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)
How she got control of the gold dagger, Blade did not immediately know. But perhaps Kurling had retained his fierce grip, and then extracted it as the weapon of his choice as he was attacked. But however the transfer happened, the blade was relocated from his abdominal cavity to her palm.
And she wielded it with brutal efficiency: As Kurling tried to bat her superior strength away, she took his eyes.
First the left.
Then the right.
Popping them out of their sockets with the tip that was marked with the blood from Blade’s veins.
As he started to lose consciousness, Blade was in terrible pain… but there was a smile on his face.
The death he had always wondered about had come for him finally, all those narrow misses as he had snuck around the human world and fought to defend that which he had failed, culminating in this final mortal calamity.
He was good with how he was leaving the earth, however.
He had taken care of things far better than he’d cared to admit, in the words of the silver wolf.
And in return, his sister had not just come for him, she had brought her mate and the Black Dagger Brotherhood with her.
Wasn’t family divine.
FORTY-TWO
WHEN HER WOLVEN side was in charge, Lydia was not much more than a backseat driver, able to offer suggestions as to actions, but unable to control things.
And in this wartime scenario, she had little of value to add. Her wolf was a predator with practice, and really, how could she improve on that?
As the artificial soldier battled against the attack waged against it, she just went along for the ride, swirling around with her other side as fangs were sunk into limbs that had metal bones and wires for ligaments, but that were nonetheless subject to being torn apart.
Not even the electrical shocks slowed her wolf down—
The explosion was off to the left, and it was so loud and forceful, the ground battle was paused as the wolf and the soldier briefly reoriented awareness toward the sound.
Car parts, everywhere.
Not car parts, really, but metal shrapnel flying so fast that there was no time to duck—and the distraction was something the soldier recovered from quicker than the wolf did. The flip-over came without warning, and as Lydia became aware that she was now staring out of the wolf’s eyes at the ceiling instead of the floor, she knew her other form was in danger of losing this battle.
And that was when she remembered Daniel rolling the unit over and checking the back of the neck for the power source.
If there was a way she could disconnect the battery from the motherboard? But she was going to need her human side to do it.
And another distraction…
As Lydia attempted to regather the reins, her wolf did not want to relinquish control of their joint system. She won, however, by sheer force of will. Then again, when you needed to get back to your one true love with a medical bag, you had strength reserves you didn’t normally access.
As the shifting occurred, she knew it was a long shot, but it was all she had—
The change was not as smooth as it usually was. But that didn’t matter, and beneath the cyborg, she transformed into her human incarnation.
Which made the fucking thing freeze. Like she had broken its brain.
With its dead eyes locked, expressionless, but clearly confused, on her female face, she had a split second to get something, anything she could, to use as a weapon. Shoving her hands down to the cyborg’s waist, she furiously fumbled with whatever was there—
The gun seemed to find her grip instead of the other way around, as if the nine millimeter wanted to put an end to this whole thing as much as she did.
Lydia was not a confident shooter. She wasn’t sure how the safety worked. She only had one hand.
But the image of Daniel seizing up on the floor of that concrete hallway, with Gus empty-handed beside him, gave her some kind of core knowledge in weaponry she’d never had before.
Pop!
It happened so fast, she wasn’t even sure what she had done. But as the side of the soldier’s neck blew out and the thing collapsed on her, she stared at the gun in wonder.
Then she kicked the bucket of dead bolts off.
Panting, prepared for anything, she glanced at the cyborg. It was so completely almost human that she had an odd communion with the fucking thing. Lydia looked human on the outside, too. But at least her window dressing held a conscience that no artificial life ever could—
Her arm swung the gun around without a conscious thought as a figure she hadn’t noticed emerged from the foggy, nauseating fumes.
C.P. Phalen looked like something out of a Jackass movie, her hair and face singed with soot, her Armani uniform all out of whack, one heel broken, the other stiletto cocked to the side as if her ankle had been dislocated.