Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
A simple but precise explanation. A Psy on a news show had once described the PsyNet as an endless black sea filled with stars. Today, the stars had screamed as they fell into an abyss.
It was a horrifying image.
He turned to pin her with that icy gaze that made her insane cat want to lick him. “You never told me your name.”
“Soleil Bijoux Garcia,” she said, because the time for stealth tactics was well and truly over. “My friends call me Leilei.” She pointed at him. “You can call me Soleil.” Whatever this was, it wasn’t friendship.
“Soleil Bijoux,” Ivan said, as if testing out the name. “Treasure of the sun?”
A stab inside her, her mother’s accented voice singing her a lullaby.
“I’ll call you Lei,” he said.
Her mouth fell open. “You will not. Nobody calls me Lei.” But she frowned, angled her head, almost able to hear the faint echo of a voice that had called her exactly that. It stayed frustratingly out of reach, a phantom memory she couldn’t capture, part of the monthlong black gap in her mind that she hadn’t been able to fill.
If Melati hadn’t told her that Soleil had been visiting just before the massacre, Soleil would’ve never known. But though her friend—a friend she’d made when she was nine and somehow managed to nurture to adulthood—had shown her photographs from that visit to Melati’s Texas town, Soleil’s brain stubbornly refused to remember.
At times, Soleil could swear that her mind didn’t want to remember, as if what had happened during that time would hurt her. Yet that made no sense. Melati had said they’d had a fun time together, though she hadn’t been able to fill in the hours they’d spent apart while Melati put in a little time on her small business.
Was it Soleil’s childhood friend who’d shortened her nickname?
Her cat growled in disagreement.
Frustrated, she left it for now and glanced back at Ivan. “Soleil,” she said again, her eyes narrowed. “You will call me Soleil.”
No shrug from him in answer to her statement, but he might as well have made the motion, the way his expression shifted with utmost subtlety to tell her he wasn’t budging. But what he said had nothing to do with her name. “It looks like DarkRiver’s alpha has arrived.”
“I know.” Soleil had sensed Lucas Hunter long before Ivan spotted him, the animal within her responding to the violent power of a man built to lead a pack. Every tiny hair on her body was standing up, her gut a clenched ball.
Then there he was.
Lucas Hunter, killer of the last surviving members of her pack, crouched down in front of her, his skin a muted gold and his white T-shirt stretched across wide shoulders. His thighs pushed up against the faded blue of his jeans, the black of his hair touching his nape. Eyes of panther green scanned her, the light catching on the clawlike markings that scored the right side of his face. Those markings branded him a hunter, a man designed to bring down even other predators.
That was the moment Soleil accepted that she could’ve never taken him down, that driven by maddened grief, she’d given no thought to harsh reality.
Lucas wasn’t Monroe, weak and selfish and soft from lack of training. Lucas was the epitome of a ruthless alpha. He’d have broken her neck before she put a scratch on him. Because this had never been about a shot in the back—no, she’d wanted to confront him, wanted him to tell her why he’d done a thing so shameful and pointless.
“How badly are you drained, healer?” he said in a deep voice that reached to the innermost core of her changeling heart. “What do you need?”
Her cat couldn’t resist the compulsion that was an alpha’s power. “Flatline,” she ground out.
He wasn’t her alpha, but he was still an alpha, his dominance brutal. She could have resisted had she been bound to another alpha, another pack. But she wasn’t. She was on her own. And a healer on her own could never stand up against an alpha of his strength.
To compare him and Monroe was laughable.
His eyes narrowed, his gaze locking with hers. She wondered if he knew her animal—was that instinct in an alpha? But he didn’t ask her that question, just said, “I can’t transfer pack power to you without a blood bond.”
“I know.” That was one of the gifts of being a healer in a pack—the alpha could speed up a healer’s recovery by sharing with her the power of the pack, a power that flowed in the veins of an alpha.
Yariela had told her about the energy transfer when Soleil first became her apprentice. “You’ll be asked to accept a blood bond when you turn eighteen,” she’d said, her face seamed with the lines of a life well lived. “You can refuse, of course, but why would you when it can help you heal?”