Page 14 of Cast in Shadow
A reflection in the glass caught my attention. My reflection, though it didn’t really look like me. The woman’s expression was haunted against the city lights. Her skin was too pale, and her brown hair hung in damp clumps around her face.
I looked like death.
That wasn’t unusual after expending as much magic as I had, but draining myself made it easier to see the hint of crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes and the fine lines etching themselves around my lips. They’d been there for a while. Twenty years, give or take. A gentle reminder that I was, in fact, mortal. I aged like everyone else. I just did it slower.
Turning away from the eerie image, I went back into the bathroom. I dropped my towel in the hamper, grabbed a hair tie from the bowl on the counter, and tossed my hair up into a damp messy bun before heading back downstairs.
Sublevel Three, the main level for all Lexa operations, was mostly quiet. Thank the gods. I might not have felt like being alone in my room, but that didn’t mean I actually wanted to talk to anyone. So, instead of locking myself in my comfy suite with its soft bed and wall of stacked-to-the-brim bookshelves, I hid in my office with the lights low and the shades pulled.
It was a functional space but old school, according to Shayla. Of course, she was partial to smartboards and cloud storage, whereas I still had a fondness for holding an actual file in my hands. I wanted to feel the paper between my fingers and sift through physical pages. It made it easier to think sometimes.
Spreading the contents of the file on the floor gave me a bird’s eye view of the problem. That was what I needed with the case of the shifter girl. And what I needed to keep my mind off Emerson.
Female alphas weren’t unheard of, but they were rare enough to draw attention. Couple the shifter girl’s innate power with an overbearing, misogynistic pack, and I was a little surprised they’d let her live much past her first shift.
“They must have thought they could control her,” I mumbled to myself, shifting pages and photos at random.
That was another part of the process. Neat and orderly had a place, but to find something that didn’t want to be found, sometimes you had to mix things up.
“But are we sure she doesn’t want to be found?” I asked the empty room. I stood and let my gaze drift over the pages. “She didn’t know we were there to help. How could she? And even if the team did manage to get that message across, with the whole pack coming after them, it would make sense to run.”
I crouched next to a picture of the girl at a carnival, my tired joints protesting as I ran my fingers lightly over the image. She was younger, a year or two before her first shift, and she looked so happy in the photo. Her bright smile lit up the page, and her long, straight hair, so black it had an almost blue tint to it, was blowing across her face.
“Where would I run if I was a scared shifter?” I whispered.
“The last place you felt safe.”
I jumped at the sound of Nguyen’s gravelly voice. “Christ. When did we stop knocking?”
One thick brow lifted. “I knocked. Twice.”
Shit. Did he? “Sorry.” I gave my head a little shake. “I’m trying to get into the mind of the shifter girl.”
“She has a name.”
Letting out a heavy breath, I folded my legs under me and sat cross-legged on the floor, ignoring the comment.
He knew I didn’t like to use the names of people we were rescuing. The ones we hunted down because they were a threat? Yeah, names all the way. But the ones who needed our helpbecause no one could—or would—step up and take the job, they all had identifiers. The shifter girl. The broken angel. The guy with the hair. I preferred to keep them as bland as possible, because if we lost one of them during a mission, I would never get their name out of my head.
“Naomi,” he said quietly.
I glared up at him. “We’re not having this discussion again.”
“Dehumanize them all you want. We both know it doesn’t work.”
He was talking about the last case that had gone to total shit. We’d been trying to extract a young boy from a cult, and it hadn’t ended well. “It works sometimes.”
Skepticism dripped from the look he gave me, but instead of arguing, he motioned to the photo I’d been touching. “She wouldn’t go back there. She’s having fun in that picture, but fun isn’t the same as safe.”
Solid point.
“Okay.” I pulled myself up to my knees and scanned the pages and pictures again. “It’s not going to be anywhere within her pack’s territory.”
“Agreed. I doubt it would be anywhere she’s been since her first shift, unless she has a friend we don’t know about.”
I shook my head. “They homeschool their young. So, no outside school friends. As far as I’ve seen, she didn’t have any real connections beyond the pack.”
He stepped carefully around the scattered papers with his enormous black boots and stood a few feet away from me. “Doctors?”
