male,” she said.
    Rarely did the cat inside Hiss attempt to emerge. After all, he was out of the Wildlands, devoid of magic. It wasn’t possible for his puma to be released. But hearing that Gia had been claimed by another had the beast clawing at the walls of his chest.
    “His name?” Hiss asked in a harsh whisper. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to know it—why he needed to know it.
    “I call him Grandfather.”
    It took only a moment to register, but when it did he felt her smile in the dark.
    “Gia…” he said, almost pained.
    “Keep talking,” she urged, her thumb moving over his palm in small circles. “Tell me more about the lilies and the pools, and your cat, and the Wildlands. Paint me a picture, Hiss. Just until I fall asleep.”
    He would. Then he would have to ease his hand from hers and return to his cot. Having the guards find them locked together in the morning would surely be their demise.
    Not that he cared about himself. He was destined for death, the certain path of a Pantera traitor. But not Gia. He was going to make sure she lived…and found a way out of here…found a way home if it was the last thing he ever did.
    “When I was a young cat,” he began, “I foolishly tried to consume one of those lilies.”
    “Oh no,” she whispered, laughing softly.
    “Quiet now, female,” he ordered gently. “Close your eyes. Let me help you sleep.”
    ***
    Gia woke, as she often did, to the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sounds of cage doors groaning open and Pantera being hauled out. The guards always started on Side A. Taking two at a time, while Side B got fed. It had been that way every morning since she’d arrived nearly eight months ago.
    Since she was snatched off the streets of Miami after visiting her cousin.
    Her eyes slid to the cage beside her. He was there, standing in the very center, as he always was, waiting. No matter how weary, how blood-drained he was, he fought them. Sometimes it seemed there was more blood on the floor of his cage than left in his body. Maybe that was why he did it.
    Her gaze moved over him, as curious as she was coveting. He was very tall, and though he hadn’t had much to eat since he’d come to the Sub, he retained most of his thick muscle. His head was skull shaved most days now, but she knew his hair was thick and black. His face was starkly, brutally handsome, and she often wondered what it looked like when he smiled.
    He was nude. The only Pantera who was. She’d seen why a few days after he’d come. Every time he fought the guards, the standard gray sweatpants all the males wore would either get ripped up or bloody or both. Finally, they stopped giving them to him.
    He didn’t seem to care.
    Gia did though. There were female guards, and a few male guards, who stopped to taunt him, stare at his incredible form, threaten him with more than just looking. Though she had no right to claim him in her mind, he was her male. He’d saved her from losing what had been left of her mind. He gave her hope that maybe, just maybe, she would see her Wetlands again.
    He glanced her way then and though he didn’t smile, never smiled, she felt the deep longing—the need to connect—in his stark gray gaze. He was such a tortured male. In deep pain. And she knew it hadn’t just come from being here. He’d been that way when he arrived.
    “Hungry, kitty cats?” The male guard called Dax who serviced their side of the Sub moved down the row with a stack of bowls. Though choked full of supplements, the food was barely palatable. But it was all there was.
    After sliding Hiss his bowl, Dax walked straight past Gia without even glancing her way. Her stomach growled, then rolled.
    “Wait,” she called out, despising how desperate she sounded. “I didn’t get mine.”
    Dax looked over his