Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Skin privileges.
The words penetrated the sobs wracking her, but she was too distraught to understand them. She could’ve blamed it on the imprints on the handle of the cooler—so warm, so joyous, so of family and of care—but she knew the truth.
This was the result of months of fear, months of “waking” to find herself somewhere totally different from where she last remembered being. Months of Dr. Verhoeven telling her that it was a lingering symptom of her neural scarring. But if that were true, it should have improved as she became more and more herself.
It hadn’t.
It was getting worse.
Never before, however, had she done an act this reckless—flown the jet-chopper from the compound to this remote cabin. A flight of which she had only vague memories. Of last night, after her arrival, she had nothing.
Dr. Verhoeven had suggested that she might be having “invisible” micro seizures that were wiping out her memory. Charisma had confirmed much bigger grand mal seizures after Auden came to herself with severe bruising on various parts of her body.
What if that had happened while she’d been in the air?
She could’ve killed her baby.
“Shh, little cat. You’ll make yourself sick.” A deep purr of a voice that vibrated into her bones. “Listen to my voice, focus on it.” He kept on talking, telling her about the kinds of trees prevalent in this region, which birds called it home, which smaller creatures shared this land with his pack.
It was a glimpse into a wondrous world far beyond her experience.
She did what he said, had to do what he said because she didn’t know how to get herself out of this on her own. Remi was all she had, even though she was painfully conscious that he wouldn’t have chosen this.
Auden knew who and what she was—a Scott. Feared by some. Hated by others. Remington Denier was the alpha of a changeling pack. He wasn’t helping her because he liked her. No one liked Auden.
They tolerated her, or found her useful, or saw her as a means to an end.
Jerking back, she wasn’t surprised when he let her go. Of course he would if he was trying to win her trust, trying to show her that he wouldn’t betray her. She couldn’t trust him. She couldn’t trust anyone.
Her father had taught her that lesson with the biggest betrayal of her life.
Her fingers drifted to her temple, the scar just under her hairline a ridged reminder of the price of trust.
Chapter 17
There is a point of terminal velocity, a moment beyond which the psychometric no longer has control of the inputs into their system. I didn’t understand that prior to that day at the Johanssen farm, when I fell into the vortex of an evil so profound that the imprints have become a permanent part of my own memories.
I was institutionalized in the direct aftermath. Not because I was psychotic, but because I believed with every cell in my body that I had committed the atrocities for which I had such vivid memories both visual and emotional. I remembered not just the act of brutalization, but pleasure so violent it was obscene, and I was convinced that warped pleasure was mine.
—Excerpt from Terminal Velocity: A Psychometric’s Journey into Oblivion by Crispin Nicholas (1973)
“I’M SORRY.” AUDEN wiped her face on the sleeves of her loose sweater dress, an action which would’ve horrified her mother.
But Shoshanna Scott had been displeased by Auden from a young age. Why she’d made Auden her successor, even in name only, especially given Auden’s injury, no one would ever know.
Auden did, however, know why Shoshanna had carried her in the womb, rather than using a surrogate. The vast majority of Psy believed that contact with the maternal carrier’s mind influenced the child’s mind—and psychic integrity was as important to the bloodline as genetic.
Her journey to birth had never bothered Auden. She hadn’t even been wounded by her mother’s disdain. To her, Shoshanna had just been her maternal donor, Henry the person who was her actual parent.
A good parent.
A good man.
A good liar.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated through a throat that rasped, the need inside her an aching hurting thing that wanted to hide her face in his arms and pretend this was her life, her world. Safe. Warm. Full of the wild. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Pregnancy hormones?” Remi suggested, ducking his head in an effort to meet her gaze. “It’s not a big deal,” he said when she refused to cooperate. “I’ve held more than one crying pregnant woman in my time.”
Auden tried to make sense of that, couldn’t. “You have?”
“One of the lesser-known duties of an alpha. My chest is well used to being a landing pad for tears.”
He was trying to ease her embarrassment, she thought, and wanted so much to take him at face value. To believe in someone enough to lower her guard even this much, it would be more than she’d known since the day her father sacrificed her to the altar of his ambition. “Thank you.”