by Diana Seere
Molly’s mouth went dry. “Why? What’s the matter with me?” Had sleeping with Tomas Nagy given her some kind of weird shifter disease?
Or…
Using the other sense she’d recently discovered, Molly scanned Lilah and saw the misty shadow of a wolf hovering over her shoulder, just as she had at the cocktail party earlier that evening. She was a wolf like Gavin was a wolf. Had it been in her nature before she’d met him? Or was it something about being with him that had brought it out?
Was that what happened when you slept with a shifter?
Molly looked at Jess, who had her nose in her phone and was calling out baby names she found on the Internet. Maybe it was because Jess was intoxicated, but Molly couldn’t see any animal shadows around her. Just the liquor fumes.
Tomas was a mountain lion, just like Edward. Apparently, Molly had a shifter type. How embarrassing.
What would it be like to turn into a lion? They hadn’t said anything earlier, so maybe it was risky for her to get involved with Edward. Maybe because she’d had sex with two lions it was more likely to… affect her somehow. But if it had been dangerous for her to have sex with Edward, wouldn’t he have warned her?
But he had. He’d tried to stay away from her, he’d tried to keep it cool. For a little while. Until he finally broke under the strain.
The strain of his hot need for her. Because she, Molly Sloan, was such an irresistible piece of ass.
Mountain lion ass.
“What’s it like to turn into an animal?” Molly asked Lilah, her voice a whisper. “Will it hurt?”
“You’re not going to shift. I mean, you probably won’t. Not like—” Lilah shot a panicked look over her shoulder in the direction of her sister, who was blissfully asleep.
“Not like you,” Molly said.
Lilah turned back to Molly and gripped her hands in hers. “You know—you know I—and the others—”
“I can sort of see it. The animal. Kind of like an aura.”
Lilah sucked in a breath. “Oh my God. You’re more powerful than they know,” she said.
“What are you talking about? Who knows what?”
“All of them. Gavin. The Stantons. The rest of the family. They know you’re special, but…”
“The only opinion I care about is Edward’s,” Molly said. And she was caring less and less about that one.
“Listen to me. I can’t believe they haven’t told you. I can’t believe…” Lilah trailed off. “It doesn’t matter. What’s important now is that you know you’re special. And whatever it is that makes you special is in your blood. Your blood.”
The memories of her many visits to the Boston Blood Center rushed through Molly’s mind.
The center that never quite seemed… right. How luxurious the clinic had seemed to be. Or how the same few people had always been giving blood when she was.
“My blood,” Molly said, her heart pounding harder with that very substance.
“I’m so sorry.” Lilah’s eyes filled with tears. “They’ve been lying to you. It’s not the Boston Blood Center, it’s LupiNex. It’s—Gavin.” Her voice cracked.
“What has he been doing with it?” If shifters were real, then maybe anything was possible. “Has he been drinking it? Like, you know, a vampire—”
“No! Oh God. No. They’re just studying it. In the lab. Trying to understand their own natures. At least Gavin is. There’s something in your DNA that affects shifters in ways they don’t understand. Gavin was hoping to develop a serum to control the shifting in a way they can’t control it now.”
“Control? Do they shift when they don’t want to?” Edward’s words from the drive back floated through her mind. Puberty. And when you meet your One.
“Sometimes,” Lilah said. “But that wasn’t his goal. He was… he was hoping to stop it altogether.”
“But why? Unless they lose control of their minds and kill people and ravage the countryside, because that I could totally understand.”
“No, they don’t ravage. They fight like animals, but that has more to do with them being men.” Lilah spat the word. “Males. Pigheaded, knuckle-dragging, arrogant males.”
“Why didn’t they tell me?” Molly thought of all the times she sat chatting with the staff in the clinic, smiling like an idiot afterward as she’d sucked down her juice and eaten her cookie, thinking she was such a good citizen for helping the poor little preemies that needed her special blood.
“Gavin says he didn’t know your name until three days ago. They had a security protocol to protect everyone.” Lilah shook her head. “But it obviously wasn’t enough.”
“Does Edward know?”
“He only just found out.”
“At the meeting?” Molly gritted her teeth, fearing the answer.
“No, a little earlier.”
Before they had sex then. Before they joined their bodies, their souls. Before they heard the Beat. “Why didn’t he tell me?” Molly asked, blinking back angry tears. Her palm began to itch again.
“Asher forbade it. And Gavin agreed with him. Edward is the youngest, you see—”
“I don’t care! He—we—he should’ve told me!” If not before, then certainly after. Definitely. That entire drive back to the ranch when they were hearing each other’s heartbeats, talking each other’s thoughts—
He’d made it all a lie.
“I’m going home. I’m not staying here.” Molly broke away from Lilah and marched toward her wing of the house.
“Wait!” Lilah chased after her. “You’re not safe on your own. That’s why I was so angry. Somebody stole your serum—”
“My what?”
“Molly, I’m so, so sorry. LupiNex made a serum out of your blood. And it was stolen. That must be how your identity was uncovered. I left before I heard everything because I was so mad. We don’t know who—”
All the pieces snapped together into a horrible, unbelievable picture. “That break-in at the club that Eva told me about. It was my blood that they stole?” Clearly, the break-in hadn’t happened at the Plat. Molly was tired of all the half-truths.
“Yes, and they’re afraid you might be in danger too. That’s why you have to stay here until they figure out who is behind it. This could threaten their—our—entire world.”
“I don’t care.” Molly kept walking, hurrying past the front door and turning toward the bedrooms. She’d rent a car. Would Uber come out this far? Where the hell was she anyway? She’d flown in on the private jet, but they could be hundreds of miles from civilization. Maybe thousands.
There was the cabin. How many miles was that, ten? Fifteen? She could walk that far. She’d seen where Edward put the key.
Speaking of keys, didn’t rich people often leave their car keys right next to the ignition when they were home in their highly secured remote compounds? There had to be a car around here that could get her at least as far as a town with a bus station.
“Please,” Lilah begged. “Don’t do anything crazy. I’ll go back and make Gavin apologize to you. He’ll explain everything. Much better than I ever could.”
It wasn’t Gavin’s apology that she needed. “You’ve done enough.” When Lilah flinched, Molly gave her a quick hug. If it hadn’t been for Lilah, she’d still be sitting in that living room watching Jess drink herself into a happily engaged stupor. “I mean that. Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.” It was good to know who you could trust.
And who you couldn’t.
Chapter 16
“Molly, wait!” Lilah was on her heels, pushing her way into Molly’s room and blocking the door with her body. “You can’t leave like this.”
Molly strode over to the closet and yanked out her suitcase. “I’m leaving. You can’t stop me.” Even if she’d never met Edward and was only here as Eva’s assistant, she’d want to get out of this place as soon as possible. To learn that the people who owned it had been stealing her blood under false pretenses for years…
&nb
sp; Too creepy. In a way that actually being among actual shapeshifters was not.
They’d lied to her. They’d stolen from her.
“You have every right to be angry,” Lilah said. Her cheeks were rosy and shining with sweat. “I’m furious myself, and I wasn’t the one they wronged.”
“Then you can see why I’m leaving,” Molly said. “I can’t sleep here. I can’t work here. I can’t…” I can’t love here.
Edward hadn’t told her. Even now he was in the Gathering, talking to other shifters, leaving her to fend for herself alone—in ignorance.
She’d never felt so alone in her life.
I love you, a voice said in her mind. Before I’d even met you, I loved you. Warmth tingled throughout her body. She forgot what she was saying to Lilah and swayed on her feet, paralyzed.
Her heart seemed to swell, to beat harder, louder, as if joined by another.
You.
Molly put a trembling hand over her eyes. The center of her left palm was stinging. Burning.
You.
“I totally understand why you’re leaving,” Lilah was saying. “That’s why I’m going with you.”
Shaking, Molly tried to break out of the spell. “What?” She took a deep breath. The reverberations of Edward’s voice echoed in her mind. She massaged her palm with the thumb on her other hand, trying to rub away the pain.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” Lilah said. “I’ll go with you back to Boston.”
“But you can’t,” Molly said. “What about Gavin? What about—”
Jess snapped her fingers in the open doorway and then fell against the wall for balance. “We’ll all go. The menfolk think they can push us around? Well, we’ll show them.” She put a hand over her mouth and burped delicately. “We better hurry, though. They’ll probably come after us.”
“But—” Molly gaped at both women. Her former coworkers.
Her friends.
Lilah pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and scooped out an armful of her clothes. “We’ll help you pack.”
It took Molly another second to realize she needed their help. And was grateful for it. “No, I’ll do it myself. You get your own things.”
“I only need a jacket and my purse. Those are already in Gavin’s study right down the hall. I’d thought he and I were going out after—well, never mind. Now I’m going out with you, just a little farther than I’d planned.”
“But you don’t have anything to wear,” Molly said.
“I’ve got plenty of clothes at the penthouse in Boston.”
Jess grinned and held up the messenger bag that she used for school. “And I thought I was going to study tonight, so I kept it with me. It’s got everything I need. ID and a credit card, am I right? Let’s go.”
What had Molly done to deserve so much kindness? She’d dressed them in nice clothes, and they’d shared a few jokes and cocktails, but this was something else. “Are you sure?”
Lilah stuffed Molly’s pile of underwear and T-shirts into the suitcase before moving over to the closet and capturing her hanging clothes in a hug. “Never more sure. Sorry we don’t have time to fold this nicely. I’ll send Manny over to press them later. Gavin’s chauffeur does anything. Really quite a marvel.”
Molly suddenly remembered the man who’d been shadowing her at the ranch. “Morgan,” Molly whispered. “They told him to watch me. We’ll have to ditch him.”
Jess, a little unsteady from the alcohol, flung Molly’s pink bathrobe into the suitcase. “Good point. Lilah’s got seniority here. Maybe she can figure out something to distract him. Give him a job to do.”
“He’s already distracted,” Lilah said tightly. “He’s at the Gathering with everyone else.”
“Morgan?” Already angry, this pushed Molly over the edge. “They included Morgan, the butler and bodyguard and God knows what else, but I, whose body is at stake here, am left to rot alone?”
Lilah had been efficient; the suitcase was ready. She rolled it over to the door, her face fixed in a scowl. “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe he’s a shifter of some kind.”
“But I didn’t see that in him,” Molly said. “No shadow.”
“No what?” Jess asked.
Lilah and Molly shared a look. “We’ll explain later,” Lilah said, marching over to the bathroom.
“Maybe it was because I hadn’t really looked for it before,” Molly muttered. She hadn’t started seeing the shadows until that evening.
Lilah returned from the bathroom with Molly’s toilet case. “We’ll take the Ram. We just need a little head start. Once we’re in the air, there’s nothing they can do.”
“A ram that can fly?” Molly asked. At this point, she was ready to believe anything. “Is the ram a sheep shifter with wings?”
“The Ram is a full-size pickup truck with wheels. It’ll get us to the plane. Roger will fly the plane to Boston.” Lilah ushered them out of the room.
“Roger?” Molly asked weakly. There was no use arguing with Lilah tonight. Maybe it was the pregnant thing. She was a force of nature.
“Family pilot,” Jess said. “Because of course they have one of those, right?”
“Actually, they have three,” Lilah muttered.
After grabbing their coats from the hall closet—the house was quiet, and Molly figured bitterly that the Gathering continued happily without them—the three women strode out a side door into the cold night. Within minutes, Lilah was driving them in a huge red pickup down the private drive to the highway. The roads were empty.
“Good thing you had the keys,” Molly said. “I was thinking about hot-wiring some wheels earlier.”
“It’s mine. No way I was going to get stuck out here without a way of getting around on my own,” Lilah said. “It took me two days to convince Gavin I didn’t need a chauffeur. Or an imported luxury car with gold trim.” At first her tone was loving, amused. But then she seemed to remember the events of the evening. “Stupid caveman,” she muttered.
Soon they were at the private airstrip where Molly had arrived just the night before, knocking on the front door of a large ranch house.
“Roger lives here so he can be ready at a moment’s notice,” Lilah said, knocking again. “Gavin’s probably going to regret it now, but he told me—during that argument over my car—that I could ask Roger to fly me wherever, whenever. And he promised to share those instructions with all the staff.”
At that moment, Roger appeared in the doorway already in uniform and full of energy, as if he were a firefighter just having heard the alarm. In an impossibly short period of time, their flight to Boston was cleared with the official parties and they were aboard and in the air. A woman who may have been Roger’s wife—Molly noticed she’d kissed him before takeoff, anyway—joined them in the back, offering drinks and snacks.
It was all so easy.
“Rich people,” Molly muttered.
“Don’t knock it till you try it.” With a grin, Jess pulled out an amber glass bottle from a narrow compartment in the cabin wall. “Bottoms up!”
“Oh God,” Lilah said with a sigh, “I wish I could join you. Pour Molly one, will you Jess? She’s not going to chug it out of the bottle like you do.”
“Thanks,” Molly said. “Please make it a double.”
Gavin had a wild look in his eyes, frantic and unhinged, though only for a few seconds after Lilah’s departure. Tucking emotion away, he resumed his stony appearance and announced, “It’s in everyone’s best interests to keep Molly Sloan on a ‘need to know’ basis.”
“I agree,” Edward declared, Sophia glaring at him, her expression changing to one of hurt. His chest tightened.
Gavin’s body language exuded gratitude.
“Which means,” Edward spoke up, “she needs to know everything.”
Chaos erupted. Uncertain who was speaking at any given time, all he heard was cacophony, reproach, anger, dismissiveness, and underneath it all, a quiet thread of deep, ancient determina
tion.
Their arguments and shouts were tinged with fear. He could taste it, dancing on his tongue, the vibrations making his back teeth ache.
Miklos Nagy’s voice carried over the others. “If your father were still alive, none of this mess ever would have happened.”
“If my father were alive,” Asher snapped, leaning forward on the thick oak table in a dominant stance, teeth bared as he took on the direct challenge to his authority as alpha male of the shifter world, “you would not be here.” Since their father’s death, Edward knew, Asher had spent all of his political and social capital on the shifter world working to unite the handful of remaining shifters, and while the uneasy truce was by no means strong, it was a truce, nonetheless.
The elder Nagy held Asher’s gaze, refusing to back down, but he did not reply. The ancient rivalry between the two families would have been repaired with Edward and Vivien’s marriage.
Instead, it had worsened.
“It is bad enough,” Asher grunted, expecting everyone to settle down and listen, “that Gavin’s desperate need for approval from our dead father has led to this serum and the theft, but to add insult to injury and willingly inform a human about the shifter world and about a biological weapon that is made from her blood is an atrocious affront to all that we know!”
He slammed a palm on the thick oak table.
Sophia stood, cheeks red, mouth set in a furious line, eyes blazing. Derry remained seated, looking up at his sister. Edward tried to read his brother bear and could not. A dawning sick feeling in his belly told him that Derry was undecided.
“You’re full of shit, Asher,” Sophia declared. “She deserves to know the truth. Gavin has been lying to her for selfish reasons. And you’re not much better, now that you know the truth.”
Leave it to Sophia to be blunt.
If hot coals could have fired out of Asher’s eyes and incinerated Sophia on the spot, they would have. His face twisted with a paternal pain, as if he could not fathom that his little sister, the one he’d helped to raise, would betray him.
