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I strode from the office, where the light from the industrial-sized window high on my left shined on me, but I heard nothing downstairs but the silence of real trouble. However, this time it’s the trouble we’re expecting, and the stillness is anticipation, not terror. The pack was still out there.
Then the itching up my neck I always get when the pack is near intensified, and I spared a glance over my shoulder just as a familiar gloomy face appeared in the overhead window.
Marvin.
He vanished, then flew through the window feet first in a shower of shattered glass. “Barlow, you bitch,” he hissed as he crouched before me, his face contorting as he tried to stave off the change. “You don’t deserve to be here.”
“Hey now, Marv, stay frosty, right? You don’t want to go full wolf in front of the flunky ol’ me. That would be embarrassing.”
“Kye says we don’t need to worry about taking you alive. He just needs what you stole.” He advanced on me slowly.
I took five steps back toward the stairs. “Is it stealing when you’re taking it back for the person it was stolen from, though?”
I quick-stepped toward the landing to grab the railing, but before I could, Marvin’s calf muscles bunched together as he leapt toward me.
His clawed hands dug into my arms, and I fell sideways, right over the second-story rail. I’d never been afraid of heights, but the first floor rushing up at me was the most terrifying moment of my too-short life.
I can heal, but I can’t resurrect.
Marvin’s ragged breathing in my ear was all I heard before the polished concrete floor meets my face, and I hear a pop in my neck.
I would die here on the floor while Marvin, using me as a cushion, would walk away.
It wasn’t fair. I couldn’t go out like this. All around me are the sounds of fighting, but I don’t think anyone had noticed me, sprawled on the ground, dying of a broken neck. In a panic, I reached inward. What can this stupid demon rune do, if everyone wants it so badly they’re willing to kill to get it?
I felt that same steady thrumming, a heartbeat just out of sync with my own, and then I heard Thorn’s voice in my head. “Take the mark.”
A spot of light appears behind my eyes, like in my dream, but without Freudian connotations. It looms closer, and I draw it in. “But what about my freedom? I don’t want to be your slave.”
“Not a slave, a partner. Let me save you.”
The light changed, darkened, and crashed into me in a wave of crimson.
Then the world went black.
8
Once more, I woke in Thorn’s bed, though alone.
Disoriented and confused, I hung on the edge of a fever haze as an infuriating itch on my back frantically begged to be sated. Even with a one-story crash dive into a cement floor, hurt didn’t sear through me while stretching my arm behind my shoulder.
Had I already healed from that epic fall?
I remembered my broken neck and shattered jaw, but now, there was no pain. I flexed opened my mouth and closed it, expecting a delayed sting to finally hit me, but it never did.
Everything I went throughshouldhave ended me. But it didn’t.
Fucking Marvin.
I hoped that asshole rolled snake eyes and choked on his after-healing meal.
Speaking of which, my body wasn’t whining for food like it normally would have following such a brutal assault.
After a fight, I usually craved Taco Shack, a steak from a high-end restaurant or the best burger in Baton Rouge. But now? Nothing.
Sitting slowly, I expected lightheadedness. Instead, I’m ready to go another round in the ring with Marvin the asshat. My vision seems sharper in the darkness, revealing the room's corners despite the drawn curtains and no lighting.
“Well, that’s new,” I said aloud.
