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)
He gripped her chin, fear a surge in his blood. “He knows you’re here.”
“It might not be him.” She didn’t move. “It could be anyone who recognized me.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“If anything,” she said, “it’s good news. Now I don’t suspect I’m on the right track. I know it.”
Even as ice crawled up his spine, she pulled out of his hold to store the evidence in the case she’d shown him, the one that held the letters. She locked it as he watched. “I can’t let them out of my sight until they’re en route, but I don’t expect the forensic team to find anything. He’s too smart to have left prints. Someone authorized to transport them should arrive in Raintree before lunch.”
Shifting on her heel before he could snap at her for her utter lack of response to the danger she was in, she said, “How is Jacques?” and the pinpoint accuracy of her question was a bullet through the heart.
Because a mate would act that way, would just know what was wrong with him.
“I have to let him go.” The words came out grating, broken. “No one can reach him, and his brain readings are so faint as to not exist.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve lost friends. Each loss takes a piece of you.” Unadorned, flat, and piercing in their bluntness, her words helped in ways he’d never expected.
She was a woman he’d told himself to hate over and over again, and yet it felt as if they’d never stopped their conversation in the hallway. She was still offering him bandages, this time for his soul.
And on this morning, dark and cold and crushing, he was too hurt and lost to push her away. He collapsed onto the sofa, his hands in his hair as he stared down at the old-fashioned carpet. “We were crèche-mates. We grew up together.” Adam could still see the wild and brash eighteen-year-old Jacques had been. “He’s been part of every important moment of my entire life.”
A thousand memories overflowed his mind. “He was right there beside me on our first solo flights as fledglings, and he was there the day my grandmother told me my parents had been murdered. The same man celebrated wildly with me when I was made a wing-second two months before his own promotion.”
Happiness or grief, Jacques had stood beside Adam for all of it. “He was meant to grow into a disreputable old man with me. I was meant to babysit his fledglings so he could go on date-night flights with his mate—he always wanted a huge brood. He promised me that he’d be there to the very end.”
Eleri’s legs in front of him, her body so close he could’ve grabbed her, pressed his face to her stomach as he allowed his emotions to roar through him. If she’d been his mate, he wouldn’t have hesitated, would’ve let her comfort him, love him, make this terrible thing somehow bearable.
Hands fisted, he dropped them to his thighs and looked up.
“There’s no hope at all?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her bones far too visible beneath her skin for all her obvious strength.
Following the movement because watching her when she was close was a compulsion, he suddenly jerked to his feet, his heart thundering. “How sensitive are your hands with an unshielded being?”
“On the extreme end. If I deteriorate any further, the gloves won’t work.” Eleri looked at his face, then down at her hands. “You want me to see if I can pick up anything from your injured clanmate?”
Again, she followed his thoughts so quickly, as if she’d known him a lifetime. “Can you?” he asked past the torment of knowing what they could’ve been.
“Js read memories,” Eleri said, but her brain was connecting the dots Adam already had. “But we are telepaths, and Sensitivity ramps up that ability to deadly levels. So yes, it’s possible I could sense something, but if he’s unconscious, it’s an E you need. They—”
“Two empaths who specialize in comatose patients have already attempted to reach him—they can’t.”
His pain was writ large in the grooves carved into his face, his emotions open to the world.
Adam Garrett would never hide who he was and who he loved.
A part of her, perhaps the same part that could still cry even if she couldn’t feel the sorrow that engendered the tear, wondered what it would be like to mean that much to her beautiful boy grown into a powerful man.
I have missed you all my life without ever knowing you.
Words she could never speak aloud. Words she’d barely dared to think in the depths of Silence. Words she would take with her to her grave.
“If the empaths haven’t been able to reach him…” She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to tell him the blunt truth. Because even numbed by repeated reconditionings, she never again wanted to hurt Adam Garrett. “Why do you think I might succeed where they haven’t?”