Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“Let me go, Shuli,” he said softly. “Just stop trying, okay? Consider it a birthday present to yourself.”
For the briefest of moments, Shuli’s face changed, the young male he had once been returning. Gone was the Chad-about-town with the swagger and the bitches and the money. In his place? The kid who had just made it through his own change, and was fumbling his way through all kinds of firsts with the kind of discombobulation that made you look for friends. Even in places you shouldn’t.
“Yeah,” came the rough reply. “I’ll do that.”
Nate nodded once. “Happy birthday.”
He did not look back as he strode off, the sense that he was jettisoning a weight long held making him feel buoyant to the point of being too light in his boots—
He forgot all that emotional bullshit as Evan Montiere, the other nephew who’d trespassed onto his property, stumbled across the head of the alley like he’d been punched in the gut.
Or had maybe witnessed something that had made him sick to his fucking stomach.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back out in the suburbs, underground, Wrath had something he needed to do before he left, and it was a solo mission. Trying to focus on Beth’s directions, stressed like he always got when the war and all the shit that came with it crept into his private time with his Queen, he’d left her bedroom—their bedroom—and thought he knew where he was going. It shouldn’t have been that hard. The layout of the Brotherhood’s private quarters was just like an old-fashioned wagon wheel, spokes of corridors fanning out from a common area in the center to each of the satellite groups of a family’s rooms, the whole also connected by a long, circular track that formed an outer rim.
Fucking simple. Except somehow, he got turned around and ended up in the central open area.
It was the first time he had become disorientated in his blindness in forever, and even with George at his side, and the handle of the harness squarely against his dagger palm, he was suddenly floating untethered through the galaxy… and never shall return.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
Back before he’d gone completely blind, he’d had a little sight: Hazy, blurry, indistinct, foggy, furry, only blinks. But at least he’d had some shapes and shadows, could tell the difference between a hallway and a corner, could watch out for stairs and obstacles in his way.
Could fight the enemy downtown in the field.
By the time the blindness had come fully, all those places, like the mansion, the Audience House, and the Tomb, had been committed to a permanent visual map in his mind, one so carefully rendered by repetition and the accuracy of a powerful memory that the information his eyes fed him and what he recalled melded together, becoming a kind of sight. And as maps required a compass for orientation, so he’d had his four points: his hearing, his sense of smell, the sensations of his body’s movement… and what became his one true north.
That precise recollection of his.
It had all been such a seamless integration into function that, with his characteristic arrogance, he’d assumed the competence was as innate to him as the genetic weakness in his retinas, a compensation for what he’d lost unfairly. Now he saw it for what it really was.
Just a familiar landscape.
And at the moment, he was lost in a future that to everybody else was just the present.
As his shoulder banged into something—doorjamb? whatever it was, it had no give and was next to a hole—he threw out a hand. Investigating with his fingertips, he found that yup, it was the molding around a door, and as he measured all kinds of depth and contours, shit was not like what it had been at the mansion, nothing ornate and hand-carved, curving or decorative. This was simple, machine-wrought, commercial-grade pine, a basic highlighter around a rectangle worthy only of a hasty step-through.
But it was home. Because this was where his Beth lived.
“We’re going to figure this out,” he said to George.
The golden snuffled, and waited for Wrath to step forward again. So he did. Nasty business, learning a space the hard way, bumping into things, terrified to trip, tentative, shuffling steps with his free hand out in front of him. He went around the circular space three or four times, and then he got it. The chair, the sofas, the table, the chairs, the food service area.
And when the layout was set in his mind, his awareness had extra bandwidth—and there it was. A scent he remembered.
By a doorway.
Like he could forget how rocky road smelled?
“This way,” he said.
He knew he was back in one of the spokes by the metallic echo of his footfalls, and the confirmation on direction he needed was the next scent that reached his nostrils.
Silver polish paste.