Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
On one level, none of the mates had been remarkable, their attractiveness of no particular note. And yet to Nadya, they were extraordinary, a reminder of something she had not seen or experienced in what felt like a lifetime.
Reaching up, she touched the hooding that covered her face. Then she shied away from thoughts of her own past—and instead focused on the other reason these females were of such fascination.
She was shocked that the guards were mated. That they were capable of warmth and relationship. Of common decency.
Based on their behavior in the camp, she would have assumed them all as cold and cruel as the female who led them. But seeing them look with tear-filled eyes at the females in their lives? It exposed sides to them she didn’t expect, and couldn’t understand: When the first shellan had come in, she had been struck by an urgent need to rush forth and save the female in some way, ensure that she was not there under duress, protect her.
Yet it had all been voluntary. More than voluntary.
Feeling like a voyeur, she looked away from the couple because they should be granted privacy, and noted that many of her patients were already recovering and some were even leaving. In the last four hours—going by the watches she’d taken off the guards’ wrists—three of the males had transitioned out of the clinic. Their healing was… incredible. Then again, it had been a long time since she had been around healthy vampires, who were properly fed both in terms of good food and blood.
And she supposed the fact that two of what she had classified as the most critically injured patients had been among the first out the door meant that her treatment decisions had been appropriate and successful.
Closing her eyes, she braced a hand against a shelf ladened with laundry soap flakes, the boxes of which had faded and were coated with dust. With a groan, she stretched her back and didn’t get far with it given the way her body was—
“Come with me.”
Jerking to attention, she looked over her shoulder. A guard had marched right up to her, looming with aggression in his black uniform and all his weapons. She didn’t recognize him specifically, but there were so many kitted out in the same clothes, with the same short haircut, and the same sharp stare, that they were interchangeable.
Nadya faced the male. “I can’t leave the clinic. I have patients—”
He took her arm in a hard grip and didn’t make any accommodation for her immobility, shoving her out of the storage room until she lost her footing and fell just past the doorway. Nadya cried out as her legs went loose under her, but he didn’t stop. He just grabbed whatever he could under her robing and kept going, dragging her down the concrete corridor.
Just as had been done with Kane. At the end.
“What did I do?” she demanded. “What have I—”
He jerked her and she caught a scream of pain in her throat. He wasn’t going to tell her, anyway. The head of the guards had given a command, and he was executing it, and maybe he didn’t even know.
“Would you treat your female this way?” she grunted.
“You’re not a female to me. You’re not anything.”
Nadya gasped, even though she shouldn’t be surprised. That really was the answer, wasn’t it.
When they got to the stairs at the end of the hallway, he set her back on her feet with such roughness that pain shot up her calves and into her knees. On the ascent, she did what she could to stay upright, gathering her robing so she didn’t trip, trying to stay on her feet because the alternative was so much more agonizing. It was hard to track what floor they were on, the landings a blur as the subterranean levels were climbed.
After what seemed like an hour of hiking, she was pushed through a door, and as she got a hazy look at what was ahead, cold fear replaced all other sensory inputs.
Down at the end of a long corridor of closed doors, a towering wall seemed like the only thing in the whole world. Added as part of the build-out that had occurred before the prison camp’s population had moved to the location, it was raw and unpainted, swaths of plaster marking the seams of unpainted gray panels. But none of that mattered.
It was the stains.
Brown stains had seeped into the matte gray, felt-like surface, and though the swaths of discoloration were varied in saturation and shape, there was a pattern. They were between sets of pegs… where the prisoners being punished or controlled were chained.
The guard prodded her, and she stumbled forward. Any time she slowed, she was poked in the back by what felt like a finger, but she suspected was a gun. As she passed by the closed doors, she could smell the drugs, the chemical sting in the air making her eyes water—and she thought about the prisoners who were forced to sit at tables and add compounds to raw cocaine and heroin, and then package the powders into saleable units. For hours. For no pay and little food.