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)
Yariela was the only person who’d hugged and openly taken care of her after Soleil—quiet and withdrawn and crushed by grief—became part of SkyElm. Others had been nice to her in secret, but they’d been too weak to stand up to the dominants in public—and the dominants had all followed her grandfather’s lead. He had been their alpha, after all.
A much younger Monroe had been his right hand back then.
Soleil had never blamed the ones whose care was given only in secret. Their pack had been broken long before the day their blood stained the snow. But they’d still been her pack, still been her family—and she would not rest until she knew what had happened to them.
She hadn’t heard the click of a lock when Tamsyn left the room, but she knew there had to be a guard out there. As the healer had pointed out, Soleil was a dangerous unknown. Which left the window to the right. Before she explored that option, however, she got out of bed and checked out the other door in the room. As she’d expected, it went to the bathroom: the sink was to her left, the shower just beyond it, and the toilet in a private cubicle to the right.
A fluffy blue bathmat lay in front of the sparkling glass of the shower partition.
Someone had put a fresh set of clothing on the small vanity that held the sink. Fingering the material, she saw that it was stiff, new. She’d expected—and would’ve been happy—for it to have been used, from the stores the pack kept for members who found themselves coming out of a shift naked. Every pack kept such a stash of clothing in various places where packmates might gather.
Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to risk her cat acting out. There was no way to completely wash out the scent threads of a pack from clothing that was worn by packmates on a regular basis. Those threads were often a thing of comfort. But Soleil wasn’t pack. She was an intruder.
On top of the jeans, T-shirt, and sweatshirt were sealed packs of underwear.
There was no reason for her not to take a shower. Any escape attempt would have to be under the cover of darkness.
That in mind, she stripped and stepped under spray as hard as she could make it, so that it pummeled her skin. When she closed her eyes, she expected to see the dead, or the chaos from yesterday. What she saw were stars against velvet black. An endless sprawl, lovely and haunting and overlaid by a silvery web that emanated from a single dark star.
Wonder whispering through her veins, she found herself drawn to the dark star devoid of light. She should’ve been afraid. After all, what sat at the center of a web but a spider? Yet this dark star, it wasn’t using the web to entrap people. It was doing something else to the stars hooked into the web. It was—
The water cut off.
Blinking it out of her eyes, she looked at the control panel and saw that it was set to eco-mode. She could’ve restarted it, but she was changeling, understood what it was to care for the land on which she stood. So she got out, clinging to the beautiful image that had bloomed in those moments where she’d expected only pain, only horror.
Suspicion had her scowling. It was Ivan. Of course it was. He was looking after her exactly as he’d threatened.
Cat and woman, both of them snorted … but she wasn’t mad. Not when the result had been that haunting scene that had made her forget the blood and the grief for a pulse of time. She did wonder how he was doing it. Then again, the man had literally brought her back from the dead. What connection did that create? What bond did that build?
Her cat prowled inside her, missing him.
Mine, it thought again, and the human side of her unbent enough to admit that he was both wildly pretty and stubbornly courageous. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d ever be comfortable with the label, but he’d been a hero on that street, holding the line under incredible pressure. And the intensity in those pale eyes …
A little shiver rippling over her skin, her body having woken from a long, numb sleep. It wasn’t that she hadn’t met other men over the past months. She had. Some of them had even hit on her. She’d had zero reaction to them; no desire and no anger. Just a physical and emotional blankness.
Neither had ever been an option with Ivan.
But she couldn’t think about her fascination with the deadly Psy who’d found her broken body in the snow, didn’t have time to figure out if her cat’s reaction was some kind of strange imprinting.