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“I have a splinter, too, if you want to help me get that out,” I offered, because he was beginning to start to treat the cut on myneck in a way I could only describe as ‘ham fisted’, like I’d feared he would. His fingers were like bananas.
He took my hand and looked at it. “It looks like you have a whole fucking tree in there. What happened?” he asked again, incredulous and on the edge of concern, looking through the kit and quickly finding a pair of tweezers.
“Honestly? I have no idea,” I told him, shaking my head. “I think I was drugged this weekend. Yeah,” this sounded very possible, “and something is eating at my brain right now…Motherofpearl!” I cried when he pulled the splinter out. It hurt much more than it had going in.
“Something is eating your brain,” he repeated. It sounded way dumber coming out of his mouth. Despite the fact that I’d never confuse this huge lug with a brain surgeon, for some reason when he said things in his deep, gruff voice, he seemed to easily highlight the stupid in a sentence.
“Well, not eating, per se, like apie. More like eating, you know, like acid eats.” Actually, this was my favorite theory yet. I was really leaning in. Didn’t exercise sometimes pull up acid trips and hallucinations? Running away from the mansion was probably what made me think of the werewolf thing.
Yeah, I know—the day was weirdbeforethat, but it was very possible that some of the day was just freakish and was something that, ten years from now, I would tell in fifty different ways to entertain people over a beer.
“Right…” he said slowly, and then looked me over. “Did you hit your head?”
“Maybe!” I said brightly. That would explain it, too!
We heard the door to the mansion open and close slowly. “Kaci, are you okay?” I heard Caelum’s voice ask, sounding tired and raspy like he’d just run a marathon.
“She’s fine,” Ry replied, then left me on the counter and headed into the main foyer. “Holy fuckshit! What the fuck happened to you?” I heard him exclaim as soon as he left the kitchen.
I slowly slid off of the counter and tiptoed to the door of the kitchen and towards the foyer, peeking in on them like someone might check if their parents were sleeping before sneaking out the back door.
Caelum looked like I had when I had come home, only a million times worse. Even dirtier, somehow, although I would have thought it impossible, because I’d had dirt in places that it didn’t belong.
I might have had a couple of cuts, but Caelum looked like someone had beat the shit out of him. He was bleeding from his cheek, his eye, his forehead, his neck, his shoulder, everywhere.
I felt concern, which was irritating to me. At the craziest, this was a werewolf who had entrapped me into a weird situation and had eaten my pussy out there, belted my ass, and was definitely about to fuck me before we were attacked.
At best, I was dreaming this whole thing. Hey, it was still a possibility.
“I’m going to sit down,” Caelum announced weakly, dragging himself over to the sofa. Ry got under him to support his weight on the way there.
Ry looked like he wanted to ask a million questions, though, and I was going to let him ask them. I didn’t really want to be inthe middle of this—whatever it was. But before he asked any of them, he pointed at me. “Get up to your room, shut the door, and stay there.”
“Nah,” I said, shifting my weight onto my better foot. “I don’t really have a door. It’d just make eavesdropping harder, but I would succeed nonetheless.”
“Why doesn’t she have a door?” Ry asked, looking at Caelum.
Wearily, Caelum looked up at him. “I’m not proud of it,” he said by way of explanation. “You’re the one that let her leave the mansion. You should have stuck her in the room you could lock from the outside.”
I straightened. Wow, that was deliberate. Iwasa hostage. That pissed me off… Not enough to make a big deal about it, of course, because these were two massive, terrifying maybe-werewolf captors here… but enough to feel pretty sulky.
“Well, I’m sorry if I didn’t read the playbook right,” Ry said slowly and full of sarcastic seething. “Oh, right, there wasn’t one! Why did you think I’d be good at keeping her put?”
“You’ve kept grown ass men put,” he replied with an eyeroll.
“By beating the shit out of them!” he clarified. “She’s a woman. She is like, one-twenty tops. I have to keep my elbows in so that I don’t hurt herby accident.”
My brain was currently trying to breeze through all of the reasons why a provost of a private university might be keeping grown men held captive…
You know, I wasn’t as creative as I’d thought. I was drawing a major blank.
“This happened and it wasone rogue?” Ry asked him, looking incredulous. “Who was it?”
“You know what?” Caelum answered calmly, sarcastically, “I didn’t get the license plate number on that truck.”
“I’m calling the guys,” Ry said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Want me to bring them here?”
“Might as well. She saw everything already,” Caelum waved in my direction, surprising me. I wasn’t expecting to be mentioned; I was still really hoping that this was a dream.
