Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Another wave of rage, primal with the falcon’s fury. His hands tightened on her biceps and only then did he realize he was gripping her with both hands now. “I can’t hear that name. Don’t say it around me.”
The falcon clawed at him, wanting out, wanting to strike at a foe long dead. “The only reason that fucker didn’t die at my hands is because it would’ve brought the Council’s attention to the clan.” He’d still have gone after him if his grandmother hadn’t managed to calm him down.
“Our vengeance will be against the one who took their lives,” she’d said, her face grim. “The one who helped in the injustice is our unknowing ally—he set the murderer free for us to find.”
He’d held on to that logic because it had been the only thing keeping him sane.
Eleri’s eyes were black now, but they were nothing like Sascha’s. The empath’s darkness had held grief, the black soft with shadows. Eleri’s were an endless nothingness. “He was my mentor; more than that, he was the only paternal figure of any kind I ever had.”
Adam wanted to thrust her away from him, but he couldn’t. That was the problem. “I hate you,” he said, and it was a harsh, grating whisper that hid a heart torn and bleeding. “For showing me what could’ve been only to tear it away so viciously.”
He squeezed her biceps, his talons curling around her but not cutting through. Never cutting through. “Did you know?” She wasn’t changeling, their ways not hers.
“I thought you were the most beautiful being I had seen in all my life,” she said in that flat tone that held none of the wonder in her words. “I didn’t know someone that beautiful could exist.”
Her fingers rising, brushing his jaw. “I felt a compulsion to go to you, to give you something, anything. But you wouldn’t even take a bandage from me.” She pressed her hand over his heart. “I felt another, even deeper compulsion to take your hand and just run, hide both of us. I didn’t even know you and I wanted desperately to keep you. I thought I was going mad.”
Her words scraped away the scars to reveal the throbbing wound she’d inflicted on his heart that day. “You did give me something,” he found himself saying.
“No. I’d remember. I remember everything about that interaction.”
So did he. Down to the way her lashes had come down over her eyes, and how her pulse had jumped in her throat. “When the bailiff called your name, and you walked away to head to the courtroom, you dropped a pen.”
He’d caught it before it hit the floor, which attracted her attention, and put it in his pocket. A symbol of good luck, he’d thought then, because surely the fact that he’d met her on this benighted day meant everything. Maybe even that his parents were there, giving him one final gift.
He’d met his mate at only eighteen.
He’d heard of such sudden meetings but mostly in entertainment shows. All the mated couples he knew had grown toward each other over time until the mating bond kicked in. Or like his grandparents; they’d been part of the same clan or friendly groups of clans, their paths crisscrossing since childhood.
Mating at first sight was a romantic myth, he’d thought when making fun of Saoirse’s romance novels like the arrogant kid brother he’d been. Then it had hit him like a roundhouse punch, both sides of his nature in perfect harmony.
There she is. My mate. Mine.
Later, after the horror of that courtroom, he’d laughed at himself through a haze of angry tears. And he’d seen the same pen he’d so carefully tucked away as a scalpel thrust into his heart. “I kept it all this time as a reminder to never seek you out, that whatever might’ve been between us died that day.”
He was still holding her, their bodies too close, their breaths intermingling as she tipped her head back to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry. I know there’s no forgiveness, and it’s selfish of me even to speak the words, but I can no more stop them than I could stop myself from talking to you that day. I’m sorry, Adam.”
A shine on the right side of her face, a single tear rolling down her cheek.
He took one hand off her, caught the tear with his fingertip, his heart thudding to a different beat now. “You’re crying.” A part of him that would never forget her, even as it couldn’t forgive her, wanted to hope.
She looked at the teardrop balanced on his fingertip as if she was looking at something unrelated to herself. “You reach a part of me beyond the numbness. So deep that even I can’t feel it. All I see is a wall of gray.”