Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
I’ve opened the door just a hair. I try to push it closed again, but it slams open, knocking me to the side. I hear my father make a noise like I think the people on the TV show would have made and then everything goes dark.
When I wake up, I’m not in my house. I’m tied up in the back seat of a car so fancy it doesn’t even seem real, and there’s a man next to me covered in blood, who smells of my parents, but is not my parents. It’s the first day of the rest of my life, and the beginning of my personal nightmare.
And now? It’s starting all over again.
“You forfeited your maker’s heart when you killed my parents and raised me as a feral orphan.”
“I may not have been a good adoptive father,” Alexander admits. “I did become distracted for some time…”
“You forgot I existed for a decade.”
“You were small and easily forgettable. You are still small, but I see you have found a way to make yourself harder to ignore. Does it please you, to have taken a powerful artifact?”
“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
“The feeling is mutual, little one,” he leers through sharp teeth. “Get in the car.”
“I’m not going to get in the car. You’re asking me to kidnap myself.”
“You want me to kidnap you personally? Very well.”
He picks me up in one hand and throws me in the car where I crumple like trash, folding myself into the far corner in a tangle of all too human limbs. He is careless with me, but not entirely brutal, even though he is furious with me.
He wants something from me.
He thinks I’m going to be able to get the heart back. That’s why he hasn’t broken every limb in my body.
“Now,” he says. “What to do with you now I have you in my grasp and yet you remain non-compliant?”
“I don’t know, kill me?”
“I would not give you the satisfaction,” he says. “You are going to get my maker’s heart back, and then we are going to talk about your punishment.”
I stare sullenly at him.
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll find and kill each and every one of your mates, slowly and in front of you. It won’t be like with your parents. I won’t glamor the memories out of your mind. I won’t spare you a single one of the excruciating details. It will be as if their deaths are happening to you.”
A cold spike rams itself through my heart. He’d do it. He’d do it, and he would enjoy each and every moment of it.
CHAPTER 12
Conroy
Damon and the doctor have been in the back room surgery for what feels like hours. I have paced. I have thought. I have regretted. I have made plans for what we will do once he is better. I tell myself that he will get better, because he has to get better, because there are no other options.
I want him to live. I desperately want all of us to live. We haven’t had the chance to fully enjoy our mate yet, and he is just beginning to overcome the damage of a lifetime. He spoke to Kita. He found his voice. And now he’s been fucking shot.
He will never complain about it. I already know that. He’ll probably never mention it. Even if he does start talking to us. This will just be another bit of damage he absorbs.
I wish I’d been the one to get shot. Tailor was tortured unconscious. Damon has been shot. I have managed to avoid most of the damage, but I am the most responsible. I am the alpha. I am the one who should be protecting everyone.
“Mr. Conroy?”
The medic is standing behind me, drying her hands off on a towel. Her overalls have a lot of blood on them. I try not to look at the blood. I try to look at her eyes. They’re a hazel-y green and they are warm even though they are tired. Her name is Mandy Molloy. I’ve just remembered that.
“He’s going to be okay.” She sounds very confident. “The bullet missed most important things. I fixed a hole that was where a hole shouldn’t have been, but I think that’ll be the end of it. He will need some weeks to recover. I suggest you keep him away from strenuous activity and anything dense and lead based.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. “We all owe you a great deal.”
“You owe me a few pieces of your interior decorations.”
I am confused for a moment, then I realize the car is still covered in bloody gold. We should do something about that more or less immediately.
“I’d say that’s the least we owe you,” I reply. “You’ve done more for us than you can imagine.”
“I’ve stopped him from dying. That’s it. I’m going to get a drink. Maybe change these clothes. You can go back to see him when he wakes up, but he probably won’t wake up for quite some time.”