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It was probably the drugs talking. She could tell she was on something.
Charlie had grown up in rural Cumberland, the eastern shifter state. Of course, it hadn’t been a shifter state when she’d been born, it had just been rural Tennessee.
She’d always known about shifters, though. They made up most of the people in her county and almost all the kids at her school. She’d been twelve or thirteen before she realized it was weird for a kid to have two dads and one mom, or for someone to turn into an animal.
This was the first time she’d given a thought to being part of a triad, though. Not that it was a real thought. It was a drug-induced haze, of course, because Kade was a feral murderer — or a nearly-feral murderer, apparently — and he needed to stand trial for what he’d done.
Charlie took a deep breath, and her stomach growled. The three men turned.
“Are you awake?” Kade said, softly, but his cousin Hunter brushed him out of the way. He put two fingers on her neck, feeling for her pulse.
“Yeah?” she said.
She was almost certain that she was awake, anyway.
“How do you feel?”
Charlie considered this question for a moment, watching the face of the man she’d been hunting hovering in front of her.
He doesn’t know what I was doing, she realized. He’d never have saved me otherwise.
“Shitty,” she said. That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
The two men in front of her face smiled. Then the third one showed up in front of her, holding a glass with a straw.
“Drink,” he said. “We’re supposed to keep you hydrated. You lost a lot of blood.”
The second the water hit her lips, she felt its coolness rush through her body. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was, and she slurped the water down in huge, greedy gulps, before Hunter pulled the glass away.
“Hey,” she managed to get out.
“The sedative I used has a tendency to make people nauseous for a little while after they wake up,” he explained. “You gotta take it bit by bit.”
Charlie just nodded, her cheek rubbing against the wood of the kitchen table. Hunter stood, lightly touching her bandages.
“Give it another hour or so, and I think she’ll be ready to be moved,” he said.
His gaze was totally professional, but it wasn’t until Charlie felt his finger securing her bandages a little better that Charlie realized she was completely naked. On a stranger’s kitchen table.
Better than being dead, she thought, trying to find the bright side.
She opened her mouth, then closed it a couple of times, still trying to get the hang of things.
“Is there,” she finally asked, “a sheet or something?”
Hunter, the guy who’d sewn her up, smiled.
“That’s a good sign,” he said. “She’s at least aware of what’s going on around her.”
“Yeah, and I’m naked on a table,” Charlie said.
The other two men in the room looked amused, and the dark haired one left, coming back with a soft, old quilt.
Hunter stood, and Charlie realized that he was completely packed up again except for a few orange medicine bottles.
How long was I out?She wondered.
“Antibiotics,” Hunter said, holding up a bottle. “Twice a day.”
