Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
Demon females married early, in their twenties, or the upper crust did, with the Truelocks occupying the uppermost part of the upper crust that wasn’t titled aristocracy.
Cat was turning thirty-one on her next birthday, a day that was only two months away. But since she’d passed the thirty mark, Mr. Truelock had been becoming increasingly displeased with his daughter’s live-life-have-fun-and-spend-money-until-you-drop lifestyle.
“I cannot believe you did this,” Gayliliel said quietly but in a razor-sharp tone. “Especially tonight.”
I tensed at the deterioration of her voice.
Cat didn’t miss the edge either, and I could feel her demon rearing, which meant, if the situation didn’t shift, things were about to get ugly.
“Did what?” she demanded.
“You making it all about you the first time Laura goes out after—” Gayle abruptly stopped speaking.
At that, things shifted.
They very much did.
This shift for me meant I had the familiar sensation of my chest compressing at the reminder of what that “after” Gayle was referring to meant.
At least it wasn’t so bad anymore. I could still breathe. Three months ago, when it happened, it felt like I couldn’t.
Cat glared at Gayle.
Gayle appeared contrite and avoided my eyes.
I sighed.
“You can say it,” I whispered into the loaded silence of the car. “It happened. I can’t pretend it didn’t.”
Even if I wished I could.
But I lived with it every day.
Or more to the point, without it.
It took everything I had not to fall into the habit I’d acquired and lift my hand to rub my chest like I could soothe the beast who wasn’t there anymore.
Or she was, but she was still gone.
Annnnnnd…
Yeah.
Remembering the enormity of my loss, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I forced air into my lungs.
I was so busy trying to get oxygen, I didn’t hide the fact I couldn’t, thus neither of my friends missed it.
“Well done,” Cat sniped at Gayle.
“You started it with this ridiculous Black Room business,” Gayle sniped back.
“Girls—” I tried to intervene.
It was always a crapshoot if my attempts at intervention would work, but this time when I rolled the dice, I failed.
“Not everyone is husband hunting. Fae have mates. So do shifters,” Gayle pointed out. “We don’t have to go on the prowl.”
“Lucky you,” Cat snapped. “As you know, it’s not so easy for us demons.”
“Not lucky or easy,” Gayle slapped back. “My mate could live in Land’s End, and I’ll never meet him.”
This was true.
Same for shifters.
In your everyday life, if you weren’t lucky enough to run across the one who was meant for you, something that rarely happened, eventually, you had to quest.
Which meant, unlike what Gayle just asserted, we did have to go on the prowl in order to meet our mate, and it was much more of a thing than what Cat had to do.
In fact, many fae and shifters took a year from work (this was, fortunately, legally mandated for employers to allow us to do), if not longer, in order to travel the Four Realms in hopes of running across the one who was meant to be ours.
You could, of course, contract a witch to narrow down the search area for you, but witches who could successfully track mates were few and far between, and that meant they were insanely expensive. That said, witches who scammed desperate fae and shifters were a dime a dozen.
And if you didn’t find him or her, you’d just have to make do, something no one wanted, because living without your true mate was like living without a limb. You could do it, but it would suck.
“But you can take your time, make a holiday of it,” Cat stated. “I have to make a connection or Dad’s going to—”
Now it was Cat cutting herself off.
“Your dad’s going to what?” I asked.
She turned her head to look out the window, the long, copper waves of her hair floating over the alabaster skin of her bare shoulder.
“Oh shit,” Gayle mumbled, watching Cat closely.
She turned to me (by the by, the waves of her gorgeous chestnut hair also floated enchantingly over her bare shoulders).
I stretched my lips at her. She bugged out her moss-green eyes at me.
“You two can stop pulling faces,” Catla said into our exchange.
We both looked to her to see her attention on us.
“Okay, so I messed up,” Cat went on to explain, and her gaze moved to me. “I wanted to make a big thing of it, us finally talking you into going out after…what happened to you.”
I was attacked. Randomly. Viciously. And when I was, my beast was murdered inside me. She’s still inside me, part of my soul, there but gone forever. I’m alive, but I’m still only one half of a whole. That’s what happened to me.
But I could see how they couldn’t say it.
I remembered their faces when I woke up in the hospital. They’d had the news before I did. I remembered the weeks after. The concern. The care. The sadness. The powerlessness.