Page 37 of Sweethearts and Savages
Well, I was until he realized he could use me to exact his revenge against the monsters who had stolen his ability to walk. Who’d molded him into the man he’d become before he’d died. Mean. Bitter. A little too generous with his backhand.
The girl—I mean, the monster—made a noise, and my hand went to my gun. But she didn’t even move. This was a clusterfuck and it was making me jumpy as hell.
I set another few logs on the budding fire, and already the chill was being chased away from the tiny cabin. It was just one room, with a bed, couch and fireplace at one end, and a kitchen and dining table at the other near the front door. That was it. The toilet was off the back porch, just an outhouse with an impressive hole in the ground.
When I’d bought it as a “rustic getaway,” they hadn’t been kidding.
Another snuffling noise drew my gaze back to the couch. The blankets shifted and then I was looking at bright blue eyes, so clear they were like looking into the heart of a gemstone.
Then she screamed behind the duct tape.
18
Enit
It was good to know that the part of my brain that had broken my speech wasn’t so damaged that I couldn’t scream. I screamed and screamed as I drifted out of the foggy, drug-induced blackness, like I was wading through mud. But when I saw those dark eyes staring down at me, I knew I was in trouble.
As if the duct tape across my mouth didn’t give it away. My lips felt raw and chapped, and I felt like I was suffocating behind it, even though I knew I wasn’t. The man, the hunter, grimaced as he looked at me.
“I need to take that off, but you have to stop screaming. No one can hear you here, so all you’re doing is making your throat hurt.”
My eyes felt too large in my head as I stared up at him. It was the same hunter from the woods outside the Academy, I was sure of that. A shiver wracked my body. I was so fucking cold. My muscles ached, and my joints felt like they were frozen until I was nearly moaning in pain. What the hell had happened to me?
I also realized I was naked, and a whole new horror dawned on me. I’d been completely unconscious. Did this man, this human, take advantage of me when I was unconscious?
I wailed, pulling the blankets tighter around me like they could protect me.
“Oh shit, no. I didn’t… I wouldn’t do that,” he growled, sounding offended.
I snarled at him, as he turned, grabbing a shirt from a duffle near his feet. “You were a fucking wolf. You were meant to be a man, not some tiny fucking girl.” He grunted like it was my fault he’d abducted me. He threw me the shirt and turned his back. “Put that on. Don’t try anything stupid. I mightn’t rape women, but I’ll still shoot you dead if you try to run.”
Terror crawled along my skin, and I grabbed the shirt and pulled it over my head. Apparently, my fear response wasn’t so broken that I’d forgotten the terror of a gun. Some fears were ingrained in your DNA. Fear of a predator, and when you were the top of the food chain, the fear of a gun barrel in your face was a visceral response. But when I looked at the man behind the gun, the fear was just gone.
Yep. I was still broken.
I crawled closer to the fire, seeking its warmth. I was so fucking cold that I didn’t think I’d ever be warm again. When he turned around, I was almost inside the hearth. “Move back or you’ll burn.”
He grabbed the blanket and dropped it over my head, but didn’t make me move from where I was. His eyes were cold, but hefeltlike something different. He felt like regret.
I’d always been good at reading people. It wasn’t some magical process, where I could read their heart’s desires or some shit like half the Academy thought. No, it was more an extension of my Omega powers. An extension of the feelings everyone had.
He watched me with wary eyes, like I was about to jump up and tear his throat out. It might have been possible in my wolf form, but he was more likely to die from frostbite wherever the fuck we were. And I knew we were a long way from home.
I couldn’t sense my siblings, the connections I’d had forever.
The air smelled different, crisper, less convoluted without scents of shifters and cars and people. It smelled like nature and the man in front of me.
He was tall, nearly as tall as Bohdie. He was broad, like he spent a lot of time working out. There was a small scar on his lower lip that looked like he’d been punched in the mouth and the split had healed rough.
“What.” I growled at myself. I wanted to yell, “What do you want? With me? With Eden Academy?” but the words wouldn’t come.
He paused, waiting for the rest of the sentence but I just held his eyes. I gritted my teeth. “Why. Take?”
He frowned. “You don’t speak English? You understood me before?”
I clenched my fists. I wanted to pound his face in, as my face flamed with embarrassment and rage. I lifted my hair, which was an inch or so long now, and showed my scar. “Accident. Brain.”
His hand moved toward me like he wanted to trace the scar that wrapped around my skull but I flinched away.
