Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Like Gus St. Claire had a breeding program for the damn things.
He glanced back at the four-top. Yes, the chairs were out of place, but he was the one who had messed them up—so this was normal living chaos he was looking at, not ransacked shit. And as he one-foot-after-the-other’d out toward the open living space, that opinion didn’t change. The colorful collection of psychedelic concert posters from the late sixties and seventies were on the walls in their frames at right angles, none of the glass broken, nothing off-kilter. The TV was set properly on a low-slung table, the couch cushions were undisturbed—
As he tripped on something, he managed to catch his balance by flapping his arms, and when he saw what had caught his boot, he cut the bird stuff and frowned.
The stack of paperwork was fanned out around its staple, as if it had been dropped or thrown. And he might have ignored whatever it was except for the fact that he recognized one of the signatures on the last page with all the notary stuff.
His own.
As Lydia strode through the upper level, he gingerly lowered himself down to his knees. His hand was shaking as he reached out, and he made a mess of the pickup, the papers flip-flopping, fluttering, justifying their need for that staple.
As he started to go through the document, he couldn’t believe what he was reading. So he went back to the beginning and gave it another shot. Because surely this wasn’t what it looked like—
WHEREBY the party of the first part, Catherine Phillips Phalen, does intend to transfer the ownership of the compound “Vita-12b,” its predecessors in development, and all relevant data to Dr. Augustus St. Claire…
“What the fuck…” His eyes continued to sift through the words, the operant meaning refusing to process. “What did you do, Phalen.”
Was this what Gus had been taken for?
As if the condo itself could answer that question, he looked around—and saw what had caught Lydia’s attention. In the midst of a messy pile of unopened mail on the floor by the front door, there was a pattern of dig-deeps in the wall-to-wall carpet and some bloodstains that were turning brown. So whatever had happened had gone down some time before. Like maybe twelve hours ago?
“He’s not here.”
Daniel was careful pivoting in his crouch toward the stairs. Lydia was halfway down them and finally stalled out, her hazel eyes wide, her cheeks windburned and bright red against a base of pasty white panic, her grown-out, blown-out, blond-streaked hair frazzled from the wild ride in. With her gray trail pants, and her black turtleneck and heavy fleece, she was wearing what he thought of as her uniform—and he wished she were covered head to toe in Kevlar.
“Where is he,” she whispered in despair.
For a split second, silhouetted on that staircase, she was all he could see, all he could think about—even with the urgency of what certainly appeared to be a kidnapping at best, a beatdown-and-disappear-forever at worst.
Remember this moment, he told himself. Imprint this and store it with the hoard.
At the end, when things got really bad for him and he was just a flicker of consciousness trapped inside the husk of his body, he was going to need to remember what she looked like. Sounded like. Smelled like.
His beautiful wolven. An evolutionary masterpiece, two sides inhabiting the same body, both human and lupine. A shifter that was very real, instead of some Halloween myth.
A miracle he still did not completely understand, but that he no longer questioned. How could beauty like hers be defined, anyway.
“Daniel… are you okay?”
I love you, he thought at her.
During the frantic ride in, with all his focus on getting them here, he’d slipped back into the black ops soldier he’d once been, and the return had landed him in such a familiar place that amnesia had wiped out reality. Everything was back now, though, from the rolling nausea in his gut to the god-awful wobble that dogged him—to the goodbye that was coming for them, sure as if they were stalked in the shadows, his killer closing in.
Fuck it, his killer was already here, inside of him.
He put up his palm as more alarm hit her face. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
Liar. And yet it was a truth. He was no more worse off than he had been, and when you had terminal cancer, no change was the new getting-better.
“What do we do?” she asked.
For a brief moment, a flare of intention reignited his body, purpose and sharp thinking tingling through him. But it was just a pilot light that flared and faded—
The sound of a vehicle screeching to a halt brought both their heads to the front door, and through a part in the drapes of the window seat, the blacked-out Suburban that had pulled in behind the bike was like a presidential detail rolling up.