Page 147 of Claimed

I see her sneaking cookies to children behind Meadows’ house and her with them all running into overgrown weeds to hide from him. Her calf gets ripped by a jagged piece of twisted metal and I feel it.

The fast-strobing image reel stops with the visage of Ty’s wolf on the other side of a gun barrel.

Ty’s eyes zoom in before there’s a spray of blood exploding from Ty’s side. He drops. The image repeats itself and I see it again. And again. And again and now I know that this image continues to haunt my mate.

I feel with crystal clarity how much she already loves me. How relieved she is that I’m hers, that she’s mine. How badly she wants to give me a family, to be my reward. How terrified she is that she can’t give me healthy children. She sees my smiling face in the diner over and over. She sees me when I’m making love to her. She dreams of me.

She deserves happiness. She deserves to feel like she is my reward and even more… that she’s got one in me. And I’ll make sure it’s how she feels every single fucking day.

38

Stacy

We’re sitting in the rubble that used to be the office and I feel like he’s having internal aftershocks for a few minutes before he finally loosens his grip on me as our eyes meet.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Guessin’ it was my rage at feeling the shit you’ve been through,” he says, looking almost broken. And it hurts to see him looking like this, looking like he’s in pain. I see it and boy, do I feel it. It feels like my heart is being shredded at what I feel from him.

“Must be down to my new magic. Never felt anything that extreme before. I saw your trauma, babe. Don’t know if I saw it all but I saw a lot. Saw it just now inside my own head. Saw where you got this.” He fingers the scar on my calf. “Saw how many took you on all fours against your wishes, know you couldn’t fight, couldn’t even say no, because of that fucking…” His lip curls, his nostrils flare. “I want to fucking murder that fuck,” he growls. “I must have tapped into coven magic and saw what my cousin Ronnie sees when she touches you. All the pain, all the abuse, all the ugliness your fuckin’ brother has inflicted.”

I frown. When she touches me? She only did once. And now I understand why her face changed so drastically.

“I feel it, Blossom. All of it. And I want your brother’s blood. I want it spilled here in this fuckin’ hellhole he created. Then I want us walking away from it forever. I’m tellin’ Brody, Mitch, all of these people need to get the fuck out of this place. There’s toomuch bad here. Too. Fucking. Much. The energy here? No. It’s not good here.”

He shakes his head with disgust, driving his fingers through his hair.

If this is what the truth does to Grey, how can he expect me to willingly upset him in the future?

“No! Don’t keep shit from me, woman. If you’d told me this already, he’d already be dead and out of our goddamn hair.”

I jerk back and try to get out of his grip.

He doesn’t let go of me, so I curl into a ball.

“Stacy!” he snaps, holding me tighter, mouth right at my ear. “That’s not blame. Don’t take on a new helping of blame that’s not yours. Hear me? Things are gonna work out how they’re supposed to. We’ve gotta trust in that. Trust it, be smart, and deal with things as they come. Whether that’s the sick, the evil, having a baby, whatever it is. Yeah? All I ask is just be fuckin’ honest with me, no matter you think I’ll like what you have to say or not.”

I stop trying to pull away and instead I wrap my arms around him, sniffling.

“Okay?” he pushes.

I nod, inhaling his scent, which never fails to comfort me.

“Talk to me,” he finally requests, voice softening, fingers tangling into my hair as I burrow as close as I can get.

“I wish I could purr for you too, Grey,” I tell him. “I wish I could give you as much as you give me.”

“I don’t need you to purr, I just need you within reach. And as long as I’ve got that, babe, I’ll have everything I need.”

I sigh. How did I go from so unlucky to so very lucky?

“I want to comfort you, too, I mean…”

“Nothing will give me that until this shit is done. What’d make it worse is not leveling with me about everything. Everything, mate. Please.”

“Okay.”

“Talk to me,” he repeats.

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