With the first man taken care of, I moved into the main room and started looking around.
After taking care of two more men, I came to the room where Brooklyn was being held and immediately started to get queasy at the horrid condition she was in.
She looked like death warmed over, and I wasn’t sure she’d even be alive long enough for Keifer’s mate to see her best friend again with the shape she was in.
Her hair was in dark clumps of brown around her dirty face.
She was in a bra and bike shorts that accentuated how skinny she’d gotten since she and Blythe had graduated from nursing school only a few weeks before.
Bruises ran the length of her arms and legs.
A cut above her eye looked like it could’ve used stitches when she’d received it.
Now the only thing that would fix it was plastic surgery of some sort.
The icing on the cake, however, was the tear streaks that ran the length of her cheeks.
None of that stopped me from picking her up as carefully as I could into my arms and walking with her out of the house.
“Let’s go,” I murmured quietly once I reached the front door.
“You want me to take her?” Alaric asked softly.
I shook my head, trying to fight down the irrational surge of rage that shot through me at the mere mention of him taking this woman from my arms.
“Alaric and Jean Luc, follow us home. The rest of you need to stay to make sure we make a clean exit. If I don’t get her to my sister soon, she won’t make it,” I ordered hurriedly as Perdita hovered above us.
The moment Perdita and I made it a mile away, they would no longer be under her spell.
And that could possibly spell trouble for us getting away, unless the rest of them stayed to make sure we weren’t followed.***Seven days later
“She had something in her stomach.”
I watched as Skylar held the USB drive out to Keifer, a sick ball of fear knotting my stomach.
Taking it like it was a poisonous snake about to attack, Keifer plugged it into the computer and winced when a file popped up.
“Fuck,” he hissed, clicking on it.
It was a sound file.
Short. Sweet. And to the point.
“I know you, Vassago. I know you better than you know me. I knew you’d come for her. You can’t resist helping the innocent,” Joseph grinned manically on the screen. “Which was why I put a GPS tracker in her. You’ve doomed yourself with your big old heart.”
Fear clogged my throat as I looked at the woman on the exam table.
The beaten and broken girl that would never have a normal life again.
“Find the GPS,” Keifer ordered Skylar. “I’m going to be with my wife.”
I looked over at him, then back to the computer screen as I repeated the video file.
Which was why I put a GPS tracker in her.
Goddammit. Why had I not thought of that?
I forced myself to watch as Skylar started to X-ray Brooklyn’s body, searching for the elusive GPS tracker.
“You’ll need to leave…I think I’ve found it,” Skylar said thirty minutes later.
“Where is it?” I asked, coming closer to the table.
I wouldn’t comment yet about how all of her injuries had healed so fast…or why my body ached in the very same places she’d been bruised in earlier.
I also wouldn’t comment on the itching on my side where I could see faint lines and swirls appearing.
Something was off here.
I felt something for Brooklyn…a woman I barely knew.
A woman that was just that…a woman.
I’d met her a week ago when I’d saved her from that hellhole, and hadn’t even spoken to her yet.
I had an irrational fear, though.
I didn’t want anyone to get close to her.
I hated being away from her.
It drove me nuts when Carrick, the night nurse who worked alongside Skylar, was responsible for her.
And I was just plain agitated by…everything.
“Right here,” Skylar said, pointing to a spot just above Brooklyn’s hip.
I moved closer, trying to see if I could find any scars, but there were none.
“What are you going to have to do?” I asked worriedly.
Skylar glanced at me with concern.
“Hopefully a small incision…why?” Her head lilted as she snapped on gloves.
I shook my head.
“You mind if I stay?” I questioned.
She shook her head.
“No,” she added. “But you’ll need to not go all gray in the face when you see the blood.”
I hated that she was right.
But I had a phobia of blood.
My blood. Keifer’s blood. Anybody’s blood, and I was close to losing it.
It was a deep urge inside of me that pushed at me anytime I saw it.
It wasn’t so much as getting sick, as much as my body craved it.
And not in the ‘I want to drink it’ kind of way. More like ‘I want to touch it’ kind of way.