Page 71 of Fire Bound

Blinking rapidly to clear the remaining haziness from my eyes, I look down at my arms. Handcuffs made of silver are locked around each of my limbs, effectively keeping me locked in place on the cold metal chair I sit on. That’s why I still feel weird. The silver in the cuffs is affecting my wolf’s strength.

We are immune to all diseases, and we can survive most wounds, but if those wounds are inflicted by a silver blade or a bullet it’s extremely difficult to heal from. When Ryker was shot with a silver bullet, it took him weeks to fully recover. The only thing that saved him was the fact the gunshot was a through and through. Had the silver lingered in his body much longer, he would have died.

Silver cuffs like the ones I’m wearing weaken the body, the silver permeates the skin and then the bloodstream until it makes the animal side of a shifter ill.

Even though I know it’s no use, I yank on the confines. All I succeed in doing is making them unbearably tight. Cursing, I lift my head and look around the room I’m in. The single light in the dark space hangs above my head. It sways slightly like there’s a breeze in the air that I can’t feel. Every time I shift in the chair, the wooden floors below me creak and moan. The walls of the room aren’t insulated or dry walled.

It smells musty, almost like mothballs and old people’s clothes.

An attic maybe?

The pounding on what sounds to be stair steps before the door to the room I’m in opens, confirms my theory.

The figure that enters the attic keeps his head turned into the shadows and away from me. Even with my ability to see well in the dark, the angle in which he keeps his face, keeps him hidden from view. Slowly and quietly, he begins to walk around me like a shark circles its prey.

The fact he hasn’t said a word makes me more nervous than the dark energy rolling off him like a heavy fog. “Are we going to make some introductions? Or are you going to walk in circles until you get dizzy?” I snap at him, my anxiety coming off as bitchy sarcasm. I’m tied to a chair, it’s my only defense right now.

“You’re an interesting individual, Remington.” His voice is odd sounding, almost like something is hindering his speech. “You’re not as strong as your brothers, but you act as if you are. Your attitude and how you choose to carry yourself make people perceive you as stronger. It’s a clever move,” he praises. “You almost had me fooled, but I saw through the strong façade. Those eyes of yours, they give you away. Everything you feel is reflected in them. You know what they say about eyes being the windows to the soul.”

He steps into the light and finally allows me to see his face. Isabeau undersold it when she talked about Sterling having scars. Jax seriously fucked his face up. Right down the middle of his body, he’s gruesomely burned. The entire right side of his face, bald head, and neck are nothing but scarred and uneven flesh. Deep lines run through the skin like at some point they tried to stitch him up, but it didn’t help. His nose is extremely disfigured as well is half of his mouth. The skin around his lips on that side are long gone, and his teeth are exposed because of it. Where his right eye once sat is now an empty dark socket. The burns disappear under the black turtleneck he wears, and his fingers are covered with black leather gloves, but I have to assume the damage covers more of his body than just his head.

The half of his face that isn’t damaged is weathered from age. He has to be in his mid to late sixties. I’m not stupid enough to think that his age has made him weak though.

His remaining eye, a deep green, peers into my eyes as he leans in close and asks, “If that’s true and eyes are windows to the soul, what do you think my soul looks like?” He rests his hands on either armrest of my chair as he continues to invade my space. “Look and tell me what you see.”

I do what he asks, mainly because I’m finding it hard to look away from his face. I feel like one of those idiot people that hears a tornado siren and then goes outside to look at it. I know it isn’t safe, but I do it anyway. I search his eye for a glimmer of something, but I’m met with nothing but darkness. “This is a trick question,” I finally answer him.

Curious, he pulls away and grants me some breathing room again. “Oh? And why’s that?”.

“We both know it’s been a very long time since you’ve had a soul,John.” I make a point of using his real name. I don’t know how he came to be known as Sterling, but regardless, I know it’s not his birth name. “Did you lose it when you started all this madness or when you lost Claire?” I bring up his mate’s death for two reasons. The first one being I want him to know that I’m not as in the dark as he may think I am. I knowwhohe is. The second is he’s going out of his way to make me uncomfortable, it’s only fair I return the favor.

“Looks like someone has been doing their research,” he muses coldly, not sounding remotely impressed by my knowledge. “Don’t get too smug, Remington. I can assure you that you do not know the full story.”

“You’re right,” I concede. “I’m not sure I want to know it either. I have a feeling that, like your face, it will give me nightmares. I don’t need to hear the gory details of what you’ve done to become the monster you are.”

He paces as he listens to me. “You’re right, you don’t need to hear the story, but you want to. You want to know how this all came to be. You want to know how a mated, father of two, could have turned into what I am.”

Yes, he’s right. I want to know what brought all this on and what was the event that made him become the monster from a bad B movie, but I’d rather be tied to the stake and left for the crows than admit that to him. “I am handcuffed to a chair with silver slowly infusing itself into my bloodstream. If you want to do an impromptu story time, it’s not as if I’m in a position to tell you no.” I tug on the chains of the handcuffs for effect. “But we both know this is how you like your women, isn’t that right?”

“Truthfully, I prefer when they’re sedated so they can’t speak to me or plead for their lives. I find those exchanges tedious and obnoxiously time consuming. I don’t have time for their tears or cries for help.”

“You’re disgusting.”

I can’t believe that Jax and Pruitt both come from this man. Jax looks nothing like him. Pruitt shares the blonde hair and green eyes, but even then, their energies are so different, you’d still never know they were related. The only thing I can think of that Jax inherited from this man is his tenacity and strength, both things he will need if he stands a chance against the fight Sterling is bringing.

I keep checking in on the link between us, ensuring I can still sense Jax. As long as that bond is alive, I’ll be okay knowing he’s alive.

“Scientific advancement isn’t always pretty.” Sterling laughs mockingly, his destroyed lips pulling in a way that makes me uncomfortable. “You know who first told me that?” He turns serious once more. “My mate. You see, this” —he gestures around with his gloved hand— “whole thing started because of her. Although, we both had better intentions when we first started our experiments.”

“I find it hard to believe that Genevieve’s mother could be responsible for any of this,” I argue. What kind of woman could sit back and allow the things Sterling has done to other women? I have to believe that she never would have allowed something like this to happen.

“I’ll admit, it wasn’t this…extreme… when Claire was alive, but after she was killed, I saw no point in holding back or following the rules,” he explains. When he talks about his mate, the normal side of his face pinches as if after all these years, he still feels the weight of her death. I’m sure he does. No one handles the loss of a mate well. It’s like losing the other half of your soul. Many wolves don’t survive it. “Before my granddaughter went and made that prophecy come true, the wolf shifter population was falling. Birth rates were declining rapidly as more and more she-wolves struggled to carry their pups to term. If someone didn’t intervene, we were going to be extinct in a few hundred years. Claire believed if she was able to genetically modify a wolf shifter embryo, she could find a way to save the species. As you know, we’re the only species that struggle with fertility rates. Claire thought that if she could find a way to splice in just enough DNA from another species, we could ensure the wolf embryos continued to thrive and grow. We had to find the right amount of foreign genetic material to use because we didn’t want the characteristic from the donor species to be present. At that time, we weren’t—or I should say,Iwasn’t—interested in cross breeds or hybrids. We just wanted to save our people from dying out.”

So selfless, someone get this man a medal.

“Well, your priorities have obviously changed.”

“When your mate is unexpectedly killed in a shocking and senseless way, you tend to reevaluate your thinking.” His weird voice turns into a low growl. “I thought I could live beside humans in harmony, but when they hunted my mate for sport and then got away with killing her, I decided humans didn’t deserve to live in peace or in power. We allow these inconsequential beings to dictate our lives. We have to follow their rules and live in hiding as to not spoil them, while they go unpunished for their crimes against us. They slaughtered my mate and cheered about it because they thought they’d simply killed a wolf. They had no idea what kind of life they’d just taken. Thesehunterstook pictures of her body and put it in the newspaper. They were applauded for their ‘record-breaking’ kill. In order to remain a secret to the human world, they could never be held accountable for what they did.”

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