A room that would never wash clean.
Yet beautiful. History right there.
Scared and ugly like her.
This washerroom. Where she would build her nests. A room of betrayals, secrets, failures, and mistakes.
Stained.
Not three paces from the bed, Ancil had been slain. She could hear it, the echo of pulverized meat, the dirge of Jacques Bernard beating his closest friend to death—the sickening thuds, the grunts of pain, the begging as Ancil pleaded for his Commodore to stop.
What sounds had come from the other lives smeared here and there?
Wailing? The crack of bone?
If ghosts existed, Ancil was there, watching her. No doubt a snide smirk on his insufferable face. That had to be why the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight.
“Brenya?”
It was a soft call, a distant Alpha plea. Jacques Bernard, seeking space in her ticking skull. Reaching out, not with forced pleasure or disdain, but with a gentle call.
A cowed prowler pacing at some invisible line he could not easily cross. An anxious Alpha.
Jacques Bernard wasapprehensive.
His loss of influence gnawed at him now that his bravado and violence had been beaten back.
“Mon chou… please.”
It seemed Jacques had learned something from his usurper. Now he knew what it was like to experience each sensation of his mate being well-fucked by another.
Now, he stroked instead of hammered, a feather-light tickle on her brain.“I love you.”
She snorted, surprised the sound had come out of her.
Thetick, tick, tickin her skull grew with a vengeance. Almost loud enough to fully drown out Jacques’s plea.“You need me, Brenya. Only I can keep you safe from him.”
Pulling her knees under her chin, she began to rock, honey eyes zipping about the room, noting anything,anythingthat would keep her focus pinpoint and safe and make this feeling of him inexorably creeping nearer end.
There were cracks in the paneling, small areas that could use buffing… the flowers on the table, a single white petal having fallen.
That petal held her unblinking attention as if it were the lifeline.
Theoretically, she knew those flowers had been there for days; she’d cataloged them when they had arrived. But now they werethere. She could pay attention to the stems, the wilting leaves, the over-bloomed camellias bursting apart, telling a story of what they had been through in their time on that table.
Compelling her to pay attention to more than information and statistics. Thetick, tick, tickand Jacques Bernard shoved aside if she conceded that, if appreciated, the flowerswere pretty.
And they were there, because Jules had put them there. On the table, beside her nest.
For her.
And she had never paid any attention to them. Why would she?
Why wouldn’t she?
In the overbright light, with her brain snapping in her skull and Jacques barking from his cell, she learned that shelikedanddislikedvarious details about the room.
Had opinions.
