Contents
Cover
STRAYED
Copyright
More by ALN
Dedication
Warning from the Author
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Author Note
Next in the series
New "CAGED" series: UNBORN
Connect with ALN
Glossary of Characters
STRAYED
By
Amber Lynn Natusch
STRAYED Version 1.0
Copyright © 2014 Amber Lynn Natusch
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9891023-4-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Published by Amber Lynn Natusch
Cover Design by Regina Wamba, at Mae I Design
Editing by Jennifer Ryan
www.amberlynnnatusch.com
More by Amber Lynn Natusch
The Caged Series
CAGED
HAUNTED
FRAMED
SCARRED
FRACTURED
TARNISHED*
STRAYED
CONCEALED*
BETRAYED
(* novellas)
The UNBORN Series
UNBORN
UNSEEN
Contemporary Romance
UNDERTOW
More Including Release Dates:
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To the crazy voices in my head:
Keep the party going, y'all
Warning from the Author
If you have not yet read TARNISHED, book 5.5 of the CAGED series, please start now. It may be a novella, but it was written to be an integral part of the series, and contains important back story that affects the greater arc. If you choose not to read it, parts of STRAYED will be rather confusing.
You have been warned.
Please also note that a brief reminder of each of the characters in this series can be found at the end of this book in the “Glossary of Characters.” However, I would strongly recommend a reread of the series/last few books if it has been awhile. There is so much story that unfolds in this novel that it helps to have all the details fresh in your mind.
Prologue
My fingernails dug deeply into the sofa cushions as I struggled to breathe against the disbelief that filled me. Images flooded my mind, replaying like snapshots taken while a subway train raced in front of a camera lens, never letting me see the whole picture clearly.
Jay's limp body at my feet.
Ares’ black eyes piercing mine.
A mysterious woman.
The woods.
The wolves.
Darkness.
It was an ominous montage to say the least.
Scarlet had been hiding something from all of us since her return, and it appeared that she had done so for good reason. Unfortunately for her, out of sight, out of mind seemed to no longer prove true. Whatever she had done during her three-week rampage was somehow bleeding into my consciousness.
And it did not look good.
“What have you done?” I whispered in the silence of my living room.
I received no response, but her time of secrecy was over. Our reforged bond was betraying her. And while my mind frantically searched for the missing pieces of the puzzle, I came to an inevitable conclusion: Scarlet had fucked up, and we were all going to suffer the consequences.
If history was any indication, the question wasn't whether or not the piper would come calling, but if we could afford the price he would demand when he did. And with Ares involved, I knew that there was only one currency he'd be dealing in. A combination of pain and death was the former god of war's trademark.
And he would enjoy collecting both.
Chapter 1
“Poker!” I screamed, slamming my delightfully matching hand of hearts down on the table in a celebratory fashion. My arms shot up in victory while a slowly burning stogie dangled from my mouth. Jumping up from the table to do my winning dance, I realized how much I really enjoyed poker night, or “boys' night,” as the others insisted on calling it. Penis or not, I crashed their party since it was being held in my apartment.
“Ruby,” Cooper started in with his most put-upon tone. “I will not say this a third time. You don't yell 'poker' when you think you've won. It's not rummy. You wait until it's time to lay your cards down and then we look to see who was full of shit and who had the real deal, okay?”
“But I have matching thingies on my cards!” I protested, removing the cigar to take another swig of beer. “I thought you couldn't beat that?”
“You can't,” Janner interjected, “so long as those matching thingies are also in numerical order and of the highest card value.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, plopping back down in my seat. “I forgot that part.”
“Yes, well, five beers will do that to a person,” Cooper pointed out.
Alistair laughed at his observation. “I like her when she's pissed to the gills. It's the most fun to watch.”
“I'm glad I can be so entertaining for you, Ali,” I bit out, taking another swig from the green glass bottle in front of me, my poker buzz sufficiently killed. While I pouted, Cooper, Janner, and Beckett investigated the hands that were played to determine the winner, and Alistair made a mad dash for the bathroom. He had a bladder the size of a kumquat.
“Ruby, love,” he called from the loo. “I need you to explain this bizarre behavior of yours. It seems as though you're determined to leave the toilet seat down, and I cannot fathom why. I've pissed all over the bloody place in the middle of the night because of it.”
I couldn't help but laugh. Alistair was at his comedic best when he was being serious. It was an endearing quality. Unfortunately for him, he could never quite understand why the rest of us snickered at his sincere expressions.
“Well, I hope you used bleach when you cleaned it up!” I yelled from the living room, still sulking about my no-yelling-during-poker lecture.
“You have bleach?” he asked, confusion in his voice.
H
is question jarred me from my pity party, and I thought about my late night, barefoot escapades on what had surely been a urine-stained floor. I was totally grossed out.
“Alistair,” called out Cooper, who was on a mission to procure more food from the kitchen. “I'm still amazed that you ever had a woman. She must have been a saint.”
“She was!” Janner and Beckett replied in unison as they stood to join Cooper.
With that, Alistair appeared in the hallway, a mournful smile tightening his expression. His mate had been murdered months ago, and the pain was still palpable when he thought of her. Given that the reason why she was lost remained largely unknown only complicated the matter.
“I'm sorry,” Cooper said as he approached him. “I wasn't thinking―”
“No worries,” Alistair said, giving him a clap on the shoulder. “It's nice to remember her with a little humor and laughter for once.”
While his sadness overtook the room, I thought about the mystery shrouding her death. Their pack had been embroiled in some shady dealings involving the “testing” of a brain control technology, which their psychotic pack leader had fully exploited. As with any maniacal plan to do evil, collateral damage was a given, if not a prerequisite. Jemma, Alistair's mate, fell into that category.
I tried to ignore the silence that had rolled in like a fog off the water to cloud the apartment. Turning away, I did my best to zone out completely. I did not want to make a big production out of his grief, but even the alcohol in my system could not stifle my sensitivity to his sadness—my empath abilities were just too strong. Alistair was a proud wolf; Jemma was his weakness, and although he would never downplay their love, it bothered him to not appear as strong as the others. I didn't want to highlight that.
Avoidance of the subject was necessary for his sake.
“She looks like she's all alone,” someone said. The words startled me to attention. They were said playfully, but the instant they left Beckett's mouth, my body snapped to attention. Scarlet did too. Another flash of the mysterious, dark woman slapped my mind, leaving as quickly as it had come.
But, this time, she spoke.
All alone...
Those two seemingly innocuous words were all I heard, but what they did to me―how they made both Scarlet and me feel―let me know that they were far from harmless. They were a piece of the puzzle that Scarlet was working hard to keep me away from. If things continued to progress at the rate they were, she wouldn't be able to hide those pieces for much longer.
“Ruby?” Cooper called, his expression growing more concerned. “Ruby, what's wrong? I know that face. Don't you dare try to lie to me.”
“So,” I started, stalling while I tried to figure out the best way to bring up the Scarlet debacle. “The strangest thing happened to me when you guys went out to get the provisions for the evening...” I was immediately met with four dubious stares, all of which read, “What have you gotten yourself into now?”
I found their lack of faith underwhelming.
“I didn't do anything!” I exclaimed, springing up from my folding chair. “I swear...all I was doing was vegging out on the sofa—relaxing for once in my life—and then suddenly, BAM! I get whacked with a bevy of memories that aren't mine.”
“Why are my hackles already up?” Cooper mumbled rhetorically. He knew all too well how deep my uncanny ability to attract danger ran.
I sighed, knowing I was about to freak them all out. It was well warranted, though. Ares in any cerebral montage was never a good omen.
“Don't panic just yet,” I told him, hoping saying so would effect some measure of damage control. “I don't know what it all means yet, but I think that I can see some of Scarlet's memories, or at least what she saw while I was incapacitated.”
“How do you know this?” Janner asked, eyeing me from across the kitchen island.
“Well, at first I wasn't sure, but after a lot of thought, I started to make some sense of the small bits I had seen.”
“And what exactly did you see?” Cooper asked, working his best Sean eyebrow impression. Sadly, he didn’t appear to be doing it intentionally.
“Well, I saw Jay lying in a pool of blood, then that flashed to Ares staring me down, then some gorgeous woman glaring at me, then what I assumed was the forest in Maine. After that, I saw you three,” I said, sparing a glance at the U.K. trio. “And then...I saw nothing. Everything went as black as it had been when she had me tucked away.”
“Maybe you're just getting your own memories back,” Cooper offered in explanation. “Maybe you were never really 'tucked away' at all.”
“Nope. No way, Coop. What I saw was nothing I'd seen before.”
“But what does it mean?” Alistair asked between bites of the food he'd pilfered from the kitchen. My food expenses had more than quadrupled since the three of them had decided to stay in my apartment. There were times when I regretted making the offer to let them.
“I wasn't sure at first, but now I think it has something to do with our bond and Sean's mom healing me,” I replied while I watched dollar bills disappear from my bank account with every bite he took. I decided to turn my attention back to Cooper before continuing. “You remember how I started hearing Scarlet in my head right after Sophie worked her magic―regardless of the presence or absence of my ring?” He nodded tightly. “I think maybe that same kind of effect is at work here, only this time it's affecting our ability to see each other's thoughts.”
I stopped for a moment, absorbing the implications of the observation. There were things that Scarlet had seen over the past two years that I wanted no part in knowing—a point that I planned to make perfectly clear to her. She may not have been overly talkative lately, but I knew she could hear me, and on that issue she was going to, whether she liked it or not.
“Have you asked her about this?”
“Of course I have, and it's gone about as well as any other interrogation I've attempted over the past few weeks.”
He choked on a laugh before walking toward me.
“Too bad Sean isn't in the 'threatening Scarlet' market anymore. It might have come in handy on this one.”
“With Sean, I'd never fully rule that out,” I replied, choking on a little laugh of my own.
Chapter 2
My mind was still unsettled the next day when I opened the shop. It took me three tries to get the key to turn because I was so unfocused. In fairness, it was a temperamental lock, but I knew the dance I needed to do to get it to work. That morning, the task seemed almost insurmountable.
When I finally jostled both key and lock into submission, I pushed the vintage wood and glass door open and made my way inside, taking note of the fact that, for once, I wasn't the second person to arrive. Peyta had yet to show up to REWORKED.
There was a moment of panic when I ran through the Rolodex of reasons why she wouldn't have shown yet in my mind. Luckily, before I got through the Cs, the sprite-like teen pirouetted her way into the shop, beaming. Her joy was infectious, and I soon found myself smiling like an idiot even though I didn't know why.
“Well good morning to you too,” I teased, walking to the back counter. “Care to share why you're the embodiment of a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza?”
She paused for a second, allowing my anticipation to build before lunging toward me with wide eyes.
“I'M GETTING MARRIED!” she screamed in the most girly way while she snatched up my wrists and held them captive. She then began jumping up and down, making odd, squeaky-squealy sounds.
“I'm sorry,” I said, shaking my head to clear my mind. “Did you just say married?” She stopped bouncing just long enough to stare into my eyes and repeat herself. The same shenanigans that had followed her first announcement carried on directly after her second. But once she realized that I wasn't joining in her revelry, her elation quickly plummeted to a defensive despair.
“You're not happy,” she stated, an unmistakable heat tainting her words.
; “Peyta. Please don't take my lack of reaction to mean that, but holy shit, girl. You just dropped a bomb on me—a big one. Let me process it first before you go getting all Gloomy McPoutypants on me. You're still a teenager. You getting married to anyone is a bit of a mindfuck, let alone marrying some immortal who, not so long ago, you were convinced had walked away from you, never to be seen again.”
Though her exuberance did not return, her face softened enough to let me know that we weren't going to continue down the path of hostility.
“You're right. I'm sorry...I was just so excited,” she started, her shoulders slumping forward slightly as she spoke. “Maybe that wasn't the best way to tell you, but it's just that we've been trying to figure out a way to be together―like really together―since the whole thing with Alistair and the other Brits. When Jay and I talked that night—after I healed Ali—we worked everything out. I understood why he'd left me, that he had done it to keep me from having to live that kind of life. It only made me love him more. So when Sean said he would bond us, he made it very clear that we couldn't mention what we were going to do to anyone. Not even you.” Her eyes darted away from mine when she said those three words. She felt she had betrayed me; I could feel her shame emanating from her. “But then today Sean called us and said we could talk about it, and then he gave us very specific instructions on how to handle the situation publicly.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we have to look like we're getting married, you know, by human standards.”
“You are human, Peyta,” I said with a sigh.
“Yes and no. But that won't matter once I'm bonded to the PC.”
“And how exactly is that even going to happen?”
“I don't know, but Sean said he's found a way around whatever roadblock had previously been there,” she replied with a shrug. “And really, it's hardly like he's going to tell me what that was. Frankly, I don't want to know. I want Jay. Forever. If Sean can give me that, the rest is just a detail.”
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