AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And stand guard, I add after Hermione says she’s on her way. Don’t let anyone in to bother her. Not even me. Not even if you have to fight me to keep her safe.
Hermione replies, Yes, Alpha, and severs the connection without a hint of judgment or rebuke.
But I feel it all the same.
I’ve let my second-in-command down and tortured a most likely innocent woman and I’m no closer to knowing what Kelley Astor was doing in my tower than I was before.
But I know where to start looking…
I send out a second telepathic call, this time to Cameron, my father’s personal assistant/nurse/bodyguard, asking him to join me on the fifty-first floor.
Cam knows this tower and its secrets better than anyone except Dad.
And he loathes me.
He’ll give me honest answers, even if they’re answers I don’t want to hear. And he might be able to do something for Willow. Cam has the gift of forgetting, too, though he stubbornly refuses to use it.
He believes in the integrity of the mind and the sacred nature of human—and shifter—experience. To my knowledge, he’s only used his gift a very few times, usually to banish the memory of such excruciating pain that the people involved could no longer function in the wake of their trauma, even after their physical wounds had healed. He attends to people who have been tortured by our enemies, burn victims, and children who have suffered horrors too intense for their still-forming minds to bear without potentially fatal damage.
As a child, Willow absolutely would have qualified under his strict moral code for using his gift. Victims of childhood trauma are two to three times more likely to succumb to fatal addiction or suicide than other children. What Willow’s mother did for her likely saved not only her daughter’s sanity, but perhaps her life as well.
And I destroyed that precious firewall for nothing.
For a power play.
To show this woman who gets to me like no other who’s in charge.
I try to tell myself I was doing what I had to do for my pack, and that there’s no way I could have known that she had a horrible gift-suppressed memory. I tell myself I have a responsibility to return to her tomorrow and keep at it until I get what I need from her.
I tell myself that I’m not the bad guy.
But even I don’t believe it.
Chapter Three
Willow
I’m dimly aware of Hermione untying me, helping me to my feet, and leading me out of Maxim’s apartment and down the hall to my rooms.
But then time jumps forward.
Now suddenly we’re in my bathroom and she’s wiping my face with a cool cloth, asking me if I want her to help me take a shower or a bath while I shake my head frantically from side to side.
I can’t bear to be touched, even by someone I know means me no harm.
The memory of the man’s hand over my mouth and my soul leaving my body is too strong; it has ballooned inside my brain until it fills every inch of available space with fear.
Fear.
Maxim’s gift is fear.
No wonder he’s afraid all the time, I think. He knows just how much there is to be afraid of. How fear poisons and destroys.
Before tonight, I would have felt sorry for him, that he has born witness to so much suffering and pain.
Now…
Now, I don’t know what I feel for him.
