Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
People who were into their own kind.
FFS, his sex life had never been conventional, so it could have been him. Saxton. Ruhn. Blay and Qhuinn.
So fuck the glymera, he thought as he took another pinch out of the pouch.
“We’ll find it,” he vowed to the King’s solicitor. “And I’m going to enjoy blowing it the fuck up.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the prison camp’s new location, three stories below the abandoned tuberculosis hospital’s decaying floors of patient rooms, treatment areas, and administrative offices, two levels beneath where the drug processing was performed by the imprisoned and the private quarters for the Command had been built, and four flights of cracked concrete steps underneath the terrible sleeping conditions of the prisoners… a lone nurse draped from head to toe in dingy brown robing was changing the bedsheets on a thin, stained mattress with the kind of care usually reserved for the master suite in one of the aristocracy’s finest houses.
As Nadya moved about the rusted metal frame, tucking the rough sheets in between the creaking springs and the forty-year-old padded pallet, the falls of fabric she hid under swung loosely about her scarred face and crippled body. It was a strange contrast, her stiffness, jerks, and hobbles, compared with the flow of the cloth, and she reflected, not for the first time, that she wore what she did partially because it granted her something of what she had lost.
Ease of movement. Grace. Fluidity.
But there were other reasons she covered herself thus.
Flipping a clean blanket out of folds she had rendered it into, she let the woolen weight settle and then smoothed out any wrinkles. Then she bent down with a grimace and picked up the thin, hard pillow from the concrete floor. As she placed the headrest where it belonged, she stared down at the vacant bed.
Until she had to look away.
What she saw around her elevated none of her unsettled mood. Her makeshift facility for the sick, injured, or infirmed among the prisoners was in an abandoned storage room, tucked behind a forest of shelves that still bore the weight of supplies that had been outdated or antiquated twenty years ago. When the camp had been moved here to this old human hospital, it had taken her nights and days to clear the space to set up the row of treatment beds, and as much as she scrubbed the floors and laundered the linens and washed down the walls that she could reach, she did not bother with the dust on the shelves.
There were limits to her energy and she disregarded them at her peril.
She had had two patients thus far. No longer than a night ago, she had washed and remade the bed on the far end, where that human woman had been, where Lucan had watched over her.
Where the wolven had fallen in love with his fated mate.
From Nadya’s post in the shadows, she had witnessed the favor growing between them, and she’d recognized it for what it was: a blessing granted by destiny. A relief of suffering, a source of hope in turmoil, a direction when all seemed lost.
A destination when one had no home.
After the woman had left, Nadya had taken similar care with the washing of the sheets and blankets. She had known that Rio would not be back, assuming she survived the return to her people—and therefore she had known that Lucan would not return, for wherever that woman would be, he would go. Thus to honor them, she had stripped and reconstructed the bedding with precision, as if her efforts could somehow impact their future.
As if she held magic in her hands and could aid them along their journey.
Looking back down, she stared at the bed before her. Then she splayed her hands wide once more and ran them over the blankets. As the texture of the coarse wool registered, she pictured the patient who had lain there returning to her clinic, as if she could summon him by will alone. She visualized him coming back to her in the same manner he had first arrived, with Apex and Mayhem holding his weight up by the armpits, his feet not touching the concrete, his head loose, his body injured in shocking ways…
But his eyes seeking her out even though her face was hidden beneath her hood.
She imagined Kane with utter specificity, his raw burn wounds, his patchy hair, his mouth drawn tight from the suffering. His withered limbs. His clawed hands that were missing fingers.
She had done what she could for him, but her efforts had made little difference. He had remained on the verge of death until the night before, when the guards had taken him away roughly, with no regard for his compromised condition.
She’d tried to stop them. But the male who had manhandled him had put a gun to her head. She would never forget the look in those cold, pale eyes.