Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87848 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
He stays silent, kindly not mentioning the fact that I thrashed her publicly and thoroughly in front of a crowd. Or the fact that the first transition from human to wolf is the most painful thing a female can endure, including childbirth. Some females never emotionally recover from the first transformation, and refuse to do it a second time.
The physiology of being a shifter is a brutal thing, a supernatural curse, some call it. In females, the transformation is inextricably linked to the loss of virginity to their fated mate. When her flesh joins with the male nature made her for, she is transformed in many ways. She is not merely deflowered. The veneer of simple humanity is ripped from her and the beast is revealed. When Beatrix and I first have sex, she will discover something new about herself, something she clearly understood instinctively, or perhaps was told when she was young, but was taken from her by the orphanage.
The director knew the truth, but I wonder if he did not suppress it simply to make her easier to handle. It would be simpler to drug a young female shifter than to deal with all her rising instincts.
“We are going to the family home,” I tell Daniel. I had planned for a different destination, but Beatrix needs to be among her kind. “I want there to be nothing but peace and recuperation for her. I will take several months from my duties. I will…”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
There’s a sudden series of loud noises coming from the rear carriage. I move before I can think.
I rush back to find the bed empty and the rear carriage door open. The banging sound is the door slamming back and forth at high speed.
She’s jumped.
I run to the little balcony at the back, expecting to see the receding body of my mate twisted on the tracks. But I see no such thing. Instead, I see something large moving under the moonlight, something fast and primal and animal.
A cold thrill runs through me as I realize what I am looking at.
A wolf. A shifter. Her.
My mate has shifted, leaped from a moving train, and is fleeing into the night.
It should be impossible.
Daniel is immediately behind me.
“She took her wolf form,” he observes, stating the obvious.
“Stop the train!”
I pull the emergency cord. Even this customized vehicle has the same one as the one in many public passenger vehicles. It bypasses all other controls and immediately applies the emergency brakes.
The sound of metal on metal at this speed is deeply unpleasant. It sounds like something being ripped from the very core of the earth, a scream from hell.
It takes less than a minute for the train to slow enough, but that minute is an eternity in my world. I watch her run in wolf form, feeling everything I thought I knew melt and fall apart.
She should not be able to do this. She is my mate. I know it. I know it to my fucking marrow. We did not consummate our connection, so this should be impossible.
Nobody else will understand the problem. They will assume a hasty consummation preceded these events. They will think she is claimed. Is mine.
They will assume that my horror is to do with the fact that my mate has fled, has leaped from a fucking moving train. The fall could have killed her quite easily, but not only did she not die, she does not seem injured.
It shouldn’t be possible. The thought keeps running through my head, torturing me with circular logic. The only way a female shifter is able to make the change is if she has been mated by her fated mate. But I am her fated mate, and she and I have definitely not ever had sex. I would certainly know if I had ever been inside her.
I am confused. Horrified, actually.
A dozen thoughts crowd my head all at once, coming thick and fast in the few seconds we have before it is safe for us to give chase.
Could I be wrong? Is she not my mate? Did I fall for some hot, broken, not-so-innocent girl in a shitty situation? Am I so lonely, so desperate, that the smell of a fertile female is enough to confuse my senses? Did I fundamentally settle for the first young woman to cross my path on this particular journey? Have I given up on myself? Was the pack right to force me to seek a female, or have they pushed me to bond with a ruined girl? Or is it the blood that the director mentioned, some Siberian heritage? Is that what spoke to me? Have I been drawn to a foreign lover that has confused my senses?
All these thoughts amount to nothing.
The blunt truth of it is that by all laws of wolf nature, I know she is not truly mine. She cannot be.