EPILOGUE
Alan dragged his eyes open to a room flooded with sunlight. He’d always like the light, but this time he flinched away from it. And then suddenly, she was there.
Tonya.
Her face was drawn with worry, her hands tight where they gripped his arm.
“What’s wrong?” he rasped.
She blinked twice before speaking, her voice heavy with irony. “Nothing’s wrong except you’ve been running a temperature higher than a volcano for nearly a week.”
Huh. Is that why he felt like an overbaked biscuit? God, even his skin seemed to crackle when he moved. Thankfully, she brought him water, and he drank the cup greedily. Flashes of memory returned to him. He’d been abducted right in the courthouse parking lot. Then that damned cage and all the who-knew-what that had been shoved into his arm.
Evil Einstein and that cougar bitch. She had been the worst. Einstein had just looked at him like a science project, but that bitch had sat and stared at him. Hours upon hours just like a fucking cat, and she hadn’t said a word. At least not English words. There’s been weird chants and strange potions shoved down his throat. And all the while, he’d felt the caress of her like slime on his skin.
And then…
Oh, hell. “Did I shift?”
Tonya’s gaze slanted away. “Sort of.”
He looked at her face, seeing the stark fear that she tried to hide. And then he remembered the rest. The prickly agony of fur spiking out of his skin. Not in a regular way, but in patches. The horror of a nose and mouth elongated and teeth that were sharp and irregular inside his mouth. And the fever. He remembered the fever sapping his strength and the bitch hissing in his ear when he was too weak to move.
And he remembered how much he hated her.
“So I’m a freak now,” he said as he looked at his arms before him. Same bones, but the skin was patchy with dark spots. Same hands except the knuckles were larger, the fingers blunter.
“No!” Tonya said, gratifyingly vehement.
“It’s okay. I was one already, though in a different way.”
She turned to look at him, her blue eyes laser bright. “What do you mean?”
He meant a lot of things, none of which he could process or explain right now. “How’d you find me?”
“Mark turned on your phone. Used the GPS.”
Right. Good idea. But… “Why’d it take a week?”
Silence.
He looked at Tonya and a familiar ache settled into his chest. Good God. He’d been gone for a week, trapped in that cage while Einstein experimented on him. He’d missed two court dates and at least one Gladwin pack meeting. And in all that time…“You guys didn’t even realize I was missing.”
She swallowed. “Carl got a text saying you had met someone. That you’d be gone for a while.”
“Because I’m so irresponsible that I disappear for a week without finding a replacement, without emailing everyone at least twice. Without—” His voice choked off. He’d been covering the Gladwin paperwork almost since he could read. His father was never happier than when Alan announced the intention of becoming a lawyer. The Gladwins needed a lawyer in the family because good ones cost too damned much.
So he’d gone. He’d studied. And he’d become his brother’s right-hand man for everything that the shifters were too twitchy to deal with. Paperwork. Court filings. Hell, he even did the taxes. All the details of living in this modern age were handled by Alan.
And no one had fucking realized he’d been missing.
“I’m sorry. We’re all really sorry,” she said.
Yeah. He got that. Except sorry wasn’t cutting it with him right now. Fury itched right beneath his skin. A red haze of hatred rose up from his gut to choke off his words. Tonya was saying she was sorry. Tonya, the woman he’d loved since he was ten, was apologizing for not noticing him.
Like that was fucking unusual.
“Get out,” he said. Except it didn’t come out in cold, clipped tones. It wasn’t his precise, businesslike way. No, the words were snarled. The meaning was ripped from his heart and thrown at her face.
