Page 395 of Shadowblood Souls
Not that I seem to knowhowto reach anymore. My head is aching and spinning at the same time.
I can’t collect my voice; I can’t remember how to move. Pain washes through my limbs in waves.
Footsteps thud across the cracked dirt. I have a blurred impression of two figures standing over me—a broad-shouldered man and a wiry woman.
“You did a good job, my shadowbloods,” the man says in a roughly amused baritone. “You did half ofmyjob for me.”
My mouth opens and closes as I grasp for words. For a shriek. For anything.
The man turns to the woman. “Toni, we need them to know right from the start that I’m no one to fool with. That one first—the one with the tentacles.”
He points, and the woman raises a gun I hadn’t noticed clutched in her hand. “Of course, Mr. Balthazar.”
“No!” I choke out, barely a whisper. I manage to jerk my arm forward?—
And something slams into my head from behind, knocking all the thoughts out of my head.
Right before the darkness closes in, the last thing I hear is the blare of a gunshot.
Heartless Foe
One
Riva
Iwake up with a jolt of my nerves. A tremor ripples through my throat, as if I’ve just finished shouting out a name.
Dominic!
My pulse is thundering. I shove myself upright and then sway with a rush of dizziness.
Aches run down my back and arms. The stretch of a scab over a partly healed cut on my shoulder throbs.
I blink, struggling to clear my glazed vision. I’m sitting up on a bed—a large bed, heaped with layers of sheets and a blanket.
Whitewashed walls surround me. A vanity stands in one corner; a deep red rug covers most of the open floor.
It doesn’t look like a prison. But I didn’t ask to be here, and I’ve been wrenched away from my men,again.
My claws shoot from my fingertips to dig into the soft sheets, and my muscles tense to spring into action. But at the same moment, an overwhelming sensation rolls over me, pinning me in place like a boulder.
We fought so hard. I went so far to carve our way to freedom.
Do the guardians have their own claws so deep in us that we can never totally break free from them?
The overwhelming sense of doom squeezes my lungs.
I clench my jaw against it. Anger sparks beneath the suffocating fog, burning away the thickest patches.
Whoever attacked us this time, they hurt all of us. They sent the truck and van crashing to the side of the road.
The man who loomed over me when I lay bleeding on the roadside and claimed we’dhelpedhim—he told the woman with him to shoot Dominic.
What have they done to Dom? What have they done with all of my guys?
The fresh zap of panic breaks through the rest of the fog. I scramble off the bed, my gaze darting around me, cataloguing every inch of the room that might hold a clue to escape.
Around the edges of the rug, worn stone tiles show, giving the impression they’ve been walked on for decades, if not centuries. Thin beams crisscross the ceiling. Most of it is white like the walls, but delicate designs in pastel colors decorate some of the spaces between the beams.
