Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
“Us is the people who will kill you if they discover what you now definitively know. You can never tell anybody. You need to disappear from the publishing world.”
I see her face shift as she struggles to come to terms with the very bad news. Her life as she knew it is over, and as the orgasms fade, the reality of that fact is finally starting to work its way through her mind.
“This is how you tell me you’re kidnapping me.”
“You wanted to follow the wolves,” I tell her. “Now you’ve found them. But they are never going to accept you. That scar you wear? That is your fate if they ever find out that you are with me. I will try to protect you, but…”
“Then shouldn’t you just let me go and live my life? They don’t need to know what I know. It can be our little secret.”
I think about that for a moment. I don’t want to ruin her life by dragging her out of it, but I also know that she already knows too much. She’s not going to be able to resist looking for more information. She and I are not going to be able to stay away from one another either.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
A harsh, demanding knock at the door makes us both freeze. That’s bad. Very, very bad.
“Quiet,” I say, pushing her into a closet. “Don’t. Fucking. Move.”
I close the door on her frightened face, glad to see that she seems to understand the urgency of the situation.
Bam. Bam. Crash!
The door flies open under the fist of someone who has no boundaries, and my half-brother Karl walks in. He is tall, dark haired. It’s long and tied back at the nape of his neck. He has a scar running down the left side of his face that goes right through his eye. That eye is milky white. No color in the iris, just a dark little hole in the middle where light still makes it through, but bent and twisted.
“Why are you still here, Gray?”
He doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t even acknowledge the door hanging half off its hinges. He doesn’t care what he breaks. He doesn’t care if he’s rude. Karl can be defined by the singular quality of not caring about anything other than his mission. He’s my father’s favorite son, or was.
“What do you mean?”
“New Orleans wants to know why you haven’t reported in. The research was well over a week ago. There’s been no more discernible material coming out of her direction, right? So why aren’t you back in New Orleans?”
“What are you doing here, Karl?” I answer his question with a question. I don’t like being checked up on, and more worryingly, I know they don’t send Karl for check-ins. They send him when they want someone dead.
“Following up.”
“Alright, well, I’m not a pup, and I don’t need to be followed up on. Do you want to go and grab a drink?”
I want him out of here, before he scents Callie.
But it’s already too late. He leers at me, his canines long and white. Borderline vampiric in appearance, though he’s a hundred percent wolf.
“I can smell it, you know. The sex. The human. The seed. The fact that you’ve been fucking someone here.”
He’s an invasive fucker.
He doesn’t care that he’s being rude and awkward. He doesn’t give a fuck, because he’s as close to a psychopath as the pack will tolerate. It’s not that he doesn’t have any feelings. It’s that he knows how to use them as weapons. They’re scalpels he dissects other people with.
“I’m allowed to fuck, Karl. You don’t own my dick.”
“Wrong,” he says. “I own your fucking dick. I can have your dick torn off and fed to you if I like.”
I want to hit him. Actually, I want to rip him apart. Sadistic, stupid fucking errand boy. His power comes from the fact he reports directly to the Louisiana alpha, and he thinks being born a few months earlier to a different mother, but from the same father, gives him some kind of power over me.
I grew up in a power struggle with this fucker that won’t end because he just won’t end it.
“Alpha wants to see you in New Orleans in two days,” he says. “If you’re not there, you’ll be dragged there.”
“Do you want to go out for a drink or what?” I want him distracted. I want him out of here.
“Yes. Asshole.”
“Good. Then let’s go.”
“Do you have your purse?” Karl smirks at me. God, he’s a fucking dick. But he’s letting me draw him out of here, and that’s all I care about.
We get in the van and we leave, and I know I’m giving Callie a chance to escape, but better she escapes now than I watch Karl do his best to tear her apart. I’d defend her, of course, but it would be brutal and bloody either way.