AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Your name, miss,” Tungsten’s deep voice bellowed, though his tone seemed to skirt the edge between calmly authoritative and demanding. “I will have it now.”
She looked to Bronze, who, with his arms folded across his chest, stared back with an unreadable expression. Likewise, the other two males eyed her with curious intent, though, with every passing moment, the encroaching panic crept higher, tightening around her and drawing all her air into a vacuum she had no hope of surviving.
She was going to die. She had made a terrible choice in leaving, and she would now pay for it. By the mark of her own stupidity and carelessness, she would pay for it.
“Tungsten, Bronze, back away. Now,” the blond one said.
Clara threw her head from side to side as the hyperventilating kicked in. “This can’t be happening. I found the stone circle, the bridge. I did everything I was supposed to do.”
“Shit, she’s going into shock.” The large one, Iron, barked orders and ran toward the bed. Large hands yanked the blanket off her. “Why the hell does she still have damp clothes on? Get one of the mates in here now.”
Rough hands pressed against the pulse points at her throat and wrists. Her sleeve was shoved up high on her arm, then something sharp pricked the skin at the crux of her elbow. Her wolf snarled, but even her beast had weakened too much. More shouting, drawers opening, footsteps banging down the hall, heading toward the room. A woman’s voice. Then more yelling.
“No . . . no . . .” She had worked so hard, covered her tracks, learned everything she could before she planned her escape, and it still hadn’t been enough. Anything she did would never be enough.
A heavy pall pulled her further into the hysteria, until all she could do was embrace the darkness that rose up to claim her.
But before her mind was pulled from consciousness entirely, she caught a few mumbled words from the male who’d brought her there. Bronze, she dimly remembered. His name was Bronze.
“Not a human . . . a lycan . . . some sort of trouble.”
Her final thought left her in a whisper of despair and regret.
She would truly die this day, but that didn’t crush her nearly as hard as the weight of her failure.
Chapter 6
Thirty minutes later, Rhode and Drea—his care provider and soul bond to Bronze’s other brother Chrome—walked out of the sick bay where Clara was being seen. Bronze barely let Drea’s purple nitrile gloves hit the waste bin before he rushed over to both of them. But before his first question could leave his lips, Rhode pegged him with a warning look that said far more than any expression had any right to.
All’s good. Settle. And then finally . . . We’ve got a lot to talk about.
Drea squeezed on a few pumps of hand sanitizer from the wall unit outside the patient room, gave her hands a few good hearty shakes to hasten the drying and dispense with some of the alcoholic fumes, and dug around in her lab coat for her always-present bottle of lily-scented moisturizer. Mages, even in the middle of the night, the woman stuck to a personal care routine with enough diligence to make the Armed Forces seem like they were slacking in the scheduled efficiency department. Figured it made sense, given that she chose to have ass-length hair and all the maintenance that came with it and had still managed to patch up their boy Rhode after his captivity far better than any of the sentinels ever could.
Not for the first time, Bronze wondered why more mortal civilizations weren’t matriarchies. Shit made sense, even if he was a millisecond away from the vein in his temple exploding and taking him into aneurysm territory over the woman’s dallying.
With painfully slow movements, Drea finally finished her mile-freaking-long skin care routine and gave them both a reassuring smile.
“She’s sleeping now. Fluids are dripping into her just fine, and all her vitals are steadily creeping toward normal. Whoever she is, she’s damn lucky you found her when you did.”
Bronze nodded and did his best to keep from not so slowly escorting his brother’s mate way the heck out of earshot so he could get to the bottom of whatever Rhode had managed to discover. The former seraphim commander of Chrome’s intelligence unit may have been out of the game and stuck in the mortal realm like the rest of the sentinels, but old habits didn’t just die hard with that one. They were pulverized into atomic ash and cast to the wind along with the dead secrets of his enemies.
Efficient, that one.
In other words, the dude also knew stuff. And, yeah, Bronze really needed to know what he knew.
“Appreciate the help,” Bronze said before placing a hand on the small of Drea’s back and urging her down the hallway toward her and her mate’s living quarters. No easy feat, given that the woman was nearly as tall as he was and had a backbone stronger than most suspension bridge cables.
Her long blonde braid, a bit mussed from its hasty middle-of-the-night erection but still just as heavy, smacked him in the chin on the back spin as she whipped out of his hold. The look in her violet eyes promised a certain kind of punishment that made even Bronze’s balls tense up on alert. “Um, no. You do not get to wake me up before the ass crack of dawn, have me explain to Chrome why I’m being forced to put work clothes on, drop me in front of some poor injured woman and say, ‘Here, fix her,’ without providing me details.” Her insistent finger found the precise spot on his chest that had zero padding and abysmal pain tolerance, and she rage-poked the shit out of him. “I’m here, and thanks to me, so is she, so start talking. I want deets.”
“Ouch! Fine, okay? Fine.” Bronze murmured his agitation, grabbed up her hands and, with a show of caring patience worthy of a goddamned Academy Award, slowly placed them at her sides. But because he wasn’t born yesterday, he strategically moved his grip to her shoulders lest she get any more bright ideas for sudden movements or finger jabs.
Her mouth, however, he couldn’t do anything about.
“I’m serious, Bronze. Just what the hell did I walk into here?” Some of the fire had extinguished from her plea and had been replaced with the compassion and concern that made Chrome and the others love her and allowed Rhode to trust her implicitly with his care following his captivity in Cyro’s camp, despite the seraph’s well-guarded secrets.
Right on cue, the seraphim commander sidled over to Drea and replaced Bronze’s hands with his own, then turned her to face him. “You are, by far, the greatest asset to any of us, and to me, especially.”
A subtle flush darkened Drea’s already heated cheeks. Mages, the woman cranked out BTUs like a frickin’ fighter jet engine when she sank her teeth into something. But the tells of exhaustion were there for those who knew to look for them. Despite the calculating questions running behind her eyes, the shadows beneath them told a different story, as did the way her shoulders sagged into Rhode’s far gentler hold.
