Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
But what if it destroys, he thought.
And yet… his sister was right.
After a long moment, Blade bowed deeply. “Thank you. That is most helpful. And may I tell you that I wish you all the best, you and your male. Now, if you will excuse me—”
“Where are you going?”
He exhaled and glanced around. “To get my proverbial doctor’s bag, sister mine. Good evening.”
He did not walk off. Rather, he dematerialized. After all, when a plan had been decided, a resolve locked into the marrow, one did not wish to dally on foot whilst time was of the essence: Although he had never consciously been one for feats of heroism, he would feel rather cheated if Daniel Joseph, his former operative, lover of who Blade feared was the love of his life, died on the cusp of his rescue.
Lydia’s favored future cut short by biological failure, when there was a far happier resolution on the verge of reaching her beloved.
And there was another reason he wanted to dematerialize instead of go on foot. It appeared as though he was turning over a new leaf of virtue, and he didn’t want the other half of him to sabotage it by a trip-and-fall, engineered by the symphath in him.
One should never trust a symphath, even when one was such a thing.
Re-forming up on the summit, he strode toward the fissure in the boulders and turned sideways, shuffling through the tight squeeze. As he emerged in the cave’s belly, he went over to his scorpion’s cage.
She was so perfectly constructed, her white segmented body tiny, yet with all of its component parts. To get her attention, he tapped on the side, and as she turned to him, her stinger flexed over her back.
Though he had not wanted to admit it, he had come to think of her as a daughter of a sort. He had raised her, nurtured her, cultivated her.
And now… he was going to have to kill her.
To save a man who was going to end up ruining his life.
THIRTY-SIX
IN THE END, Cathy could not stay down in the lab. For one, Daniel’s acute medical episode was a promise of what was waiting for her, and she found that disturbing. Though her cancer was a quiet invader at present, sneaking into crevices in her lymphatic system, in her organs, in her blood, soon enough it would become unavoidable in all its manifestations—and then she would be in a hospital bed, just like Daniel, all kinds of people trying to artificially re-create normal functioning with medicines and procedures that might or might not do the duty, for a short period of time.
But the other reason she had to leave was that being around Gus when he was doing what he did best was an exercise in masochism. Everything about him made her feel alive, from the way he took control of everything and everybody to how good he was with Lydia when it really counted.
Plus she still wanted to scream at him.
As she stepped off the elevator at her house level, she went right for her study. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d eaten anything. She didn’t care. And she wasn’t sure about the drinking thing, either. Also didn’t care.
But as she sat down behind her desk, she was tired of the cramping. Was the process of miscarriage ever going to stop? As if she needed the reminder.
Sinking back into her chair, she measured the distance to her private bathroom, and felt like it was miles instead of feet—and though it made her a total diva, she really wanted to call someone to go into the medicine cabinet over the sink and get her the bottle of Advil in there. Maybe she’d make them bring her a sandwich, too, on the theory that the abdominal discomfort might be hunger pains?
It wasn’t hunger pains.
In any event, she stayed where she was to punish herself. As the torsion in her now-empty womb went into another round of tightening, she took it as a physical manifestation of her foolishness. To believe she could have been a mother? Ridiculous, and not because of the cancer. Just like she’d told Gus, she was not—
The beeping noise was subtle, but it was the kind of thing that might as well have been a grenade with the pin out, bouncing right onto her glass-topped desk.
Someone had entered the property. Or… something.
With a shaking hand, she triggered the release for her computer, and the unit appeared before her on its rotating base. Signing in, she was quick to access the security system—
And there it was, in the camera feed for the backyard: A lone figure was walking through the field, closing in on the rear terrace. Whoever it was processed slowly, and was solely focused on the mansion—