AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Maybe I am extremely careful. Something you aren’t familiar with.”
“Get off me!” I shoved off the door and slammed my body into him. Pain tore through my side, but I didn’t care, and my vision ran silver and red as my blood boiled. “I am not your fucking grovelingpet!”
“Get back in here,” he said quietly.
I fell backwards across the threshold in the hallway. “No.”
“Summer,get in here. I am not arguing with you in the open.”
“Oh, good, because we’re notarguing,you’reordering.” I slid myself down the wall, inching towards the stairs and the open. Searle might say he’dsupervise, but he’d conveniently never be available tosupervise.
Sterling had acted like I was the unwashed barnyard animal that he’d gotten stuck with. That entire process had been humiliating and degrading, but necessary—and Sterling hadn’t even meant to treat me like that. It’d been circumstances and assumptions. Searlereallybelieved I was an abject bottom-feeding failure as a she-wolf and Luna. Not just a she-wolf who didn’t know better because she was a loner orphan, but a she-wolf who was an irredeemable hazard that had to be gently contained, muzzled in public, skillfully handled, and rehabilitated to achieve some semblance of proper behavior.
To those who believed Sterling was a hybrid, I was an Abomination. Worse than Unwanted. A twisted Abomination.
Searle clearly took too much pity on me to think I was an Abomination.
Searle held out his hand. “Correct. I’mordering. Give them to me.”
Hahaha. He was hilarious. “No.”
“Summer. How do you think this is going to end?”
Awww, he had called methatname and we were inpublic.
Searle lunged forward and his big hand closed over the journals.
Protector, Jailor, Beta
Ispun just in time. His fingers scratched at the wax bits. I scrambled down the hallway. “No!”
Time to cause a delightfully big scene like I’d never have dared to do anywhere else.
Searle marched after me. “Summer!”
“Nope!” My heart pounded and my sidethrobbed. My muscles threatened to abandon my joints and toss me down the stairs, so I did a great impression of a discarded marionette.
I bounced off the wall of the first landing, then half-walked, half-flopped down the next eight stairs to the second floor. Searle caught up just as I smushed my shoulder into the wall like a demented ping-pong ball. He snarled and snapped his hand out, ripping mine away from my chest and tearing the bundle from my grip.
“No!” The journals spilled out of the ribbons and scattered along the dark walnut floor, spewing the leaflets and stray bits of paper Mom had crammed into them. Pages and papers fluttered. The bright pink envelope of the card she’d written slid halfway under a small table in the corner.
“Enough.” Searle growled as he stood over me.
I gasped like a fish while my side howled in pain, both throbbing and sharp and tearing. I tried to roll onto my knees as he began to pick up the scattered bits. “Leave… that… alone.”
My limbs were all gummy and trembly, and every breath sent a sharp wave of pain through me.
Falling down the stairs would be a dumb way to die after all the ways I’d evaded death so far: bears, mountain lions, angry bull moose, GranitePaw hit squads... cause of death? Stairs.
On the opposite side of the landing, down the left side of that hallway, a door opened. Demetrius emerged from the master suite.
Hell. So much for thinking he and Marcella had found somewhere else to be while Searle and I got cozy/not-cozy.
Searle continued picking up papers.
“What is going on?” Demetrius asked in a low tone, gaze pinned mostly on Searle.
“A minor disagreement,” Searle replied.
