Page 73 of Bearing Secrets
Natalia.
He screamed again as more pain erupted through every nerve ending in his body, or so it seemed.
Then, mercifully, he blacked out.
34
She’d never seen someone so badly injured still manage to live.
Kirell lay on his giant bed, swathed in bandages, what skin was exposed covered in nasty-looking bruises. As a testament to his mutation, many of them were already turning from black to various shades of purple. The healing process had begun the minute the attack stopped, and everyone she’d talked to had told her he would recover, though it may take a day or two for him to regain his full strength.
It had been close, though; she’d also learned that by listening to various whispers from the Priest and his attendants. If the guard hadn’t stumbled upon them and raised the alarm when he did, Kirell would be dead. As it was, his skull had been fractured in numerous places, leading to sustained brain damage.
Nobody knew if he would be himself when he woke.
Now she waited for that inevitable moment, pacing back and forth in straight lines, ovals and weaving around the furniture in patterns, trying to distract herself, to kill some time, anything that would help her keep her composure without having a breakdown.
Returning to the bedside, she stroked his upper arm, glad to be able to touch skin in at least one place. There was something reassuring about the contact with him, the pair of them connected without any fabric in the way. She drew strength from it, hoping that somewhere, his body knew it was her, that he could respond the same way.
“You have to get better, Kirell,” she whispered, looking down at his battered visage. “Please. You have to.”
His chest rose and fell, but he didn’t awaken.
Natalia sat still for several minutes, eyes closed as she gently rubbed his arm. Without warning, something hot and wet splashed onto her arm. Opening her eyes, she tried to look through the haze to see what it was.Oh.
She was crying.
Stop it. Pull yourself together. Crying isn’t going to help the situation.
Sometimes, Natalia hated her inner voice. It was often cold and brutally honest with her at times she didn’t want it to be. Like now. Right now, she wanted to dissolve into a bubbling mess, but it was holding her together, though she couldn’t figure out why. It’s like it was refusing to acknowledge something as well, keeping its own secrets that even she couldn’t figure out.
Fine. Be that way.
Wiping her eyes, she adjusted one of his bandages slightly, ensuring it stayed in place. Kirell wasn’t bleeding anymore; those wounds had all closed, thankfully, but she didn’t want to go ahead and rip the dressings off, just in case they were serving some other purpose. There was still so little she knew about shifters, she didn’t want to start making assumptions.
From somewhere in the huge room, she heard a noise.
Her head snapped around, scanning the suite, even as she crept off the bed to the far side, fetching a knife from the side table. She’d found it in one of his drawers while looking for fresh clothes for him to be dressed in, and she’d kept it out. If this was the attackers come back, they weren’t going to find her defenseless. She would protect Kirell.
Crouching over his body like a mother lion prepared to defend her clubs, she kept looking around the room, waiting for whoever had caused the sound to reveal themselves. The lights may have been dimmed, but there was still enough to see with, and the space near the bed itself was completely devoid of furniture. Nobody was sneaking up on her.
“Come on,” she hissed. “Let’s do this.”
Who the hell do you think you are? If this is a shifter, you don’t stand a chance, idiot. Your best bet is to run for help.
Natalia politely told her inner voice to shut the fuck up. Kirell had suffered enough; she wasn’t about to let him be hurt any more. Not if she could do something about it.
There was another noise. Her ears were able to pinpoint it this time. It was coming from the wall panel, the one that was a secret door leading to passageways through the walls of the house.
Tensing, she watched and waited, until the panel popped open a bit. Then, without so much as a noise, she slid off the bed and ran at the door as silently as possible, knife held low and to the side, ready to sink it into the gut of whoever was coming through.
“DIE!” she screamed as a shadowy figure emerged, thrusting the knife forward, hoping her shout caught them by surprise, slowing their reaction time until she could do fatal damage to the attacker.
The reaction time may have been slowed, but not by anything close to enough. An arm blurred, something like steel clamped around her hand and she cried out as her arm was wrenched around painfully. The knife clattered to the floor and Natalia sunk down to try and grab it with her free hand, but fingers closed around her neck, halting her movement.
“Do not move,” a deep male voice warned, speaking with such utter conviction that Natalia did her best impression of a statue, not wanting to test their resolve. “I will break your neck.”
“At ease,” a familiar voice said next. “She is no threat to us.”
