Page 234 of Shadowblood Souls
Twenty-Seven
Riva
The boat rocks, and I jerk awake with a jolt of alarm. My body springs into a defensive crouch, tossing off the covers before I’m even fully aware of where I am.
No shouts or crashes carry from beyond the small bedroom’s door. The thin gray light of pre-dawn drifts through the small window, making the plain furniture look outright dingy.
The boat settles, whether from a wave or one of my guys moving around. I sink back down onto my ass and retract my claws.
I’ve taken one calmer breath when the door swings open and Jacob marches into the room.
He smiles at me immediately, but the friendly expression doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His pale irises have darkened like churning storm clouds.
Dark splotches dapple the fabric of his light blue shirt as well—streaking across the sleeves where they’re rolled to his elbows, splattering his chest. When he steps to the foot of the bed wherethe light is a little sharper, the spots glint with a ruddy crimson sheen.
My stomach lurches all over again. “What happened?”
Jacob’s smile stretches wide enough to bare all his teeth. He reaches around to yank a bulging plastic bag from his backpack.
“I happened.”
He upends the bag, and a deluge of bloody objects tumbles onto the far corner. A meaty smell floods the air.
I stare and abruptly recognize the details—the jutting fingers, the stumps of wrists, a glint of a thick silver ring.
They’re all hands.
Hands severed from their bodies and dumped on the end of my bed.
My claws spring back out automatically, my ears tufting with their catlike peaks. My gaze jerks to the door that’s clicked closed behind him in anticipation of some even larger threat.
Jacob tosses the bag aside with a plastic warble that brings my attention back to him. “There’s nothing to worry about. They’re never going to squeeze a trigger at you again. I made sure of it.”
His voice is even but fervid. The gleam in his eyes looks almost feverish now.
I stare at him. “You— Those are from?—”
“Every last one of them,” he says with a slight rasp. “Drey and I tracked them down, and I slaughtered them like they tried to do to us. To you.”
He glances down at his trophies. “I’d have brought their heads, but they wouldn’t all have fit in the bag. Their hands are what they tried to hurt you with most anyway.”
“I…” I don’t know what to say.
I should be horrified, right? There’s a heap of chopped-off hands lying on my bed.
Some part of meishorrified, with a thread of nausea creeping through my gut. But at the same time, a strange lightness is rushing up inside me.
We’re safe. Safe from the hunters who tried to murder us.
Because Jacob went out and took care of them before I even had the chance to worry about them again.
He’s watching me so intently my skin flares under his gaze. But whatever reaction he was searching for, he must not get it, because something in his expression falters.
The sight sends a twang of regret through me, knowing the lengths he’s just gone to on my behalf, but I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know if I can give it.
“They aren’t the only ones who hurt you,” he says, his voice gone raw, and jerks a knife out of his pocket. The blood smeared across its heavy blade suggests it’s the one that sawed through all those wrists.
Then he brings the knife to his own arm, right below the roll of his sleeve.
