Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
He and Linus are excited by the genetic lines. I am beginning to worry about something else. If I have the daughter of a spy loose in Denholm, it’s possible that nothing has been as it seemed from the beginning.
A pit is opening up inside me, an awful, yawning feeling of potential loss. Kira has always seemed so sweet, so very much what she always seemed to be. A cute little domestic dilute, craving candy and sweets and submitting to me with all the eagerness and lust she can muster. What if she was never innocent at all?
Mate bonds are unbreakable except under one very specific condition: betrayal.
Abel is waiting for me when I land. He answers the question on my mind without having to be asked.
“She’s in the dungeon. We thought it best to contain her when we found out what she really is. I tried to take her down without any fuss, but she fought.”
I look at him with some measure of annoyance. Abel didn’t have to do a damn thing. He could have left her to her devices and waited for me to arrive, but of course he jumped the gun, as always. Isabella’s paranoia about Kira is spreading, and it is not healthy.
I find Kira shackled naked in the dungeon. She looks up as I walk in, and her expression shifts from one of complete misery to one of hope. The position she is in strikes me as entirely inappropriate. It is practically sexual. But the item she is strapped down to is a punishment bench, which exists for a reason. If she is guilty of the various crimes everybody is imagining her to have committed by virtue of her secret spy blood, then they have saved me some time.
“Who took her clothes off?”
“She did. She shifted. Tried to escape.”
“Why was she not re-clothed?”
“That would have involved touching her more. Besides. Look what I found when I went through the ones she discarded,” Isabella says. “And I was right to do so, because I found this.”
She produces a pen with a flourish that suggests it is much more important than it seems to be. “It’s a listening device,” she says.
“That’s not mine!” Kira wails. “She’s lying! She’s been trying to get rid of me since I came!”
“Yes. I have. Because I saw what you were. You’re not one of us. You’re not watered down blood, you’re something much worse. You’re foreign blood.”
Isabella clicks the pen, and my voice plays, tinny and small in what feels like a cavernous space. “The contracts will be ready in the morning, but we’re going to have to ensure that they’re not aware of the clauses to do with the Greek deal…”
“I didn’t do that,” Kira says. “I didn’t. Look at me. I couldn’t even rob a house for my aunt, and you think I have been a spy all this time? You think I recorded you?”
I look down at my mate, bound helplessly, stripped of her dignity, and containing multitudes beyond that which she or I understand. I keep my eyes on her as I speak.
“Abel, get Isabella out of here. I need some time with my mate.”
Kira
I thought for sure he’d release me immediately. Instead, he stalks around me, looking down at me. He’s been at work. Expensive cufflinks flash at the end of his sleeves. They always excite me now because I associate them with the very first time we were together.
Abel and Isabella leave, thank God. Having them look at me naked was not a comfortable feeling. I know they had their reasons, practical ones, and also Isabella’s refusal to avoid a chance to humiliate me.
“You’re not going to let me go? Look what they did to me.”
“They had no right to do this to you,” Cain growls down at me. “And they will suffer for it. But you do look delicious, presented to me this way.”
I feel a little pulse of excitement, my hips dipping a little to press my clit against the bench over which I am laid. He’s right. Isabella had absolutely no right to do this to me, but now he is here, there is something about this position.
He runs his fingers through my hair lightly before curling them into a fist and pulling my head up to look at him.
“I have something to tell you,” he says. “Something you’ve probably long wondered about yourself. The identity of your father is no longer a mystery.”
There’s something about the way he makes that statement that makes my stomach clench, and not in the hot way. It feels like something bad has been uncovered. And that’s why he didn’t completely lose his mind to find me stripped of everything and tied to a punishment bench. Maybe, in his eyes, I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I am something wrong.