Page 46 of Shadow

I couldn’t shake the image of those eyes. The creature’s gaze wasn’t empty or primal. It held some kind of intelligence.

I rubbed my arms and began pacing, my thoughts spiraling. How could our government have known about this and kept it hidden? If King’s suspicions were right, they had known as far back as the first wave of the invasion.

Nuclear fallout didn’t affect the hellhounds or hellhumans, as I might start calling them, but it killed countless people. And those who survived? They were left to face the monsters.

I needed a drink.

Opening my door, I found both guards standing at attention. One arched a brow as I addressed him directly. “I need a bottle of tequila. Do you know if there’s any available?”

Before he could answer, I rushed to add, “Honestly, I’m not picky. If you have anything; beer, whiskey, whatever, I’ll take it.”

He nodded silently and walked away, leaving me with the second guard. Boot had mentioned there would always be two, so I was never left unprotected if one had to run an errand.

For once, I wasn’t as resentful of my confinement. There were hellhounds in this compound, and I was terrified I would run into one. Since I was stuck here, I might as well use this safety to my advantage and ease the pressure I had been under since I arrived. It sounded like a great idea, even if I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes you had to do what you had to do.

Back inside, I changed into a nightshirt and shorts, pacing the room while my thoughts spiraled. Pacing solved nothing, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Ten minutes later, a knock on the door interrupted my circling. When I opened it, the guard handed me a bottle of Havana Club rum.

I took it with a grateful smile and closed the door in his face, wasting no time in finding a glass. Dumping the water into the sink, I refilled the glass with the amber liquid.

The first swallow burned all the way down. The second, not so much.

And so it went.

It had been years since I had gotten drunk. Too many years.

I sank onto the bed, my head resting against the pillow, the glass perched on my chest, and the bottle sitting on the nightstand. My thoughts, now easing with alcohol, ascended into the absurd.

King popped into my head.

A fuckinggorgeous, asshole King who had threatened to kill me too many times to count. He had me sleeping ina building that held hellhounds several floors below. Creatures capable of ripping everyone to shreds.

I finished the first half of the bottle and cared a little less.

An hour later, the bottle was mostly empty, and I was sipping at what was left in my glass, the alcohol fully in control. The room spun lazily, and I knew tomorrow morning was going to be hell.

A heavy knock at the door jolted me from my morbid thoughts about hellhounds tearing me apart.

“Come in,” I slurred, making no effort to move. I was too drunk to stand anyway.

The man himself entered, or should I say, the King. For a moment, I wondered if he was there to kill me. “Go ahead, do your worst,” I slurred with exaggerated bravado.

I wasn’t prepared for his smile. That damn, soft, inviting smile that transformed his harsh features into the surprisingly human side of him even if it was an illusion.

“If that almost-empty bottle is your doing,” he said. “I don’t need to kill you. I just need to wait you out. Ever hear of alcohol poisoning?” he asked with humor.

Yes, fucking humor. I lifted my glass in a mock toast and took another sip. It was good, too good. “You have no…” I hiccupped loudly, “idea how much liquor I drank in college. If that didn’t kill me, this bottle won’t either.” I gestured toward him with the glass, sloshing its contents slightly. “If you drink, join me.”

Instead of responding, he moved toward the bed and sat near my knees, swinging his full gaze to mine.

I studied his face, and for the first time, maybe, I found his eyes sexy. The damned eyes I wasn’t supposed to look into. Not the rest of him, though. He was just too big to be sexy.

A giggle escaped me. Back in the day, all I wanted was a man taller than me. Now I had one sitting on my big, lonelybed, and I was judging his height as a flaw. It was. And those muscles? A total turn-off. They were. Really. He was just too much.

“Why can you look into my eyes, but I can’t look into yours?” I asked, marveling at how the entire sentence actually came out the way I meant it to. Or at least I thought it did.

“Your eyes are bouncing from the alcohol, and it isn’t giving Beast trouble.” He lifted the mostly empty bottle, and for a second, I thought he was going to take a drink. Instead, he poured the remaining liquid into my glass, filling it to the brim. “Liquor does nothing for us, so please, enjoy it without me.”

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