Page 7 of Racing the Storm

The man—Kasher, I was assuming at this point—gestured with his left hand, and suddenly two people appeared to fill our plates. It was simple fare, steamed runner beans, chicken, potatoes, but it was a feast for me. My fingers trembled again as I lifted my cutlery, but I deliberately took slow bites, not watching him as I ate.

“Are you going to tell me what you want?” I finally asked again.

He shrugged. “Eventually. It’s not pressing.”

I took another drink of the wine, then reached for the water glass, realizing I was still dangerously dehydrated. “How long have you kept me here, Dr. Kasher?”

His thin lips stretched in an almost sick smile. “You figured it out?”

“It wasn’t difficult,” I told him with a shrug. He looked nothing like his son, but he was everything Misha had described. “Your spy made it obvious you were going to make a grab for someone.”

“And you figured it was going to be you?” he asked.

I nodded, feeling foolish because I should have been able to realize the text was a decoy. But I was too afraid of missing something important from Zane. “Believing the text was my mistake.”

His brows rose, and he made a considering noise as he sat back. I noticed he hadn’t touched his food, and I wondered if it had anything to do with the disease ravaging his body. I couldn’t get a good scent on it to know what it was, but it didn’t matter. The man wasn’t well. “That’s surprisingly observant. We would have taken you either way, but I’m glad you made it easy on us.”

I almost laughed. Did he expect me to agree with him? To find any humor in this situation.

“To answer your other question,” he said when I offered nothing more, “you’ve been here two weeks.”

I jolted at that, my heart thrashing in my chest for a moment. Two weeks. I’d been captured for two weeks, and no one had been able to find me yet. The chances of a rescue slimmed considerably. “And what do you want with me?”

He looked at me another long moment, then smiled as he threw his napkin on the table and pushed himself to stand. “We’re going to have a lot of time to chat, and I can fill you in on the details. But for now, we have a plane to catch.”

Panic seized me. A plane?

“This is a terrible idea,” I told him. “You know that my people will come rescue me.”

He laughed again and shook his head. “I have no doubt. I knew it would be difficult getting you out of the country, but I was also told you were a reasonably docile animal. Especially since we have the means to control any sort of…outburst.”

I couldn’t help my wince, and I hated that it sparked joy in his beady eyes. “Where are you taking me?”

“Away. There are things spiraling out of my control right now, Dr. Bereket, and I’m on borrowed time. Now you can come of your own volition under guard, or you can come drugged and unconscious. The choice is yours.”

It wasn’t much of a choice at all. I couldn’t handle another stretch of time being drugged. And I didn’t need to see the guns pointed at me to know they were there—and I didn’t need to see the look on the guards’ faces to know they’d take no small pleasure in putting me down like the beast they thought I was.

I lifted my chin, then climbed to my feet. I could feel the tension in the room rising. They were afraid. This man wasn’t, but the ones behind me—they had no idea what we were capable of. And I planned to use every second of that to my advantage.

Chapter

Three

MIKAEL

Being one of the few on the council who remembered life before the vicious hands and sharp words of humans reduced our community to glorified zoo animals wasn’t easy. Listening to young pups who couldn’t remember the peace that we were fighting for—or, at least something like it—was hard, because their ideas were so damned unrealistic.

They envisioned this Wolf-human paradise where one battle, one treaty, one speech would suddenly erase generations upon generations of hate. These new versions of humans would be open-minded and ready to embrace us with all the love and equality we had been denied since before they were born.

Of course, all anyone had to do was look into human history to know this wasn’t possible. Humans still oppressed each other with the same viciousness as they did us. But they had a common goal now—a shared hatred for glowing eyes and claws and fangs—so they could set aside what they were doing to each other and work together. It was hilariously ironic in a lot of ways.

But mostly it left me feeling once again nihilistic, because they were incapable of change. If they couldn’t see each other as equal, there was no hope for us. Our only option was to carve out space and pray they left us alone, but even that was a pipe dream.

Of course, these young Wolves never wanted to listen to me. They didn’t understand loss the way I did. They didn’t see an entire life systematically stripped away. They weren’t turned from a docile professor into a solider trained to gut and kill anything that crossed its path.

Our need to fight turned us into the monsters humans feared we would always be—and somewhere, deep in my mind, I wondered if maybe, in that one thing, they were right.

I was twenty-two when the first laws began to creep over Wolf borders. I was twenty-four when my family was ripped apart. Even with the new rules and regulations against our kind, I never fully believed they’d do us actual harm.

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