Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
And that was part and parcel of what was extraordinary.
She was quiet as she tiptoed in, the concert of beeping from the monitors her metronome, her eyes tearing up so much that she had to brush them with the backs of her hands. When she was standing in between the patients, she looked to her mother first and was not surprised to find that the Shadow Queen had her head turned to the right.
So that even though her eyes were closed, she was facing her mate.
iAm was, of course, in exactly the same position on his own pillow.
Denne glanced at all their vitals readouts, the screens like little electronic thought balloons offering commentary on their most critical bodily functions. No alarms were going off, and she measured the trailing heart graphs as if she had a fucking clue what she was looking at.
All the numbers scared her, although that was her mood rather than whatever was going on. Was their oxygen 120? And their heart rate 72?
Maybe that was their blood pressure—
“Denne…?”
Turning toward her mother’s voice in shock, Denne put her arms out and sank into her thighs. As if the female was going to spontaneously thrash herself off the bed and onto the floor, crashing like a mirror dropped on concrete.
“Mama?”
By some absolute miracle, those beautiful black eyes were not only open, they were focused. “Are you… okay…”
Snapping back from the wave of panic, Denne rushed over and took the Queen’s hand. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine.”
Well, that was a little bit of an overstatement. She had a limp, and some low-level burns from where the explosion had toasted her back. But compared to being shot or stabbed? She was ready to run a marathon.
On that note, she glanced down at the Queen’s stomach area, and felt so much rage, she wanted to kill t’On all over again. From what she’d been told, the operation that had saved Catra’s life had been a nick-of-time kind of thing, performed in the dome, on that black glossy floor. A healer named Jane—who she had later learned was Al’s wonderful mahmen—had been assisted by a nurse named Ehlena. Together, the females had somehow managed to repair the damage done by the stabbing.
“Are you in pain?” Denne asked. “Should I get Doc Jane?”
She was completely unsurprised as her mother’s eyes shot to the right. “Is your father…”
“He’s going to pull through—the doctors said he was very lucky.” If you could consider being shot in the fucking chest winning a scratch-off. “The bullet punctured his lung, but missed his heart and any big arteries or veins.”
The relief the Queen felt immediately registered on her monitor, some numbers dipping down, others going up, the little graph thing tracking the heart rate easing until there was a full inch between the steady peaks.
“It was… t’On,” Catra said roughly. “All along.”
“I know,” Denne gritted.
“Your father… found papers left in our quarters. He was selling all our land… to humans. He came looking to kill us…”
“Shh.” Denne leaned in and stroked a tear from her mother’s cheek. “There’s time to talk later. Just rest now—”
“What did you do to him.”
That voice was commanding now, the eyes very direct in a way that belied the fact that the Queen was hooked up to IVs and recovering from a very serious knife wound. And Denne instantly regressed to being a young again, proof, she supposed, that you were every age you’d ever been—and when a parent gave you that I’m-not-messing-around routine, your inner five-year-old still came to attention.
And as the demand lingered between them, she thought back to the young woman in the blue silk dress and realized something about herself: She was a protector and a defender by nature, and while that resonated in her soul, it was one more connection she was finding to the world around her.
She kept this up and she was going to have quite a meaningful fucking life, wasn’t she.
“I took care of it, Mama.” She squeezed the hand that was so much like her own. “That’s all you need to know.”
She’d also turned a perfectly nice glass mansion on the Hudson River into a fireball, but details, details. She could only imagine what the human media was saying about what had happened down by the waterway.
Directly across from where they’d found that dead two-bit gangster.
Conspiracy theorists on the internet were probably going to have a field day, even though they wouldn’t come close to the truth, would they.
But sure as shit, she was going to watch the Netflix documentary when it came out.
Catra shook her head slowly. “You shouldn’t have done that—”
“No one… could have stopped her.”
Denne pulled another torso twist, and felt a fresh wave of relief—that promptly escorted in the kind of shaky aftermath that happened when a semi near-missed you on the highway.