by Noelle Marie
I glanced up at Cornelius, stunned. Considering the man’s wide-eyed stare, I didn’t know which of us was more shocked by his actions.
But the surprise painted on the man’s face soon melted away, swiftly replaced by an indignant kind of fury. “Don’t look at me that way, you… you ungrateful, spoiled child!” He ran his hands through his white hair. It was the first time I’d seen his orderly locks look the least bit disheveled. “That you would have the audacity to say such a thing after all Vanessa and I have done for you!” He glared. “Do you have any idea what would have become of you if we hadn’t taken you in? If she hadn’t wanted a baby so damn badly?”
Through my shocked stupor, I recognized Cornelius’s words for what they were: a confirmation of my suspicions. I wasn’t his biological daughter; I wasn’t Vanessa’s, either.
“I knew I never should have let her sweet talk me into taking you,” he continued to rant, hardly even talking to me so much anymore as himself. “But she was just so desperate for a child of her own. After a decade of trying, she’d finally come to accept that she was barren, but the adoption agencies were taking so long to get back to us.” Cornelius shook his head, releasing a hysteria-tinged laugh. “She didn’t even care that you weren’t fully human – an abomination to nature.”
My belly clenched. Surely, he didn’t mean-
Cornelius was so wound up that he didn’t even notice another person slink into the room until it was too late. (I was so distraught that I hadn’t noticed him, either.)
“Now, now, Cornelius,” Felix tsked from the doorway, his voice floating out from behind the man. “There’s no need for name calling.”
Cornelius visibly started at the interruption, jerking around to face the newcomer.
“Felix!” he exclaimed, obviously flustered by the man’s sudden appearance, “I… well, I wasn’t referring to you, of course. You’re an exception to the rule. Why, no one could say a word against you, the fine, upstanding citizen you are. The Vanderbilts, either, of course,” he hastily added.
Felix raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “Of course,” he deadpanned.
I used the time Cornelius took to stammer through his blubbering retraction to push myself up off the floor and stand on wobbly legs. “What are you talking about?” I asked, addressing the man I’d spent the past week thinking was my father. “Not fully human?”
When Cornelius didn’t immediately answer, I turned to Felix. “What’s he talking about?” I demanded.
I tensed when the man approached me, but forced myself to hold my ground, even when he stopped a mere foot away and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear in that falsely-tender way he liked to imitate. “Sweetheart, there’s no need to play dumb any longer. I think we both realize you already know.”
Felix’s eyes flashed yellow, his pupils elongating in a way that could never be attributed to a trick of the light or an overactive imagination.
“You’re a shifter,” I stated dumbly.
In that moment, it was so obvious that I felt stupid for not having noticed earlier. The animal way Felix moved, the sharpness of his unnaturally white smile, the way he always seemed to know how I was feeling – when I found something he said particularly upsetting.
It wasn’t paranoia, after all; Felix had been using his enhanced shifter senses to profile me.
“That’s my girl,” he praised, condescension practically dripping from his voice as he patted my cheek. I stiffened when his fingers trailed lower, caressing my jaw in a deceptively sweet gesture before his thumb was suddenly pressing right there, into the open cut on my bottom lip.
I gasped, jerking my face out of his grasp and taking two harried steps backwards.
Felix grinned. “And you, sweetheart, are a bearer.” He tilted his head to the side as he examined me. “Though I must admit to being curious as to how you know about us, especially considering your supposed memory loss.” The smile fell from his face. “Your little shifter boyfriend tell you?” he asked. “The owner of that shirt I confiscated?”
A shot of terror swept down my spine.
Derek.
I didn’t know why, exactly, but I knew I must never let Felix find out about him. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Felix’s grin returned at my answer, the smile that stretched across his face decidedly predatory. “Of course you don’t,” he agreed faux-politely before turning to Cornelius.
“I told you the girl was out of control. Consorting with strange men she hardly knows-”
I stiffened, taken off guard by the conversation’s sudden change of direction. “What-?”
“-lying straight to our faces about it-” Felix continued to list my supposed transgressions.
“Hey!”
“-disrespecting you, practically spitting on the grave of your dead wife.”
“That’s not true!” I protested.
Felix wrapped his hand around my elbow and had my arm twisted behind my back so fast that I didn’t even have time to react before his other hand had circled around me and curled over my mouth. I was trapped, my back to his front, his face hovering over my shoulder – so close to my own that if he turned at all, his nose would have brushed against my cheek. “And she never knows when. to. stop. talking,” he added, his voice dangerously low.
Felix eyed me disapprovingly before redirecting his gaze back to Cornelius. “I think it’s clear that you’ve been entirely too accommodating, Cornelius. If we’re going to get Sloane here properly trained for her shifter husband to enjoy in time for their wedding this September,” – It was obvious, by then, of course, that the Vanderbilts were shifters, but I still tensed at the way Felix so plainly stated it. – “I suggest you let me take matters in my own hands.”
I didn’t know how it was possible, exactly, but in that moment, it felt a lot like Felix had orchestrated this entire thing – liked he’d been plotting to turn Cornelius against me from the start.
I stared at the man in question, trying to implore to him with my eyes alone not to do this – hand me over to Felix.
Cornelius’s countenance, however, was, for once, unreadable.
After a long, tense moment passed… “Of course, Felix. If that’s what you think is best.”
Despite it all, the betrayal still stung.
“I do,” Felix confirmed. “Now, if you’ll excuse us,” he said, finally removing his hand from my mouth so he could grab my other arm and begin to drag me from the room, “I have an important lesson to impart upon this young lady.”
I tried to jerk out of Felix’s grasp, and though his hold was unyielding, I managed to curl my fingers around the edge of the door frame as Felix attempted to wrench me from the room.
“Cornelius! Cornelius, please!” I begged, and though the word tasted bitter on my tongue, I was desperate enough to try it, anyway: “Dad!”
The man’s shoulders tensed at the exclamation, but when he turned to face me a moment later, his eyes were hard. “To answer your question, Sloane, dear,” he said, voice purposefully bland, “you’re not my daughter. You never were.”
With that last parting shot, Felix managed to yank my hand from the door frame.
I was forced to get over the sting of Cornelius’s rejection when I realized that instead of being dragged back towards my bedroom, I was being lugged in the direction of the staircase. “Let go of me!” I demanded, attempting to lurch away from Felix, but the man only tightened his grip on my arms. “Where are you taking me?”
I managed to grab hold of the banister, but Felix, growing impatient with my struggling, merely tore me away from the mahogany railing before wrapping me in a firmer hold so that my arms were immobile at my sides.
“Comfortable beds in big, fancy bedrooms are for good girls,” he grit out between clenched teeth as he hauled me down the stairs, “not naughty imps like you.”
He grunted, but didn’t otherwise react when I kicked him in the shin.
Dread, like a stone, sunk to the bottom of my belly when we reached the bottom of the stairs and he dragged me towards the basement door. Ignoring my fruitless wriggling, he kicked it open before lugging me down the steps.
When we reached the bottom, he pulled me to the corner of the room before unceremoniously tossing me onto the dirty mattress I’d spotted there a week ago when Marianne had taken me on a tour of the house.
I tried to scramble to my feet, but Felix was on top of me before I could blink, his knees straddling either side of my waist as he wrestled my arms behind my back. Panic, stemming from the intimacy of our position, bloomed in my chest. “Get off!” I all but shrieked at Felix, attempting to buck the man off of me.
Felix, ignoring my writhing entirely, pulled what looked like a pair of handcuffs out of seemingly nowhere. Panic continued to unfurl in my chest when he managed to snap the cuffs first around one of my wrists and then the other, only ebbing when as soon as the cuffs were secured, he stood.
I yanked on the manacles immediately, ignoring how cold metal dug into my wrists as I tried to move my arms. A quick inspection of the cuffs, however, revealed that Felix had shoved the chain of the manacles through a wrought iron ring attached to the wall.
I was, for all intents and purposes, shackled to the Sheetrock, arms stuck behind my back.
Understanding dawned, and Felix smirked as he watched me realize the hopelessness of my predicament. “This is a much more fitting space for you,” he taunted before turning on his heel and heading for the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I demanded, more than a hint of panic leaking into my voice at his looming exit.
It wasn’t like I yearned for Felix’s company. (Quite the opposite.)
Despite my fear of the man, however, the thought of being left alone in the dark, chained to the basement wall… it caused a much more primal fear to rear its ugly head.
“You can’t just leave me down here!” I yelled, fruitlessly tugging at the manacles. The only mercy Felix had granted me was that there was enough slack between the cuffs and the wall that I was able to shimmy myself into a sitting position. “Felix!”
“Pleasant dreams, Sloane,” he called sweetly from the top of the stairs before I heard the door close with an eerily loud click.
“Wait!” I called. “Come back!” I yanked on the chains. “Let me out!”
I was subconsciously aware that my voice was growing shrill, but I hardly cared. It was so dark that I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face, and the oppressive black made the air seem suddenly hard to breathe.
I screamed for Felix – for Marianne and Cornelius – until my voice was hoarse and my throat was raw – until I finally accepted that no one was coming.
Marianne had left hours ago, Cornelius didn’t care about me, and Felix… Felix wanted me here. I collapsed into myself against the wall, curling my knees up to my chest and allowing my forehead to rest on them.
There was no one to help me. No one except…
Don’t be ridiculous, a voice scolded before my brain could even finish the thought. Derek has made it more than clear that he doesn’t want anything to do with you.
The voice had a point, but that didn’t stop me from bowing my head and praying to a person I believed in more than any god. “Help me, Derek. Please.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Help me, Derek. Please.”
I jolted awake, the echo of Wisp’s forlorn voice ringing in my ears as I stared unseeingly at the crumbling ceiling.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been roused by the sound of her desperate pleas reverberating in my head, and I was well aware by then that they’d remain there, torturing me, for the rest of the day. That knowledge, however, didn’t stop me from digging the palms of my hands into my eye sockets as hard as I could in an effort to dispel them.
Like he could sense my distress, Thane whimpered and shoved his snout into my side from where he sat on the floor. I blindly patted his head before forcing myself to stand from Abram’s worn couch.
Despite how run-down the man’s cottage was – not to mention the general uncleanliness of the place – I’d been staying at Abram’s house since he’d agreed to help me get Wisp back. It wasn’t that I preferred it to my cabin; it’s just that he refused to leave, and I didn’t trust him not to have a sudden change of heart if I left him to his own devices for long.
I shuffled to the bathroom, relieving myself in the toilet before standing over the sink. Ignoring the rust, I cranked on the faucet and splashed the yellow-tinted water into my face. I glanced into the cracked mirror above the sink, grimacing at my reflection.
To put it bluntly, I looked like shit.
My skin was sallow, and hair hung limply into my eyes, which were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shaved so the bottom half of my face was composed almost entirely of unkempt scruff.
As bad as I looked, however, I felt worse. It was as if a massive lump of worry, guilt, and misery all rolled into one was sitting in my stomach – like it’d been lodged there, digging into my innards, for the past two weeks.
Because that’s how long it had been since I’d last seen Wisp.
Which meant it’d been an entire week since I’d first approached Abram. A week of knowing that she was betrothed to the son of the man who had killed my parents, that she was marrying into a family responsible for the abduction of countless bearers – bearers like Wisp.
A week of sitting on my hands and doing absolutely nothing about it.
That’s not true, a soothing voice immediately disagreed. You and Abram are working on getting her back.
I batted the voice away.
Regardless of what Abram and I were doing, it wasn’t enough. Because Wisp wasn’t here.
Two weeks.
It was like my body was going through withdrawal. Every muscle – every bone – ached, my enhanced shifter senses going haywire as they constantly searched for some sign of her – ears straining to hear the familiar lit of her voice, nose longing to pick up even a trace of her honeysuckle scent.
If I had thought that being forced to breathe in the remnants of her sweet scent that clung to my cabin was hard, it was nothing compared to the torture of living without it.
If I was honest with myself, it was one of the main reasons I made sure to check on the lonely structure at least once a day. The other reason was that I was attempting to keep myself busy.
If I didn’t, I would spend every waking second worrying over Wisp.
Like you don’t already, a voice scoffed.
It was true. But if I allowed myself to stop and think about it – think about the kind of people she was with – it’d be worse. I would start imagining all of the things they could be doing to her.
Maybe they had locked her away so she couldn’t run again. (I was almost certain by then that that was how she had ended up in the Skagit River a little over a month ago.)
Maybe they were “conditioning” her for her new shifter husband.
Worse, maybe they were hurting her.
The thought of bruises littering her pale skin caused a white-hot rage unlike any other to ignite in my gut, setting fire to my insides.
If even one fucking hair was out of place on her head, I would-
You would… what? Huh? Face it, Wisp could be cold, hungry, fucking bleeding right now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I ran an agitated hand through my hair at the frustrating truth, barely suppressing the urge to add another crack to Abram’s bathroom mirror. I wondered what had caused the first. The man’s fist, I imagined, probably sometime after the fire. Maybe he’d had dreams, like me, where his family was still alive, and waking each morning to the reality without them was too much for his fragile psyche to take.
Shaking off that dreary thought, I wandered out of the bathroom, intent on seeking out the man in question. However, a quick search of his cottage revealed that Abram was gone.
/> That wasn’t unusual.
He disappeared into the woods often. Whether it was merely to scavenge or that the urge to shed his human skin (and all the complicated emotions that came along with it) was too tempting to resist, I didn’t ask. I didn’t care as long as he did his job and helped me get Wisp back.
And he was.
So far, the man had kept his word, and when he wasn’t busy traipsing through the forest, he was attempting to arrange a meeting with Wisp’s father. He’d been using my laptop to e-mail people – I didn’t know who, but I assumed some assistants or underlings of Wisp’s father. Abram had also purchased a cell phone – he’d called it a “burner phone”, which was supposed to make it untraceable – to make calls.
From what I understood, he was claiming to represent a client (me) who was interested in donating a large sum of money – something to the tune of a half-million dollars – to Cornelius’s re-election campaign. Supposedly, I was intent on protecting local wildlife from developers who wanted to build a new paper mill.
According to Abram, however, before I committed the money, I wanted to meet with the senator in person to ensure that our “interests aligned”. Unfortunately for Cornelius, I was apparently quite eccentric, and one of the conditions I was insisting upon was that my identity as a donor remained concealed from the public.
This meant we had to meet covertly.
Abram had accomplished getting the man on the phone twice so far, and from what he’d told me, Cornelius seemed eager to meet; it was just difficult to get him to agree to do so at a secluded location. Namely, his house.
The fact that he was so reluctant to allow us into his residence caused the worry already churning in my gut to swell. Refusing to dwell on it and allow it to balloon out of control, however, I whistled for Thane. Since Abram wasn’t around, I figured I might as well make my daily trek to the cabin.
Thane scrambled to meet me at the door, following me out onto the porch and the surrounding wilderness.
A half-hour later, the cabin was in sight.
As usual, it looked undisturbed. I shifted uncomfortably at the way Thane sprinted towards the door, where he began to bark in earnest. It had happened every time we’d come to the cabin this week, and while I couldn’t read the dog’s mind, I would have had to have been a brainless fool not to realize that he always hoped she would be here. Wisp.
