AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Suddenly, from the shadows, a shifter emerges. In the darkness of the woods, teenage Cleo can’t see him, but she hears his approach and scrambles to her knees, her voice shaking as she calls, “Wh-who’s there?”
He’s a massive creature, even bigger than any of my mates. His fur is raggedy and missing patches where obvious scar tissue is visible from old wounds. He looks like a brawler—like he’s made his life all about battle and pain. A lone wolf, probably. What Dare might’ve become if he hadn’t found his way back to a pack. Vicious and brutal.
He growls, then leaps on the helpless girl.
Cleo may not have been her sister’s equal in magic, but she’s still strong. The shifter slams into her, his teeth ripping through her shoulder. She screams in pain and fear, but immediately counterattacks, even with her hands bound. She throws the wolf off her with a shield sigil and scrambles away, working with magic at the knots securing her hands. She gets free of the rope before the shifter is able to shake off the blast, and then she rips off her gag as he attacks again.
It’s a short, vicious battle. The shifter fights without mercy, attacking over and over even as she lashes his skin and gouges his fur with spells. His eyes have the same eerie blankness I saw in Cleo’s earlier.
No guilt. No remorse. Not even any anger.
He’s not doing this because he hates her. He’s doing it because…
Oh, God.
It strikes me in a wave of horror that this shifter attack wasn’t an accident. Her father carted her into the woods for her to be killed. He was too much of a coward to deal with it himself, so he hired a shifter to do his dirty work.
The clearing is bathed in blood by the time the fight is over, but in the end Cleo wins. Barely. And not without sustaining vicious wounds.
My strength is lagging, my mind reeling from the effort of maintaining control over her magic. But I can’t stop now. With a desperate yank, I pull Cleo back through the connection and into another memory.
We’re back at the Victorian house, and the scene is just as gruesome. Only this time, it isn’t her twin sister dead on the floor.
It’s her parents.
This is a few years later than the previous memory, I think. Cleo’s older, taller, appearing more like the woman I know now. And she didn’t use a gun this time either, by the looks of it. She used magic to make a point.
So her father would die knowing she was stronger than him.
I glance down at Cleo where she’s sprawled in a heap on the ground beside me. She seems to have lost all will to move, to fight back. Even her magic has stopped struggling against my hold. Maybe she’s as fucking exhausted as I am. She just cries silent tears from closed eyes so she doesn’t have to see the destruction she’s wrought on her own life. So she doesn’t have to face the truth of what she did.
But no… I can’t even completely blame Cleo. Her father made her this way. He beat the psychopath into her and paved the way for her to become this… this monster. Of course, I also realize now why she hates shifters so much. Her hatred is a bit misplaced, considering the fact her father was the one who hired the wolf to kill her.
She looks so pathetic right now. A broken madwoman.
I feel almost sorry for her.
Maybe that’s my mistake. Because as soon as my mind softens toward her, I lose the iron grip I’ve kept on her power. Her eyes flare wide open, and she lets out a hellish scream as she launches herself to her feet. With her power back under her control, she holds out her hands, black smoke pouring from her fingertips.
I react instantaneously. There’s no time to worry or question whether I can do what I need to—I just do it.
I pull my men from the astral cave right into the living room of Cleo’s childhood home.
They leap for her, growling and snarling, and I deflect her spell with one of my own just as she goes down beneath them.
This time, they don’t hesitate. They don’t give her a chance to threaten me or our unborn child.
They go for the kill immediately.
I turn away, unable to watch no matter how much I feel like I should. I hear the snap of her neck, and the harsh tang of blood fills the air. The memory washes away around us—Cleo’s dead parents vanish and the house melts away into history until we’re back in the cave.
And now the only dead body on the ground is Cleo’s.
29
Ridge
Cleo’s blood pulses from her body against my tongue, and it’s a strange sensation. This place is real, but not real, and her blood is an illusion. I know that. But I can taste it, coppery and bitter. I can feel it slippery on my tongue, leaking down my chin as her heartbeats slow. Underneath that, I sense the life leaving her. And it’s all as real as if we were back in the real world.
