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)
It was a long while before he cranked his head around, and those eyes. Holy shit, those eyes. They were dead. No light in them at all.
“What the hell happened to you,” she breathed as he looked back out to the river.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Every time Allhan blinked, all he saw were the bodies in the snow from the night before. And when he breathed in through his nose, it wasn’t fresh, cold air going in and out of his sinuses. It was blood; all he could smell was the blood. And then there were his hands. His hands were warm and sticky from trying to stop the bleeding at the throat, and his heart was pounding because he knew that there was nothing he could do.
No way of saving the male who’d spoken in such a rush.
Like he was fully aware that he was dying and determined to get some of the story out. So his friends might be rescued.
“Al? What’s going on here. Is there someone I can call for you?”
The sound of his name was like an echo from another world, and as he turned his head again, he felt as though he was looking at the female through a fog. The longer he stared at her, though, the clearer she became, until he was able to finally connect to the present. To where he actually was, as opposed to where he’d been last night.
Details registered. She’d kept her gun out, and her other hand was in the pocket of her black parka as if she had another weapon in there. Or maybe a phone? Her stance was tense and her dark eyes steady not because she was calm, but because she was measuring him as a threat.
It was strange, he thought. Reading emotions had never been a strong suit for him. In fact, for the longest time, it had been impossible for him to define the positions of eyes and mouths, and translate the countless orientations into meanings.
His father had despised his social failings. His sister had pitied them.
And he had been determined to learn that which had come so easily to everybody else around him.
As a consequence, he was an expert at them now.
“You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Damn right I don’t.” Her smile was cold, but it was to hide the fact that he had actually rattled her a little. “But that’s about me and not you.”
Allhan shook his head and looked back at the glass house. There was no reason to talk to her about anything, much less argue a fact so immutable it was practically one of the laws of physics. There were plenty of things he wanted to hurt right now, but not her. Never her. And actually, if she wouldn’t leave the clearing, he could always just reposition farther down the river. In case the slayer somehow knew he was here.
The problem? He found himself wanting to explain… something.
Even though he couldn’t tell her much—
“Six males I knew were killed last night by lessers,” he said roughly. When she gasped, he rubbed his aching sternum. “I wasn’t, like, really close to them, but I… was the one who found four of them outside of a club downtown.”
“I’m really fucking sorry.” When he just nodded, she cleared her throat. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” He glanced at both his hands and saw them stained with blood. “That just about covers it. And you know, I thought… it was bad. Like, last night, when I came here. I knew… it was bad, like, fuck. But the two of them who were kidnapped were… worked on, if you know what I mean.”
As she muttered a curse, he didn’t know why the hell he kept going. “They were taken… somewhere… and tortured. The bodies were found just before dawn.”
He looked back at his sister’s safe house. The one he hadn’t known about. The one he’d had to find in the databases when it became clear she hadn’t gone to Theo’s after all.
“The two males were tortured for information.”
That was as far as he could go. One, because he didn’t want this female to know too much. And two, he had a sudden, absurd conviction that he could ensnare her in this nightmare with him if he kept talking.
“You think slayers are going to find her,” the female said.
Oh, no, he thought. He was very sure they already had.
He’d never considered the fact that even though he might not know Shuli’s friends, they could very well know Carmen and his family. He had been born twenty years after his sister so they’d never run in the same circles—and he hadn’t had a circle. But Carmen and Theo had had an active social life, and the aristocracy was a small club.
That fucking slayer had tortured those two males to find out details about her.