Page 15 of Conquered Betrayal
Despair cracked my chest open. My bear bellowed in anguish. I could hardly take a breath. What had I done? How could I fix it? Why wouldn’t she have talked to me before doing this?
She left like this because she didn’t want to talk.
This was permanent.
* * *
I shot up straight like a canon had gone off beside me, my head pounding, my arm smarting. It took me a second to orient myself, strange details seeping into my awareness. The scent of fresh paint and dust hung in the air. I was topless. Cold air brushed against my skin, a striped blanket pooling at my hips. An overhead light lit me up like a science experiment. I twitched. Achy pain speared through my arm. I lifted my other hand to touch the tenderness. A bandage covered my shoulder and biceps.
“Careful there,” spoke a soft voice. “Don’t want you to start bleeding again.”
I zeroed in on the person, a human woman in a flowery, red sundress standing just inside a set of double doors. Her copper skin shone with vitality against the darker shade of her long hair. The room felt like a hospital, but also…didn’t. For starters, there weren’t any windows; all the walls were made of rough concrete. I lay on a gurney, but couldn’t hear regular hospital noises on the other side of those double doors. And she definitely wasn’t dressed like a nurse.
“Who are you?” I croaked, my throat dry. With a stroke of my hand, I felt the hair on my jaw, thick like I hadn’t trimmed it for a while. “Where am I?” I tossed the blanket aside. My shirt might have been missing, but I wore the same slacks I had on when I’d found Jolyn in front of the MBI building. I tensed. “Where is she?”
“One thing at a time, Lover Boy.” Her back to me, she fussed around on the counter beside the door. “I’m Alina Ramos, and you’re in a secure location at the moment.”
Must be one of Jolyn’sfriends, the ones she’d been talking to on her comm. “And where is this secure location exactly?” I clenched my hands, feeling the urge to lash out, my anger mounting. I’d found Jolyn. We’d been chased, and I’d been shot.
Alina turned, a digital thermometer in her hand, and with a quirk of her lips, walked toward me. “That’s on a need-to-know basis.”
“If I’m here, then I need to know.” I knew the words came out harsh, but Jolyn had given me half answers, and now this woman was being evasive. If someone didn’t tell me what was going on, I wasn’t going to be able to hold on to the equally frustrated bear inside me. All this secretive bullshit was more proof Jolyn and her friends were professional thieves.
“I really didn’t think you’d be up so soon,” she said, not answering my question, and seeming unperturbed by my tone. She held the thermometer up to my forehead. It beeped. She frowned at the readout. “I haven’t been able to get your fever down.”
“I run hot.” Being a shifter, I didn’t have a normal human temperature, and painkillers and sedatives burned through my system quickly. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.
God, how long was I out? What had I done while unconscious? My heart raced with dread—as fast as my mind sped with likely scenarios. My bear could have taken over and shifted to heal, but from the tenderness and heat radiating from my arm, that hadn’t happened.
Her gaze bounced to the bandage at my shoulder. “So far, you’re healing well.”
I stiffened and watched her closely as she walked backward to the sink. Had I given myself away? But she didn’t wink, or look scared, or give any other indication she’d seen more than a wound in my arm.
“The bullet went clear through your biceps, by the way.” She set the thermometer on the counter next to a basket of bandages and glanced at me over her shoulder. “It didn’t hit anything too important, just lost some blood. It’ll probably be stiff for a few weeks. You should probably get a transfusion as soon as possible.”
“Where’s Jolyn?” Not that I wasn’t thankful she’d patched me up, but I couldn’t take being stationary, even if my shoulder felt like it had been through a meat grinder and the throbbing in my skull moved to a space behind my eyeballs. I needed a private place to shift and heal all my wounds, including the headache. It would restore the blood loss as well. My bear paced beneath the surface, wanting to be free, to stretch and move. It had been too long since I’d given him free rein.
I struggled with the locking mechanism of the gurney’s safety bar, then swung my legs over the side. As soon as my feet hit the floor, the double doors opened. Jolyn stepped through, a blue dress shirt in her hand. She froze when her eyes landed on me. Her hair was how I remembered it from years ago. Freed from its net, it spiraled in every direction, wild like an out-of-control bonfire. She’d ditched her business attire for dark-wash jeans and a black T-shirt. With her face free of makeup, her freckles stood out in stark contrast to her pale skin tone. I knew what those freckles tasted like, both salty and sweet.
Suddenly lightheaded, I gripped the metal bar of the gurney behind me to keep upright. She took a step forward, like she was going to help me. I threw her a glare, daring her to get close. After everything that had happened since this morning, the strangling I’d been thinking about appealed to me like never before.
She stopped and crossed her arms over her chest, the shirt dangling from the crook of her elbow. We stared at each other like we were strangers, and I should have realized earlier that was exactly what we’d been from the beginning.
My fingers clenched on the bed. She’d thrown away everything we’d built together and I still had no idea why. Why had she stolen from me? What purpose did it serve? Did she understand what had happened to the design, that it had been used in two women’s abductions? Who was her buyer?
“You’re up,” she said, then made a face like it was a stupid thing to say.
My bear twitched at the sound of her voice. I glowered, not wanting to share any of his reactions. “Where are we, Jolyn?”
“Our home base.” Behind her, Alina slipped from the room. “For now. Until we accomplish all our goals.”
What were the chances she’d go into detail about those goals?Maybe it’s better not to know.“Are we in Detroit?”
She hesitated, then nodded, slipping her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, the blue shirt tucked over her wrist.
At least they hadn’t taken me far. If I’d somehow ended up on the other side of the country, I wouldn’t be able to keep my promises to Kane and Brooke. Shit, I needed to call them. Speaking of which…
“Where’s my phone?” It wasn’t in my back pocket where I last remembered it.
