Slip of Fate (Werelock Evolution Book 1) (15 page)

“Do you have any fragrance-free, hypoallergenic shampoo and body wash in here?” I persisted, purposely interrupting her concentration right when it appeared she was working to recall the last series of buttons she’d just pressed.

She looked like she was dying to slap me again. “I’m sure we’ll find something!” she replied flippantly before venting another string of
fucks
in annoyance at the wall computer.

“Okay if I start looking through the selection to check ingredients?”

“Yes!”
she hissed through clenched teeth, clearly just wanting me to shut up and stop disrupting her focus.

I crawled to my knees on the table, pretending to peruse jar labels on the shelf above me.

“Careful!” she cautioned, shaking her head in a manner that suggested she was beyond put out by this entire experience already. Her eyes proceeded to dart back and forth between the monitor and my activities at the shelf like a mother in a supermarket with an unstrapped, disobedient child in her grocery cart.

Though she hadn’t managed to start the showerheads above us, the table was already slightly damp from the steam. And if I was reading the anxious, disdainful expression on her face with any accuracy, I suspected she was imagining me slipping from the table like an imbecile and breaking my fragile human neck next.
In which case, she was at least partially onto my plan.

I nodded obediently, feigning cautiousness as I methodically grabbed all the largest jars I could reach, pulling them closer to me until they were lined along the very edge of the shelf, every so often bringing a few up to my face as I pretended to scan the labels. It took longer than I wanted it to with only the use of my left hand, and I feared I was running out of time. My cheek and my wrist were rapidly swelling and the now merciless, throbbing pain was starting to make me dizzy.

“Yess!
Got it!” Jacinda cheered. “I win!” she announced in triumph over the machine as every single one of the overhead shower jets abruptly blasted to life throughout the room, drenching us in warm water.

It took supreme effort to balance myself then as I seized the moment and arose beneath the spray to a full standing position on top of the table.

Jacinda caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and shrieked over the roar of the spray for me to get the fuck down. I pelted a glass jar full of sea salts at her in response, followed by another, as fast and as hard as I could left-handed.

She squealed and shouted obscenities, along with threats of murder. I was impressed that I managed to strike her with two jars before she got to me, dodging the third jar before latching onto my extended left hand and yanking me down from the table.

Unfortunately, she yanked so hard she dislocated my left shoulder. I knew it the instant I felt and heard the sickening pop as it jerked forward out of place, and it proved to be far more painful than the fall I took, as the fall was partially broken by the massage table and then by Jacinda as she caught me before I could collide with the unforgiving tile floor.

My eyes flooded with tears as excruciating pain erupted through my arm and shoulder. I bit down on my lip so hard I tasted blood.

Holding me by the waist beneath one of her arms, Jacinda used her free hand to flip the table over on its side before lifting it and flinging it across the room and out of my reach as if it were nothing.

Crap.
I’d pushed her well beyond her limit.

“
Fucking
stay!
”
she commanded, plopping me down onto the tile floor where the table had previously been before jerking my head back by the roots of my hair and shouting in my face.

“Listen, you stupid little human cunt,” she lashed, “I don’t know who the fuck you are, or why you’re such an important prisoner you get to stay in Alex’s rooms, but I swear to God I will kill you painfully and worry about consequences later if you so much as pull just one more stunt with me.
Do you fucking understand?
” she screamed, yanking my hair harder when I didn’t answer her, bringing more tears to my eyes.

I nodded as best I could and she released me, grumbling more choice insults about useless humans before stomping back over to the control panel in the wall to shut the water off. I suspected she meant to clean up the mess of glass I’d created.

My body was shaking something fierce, my tears turning to quiet sobs of despair as the sheer pain and stress of the physical damage I’d endured caught up with and overwhelmed me.

Then just as the water shut off and I was wallowing in my own bitter defeat, something hard and as heavy as a brick fell from above me, shocking the hell out of me as it knocked me squarely and painfully on the crown before crashing to the floor next to me in a mess of shattered glass and salt scrub.

I emitted an incredulous, awkward little hysterical giggle at the irony of it all. One of the jars I’d lined precariously along the edge of the shelf had fallen on me. Dazedly, I reached up with the arm attached to my good shoulder and felt copious amounts of something warm and sticky oozing from my crown onto my broken hand.

It wasn’t salt scrub, and I didn’t have to see it to realize how bad it was, as I could already feel myself fading—as if all my bodily systems were promptly shutting down. The look of pure horror on Jacinda’s face reflected all I needed to know.

I smiled wanly in return and said,
“I win,”
before slumping to the tile floor.

An enormous crash sounded from beyond the shower not a second later. I fought to peek my eyes open and managed to crack the right one barely a sliver. It was just enough to witness Jacinda as she grabbed her head, screaming bloody murder and falling onto her knees as Kai burst into the bathroom.

He didn’t speak to or even look at her; he only pushed her out of his path, sending her face forward to the floor as he entered the shower and made a beeline straight for me. I made a mental note not to sass him in the future—
if I had a future
—before surrendering to the inevitable.

CHAPTER NINE

I came to with Kai tinkering inside my head, his blurry face leaning upside down over me. The nice lady who had assisted me on my bathroom trips was on my opposite side and appeared to be administering that intravenous healing push.
Damn
.

My drunken eyeballs attempted a survey of the shower and found Jacinda’s body lying motionless on the tile floor nearby.

“Is … is she okay?” I croaked.

“No,” Kai’s deep voice echoed with finality through the shower space. “Her brain imploded.” He seemed unperturbed by that fact.

“She’s dead?” I gasped in disbelief. It was the stupidest of questions. Kai didn’t deign to answer.

Comprehension dawned … she was dead because of
me. Someone was dead because of me.
Her figurative blood would forever be on my hands.

“No,” Kai interrupted my self-flagellation, “she’s dead because I have no use for someone unable to follow simple instructions.”

I felt hysteria rising up and lodging in my chest as I gazed helplessly at her lifeless form, and then as I noted there was in fact actual,
real
blood staining the tile floor all around my person.

“Fuck,” Kai swore gruffly in an uncharacteristic display of emotion. “It’s not enough. She needs blood.”

As twisted as it was, the fear and stress I heard in his voice set my hope floating anew.
My situation was dire.
I could still die.
When the woman administering the push nodded gravely in accord, my spirits virtually soared.
I was definitely suffering acute depression.

Absurdly, the next random thought to cross my mind was that they didn’t even know my blood type.

“Sleep, Milena,” Kai told me before everything went black again.

But I didn’t dream. And I didn’t feel like I was completely unconscious. Rather it felt like I was caught in a bizarre, altered state of awareness where I drifted in and out of a dark void of nothingness. I wondered if this was what it was to be in a coma.

Occasionally I heard people talking. They were mostly male voices. I no longer felt any pain, but I was warm—unnaturally so. While it was a comforting heat, it also felt heavy. And the warmth felt like it was coming from the inside. It felt like it was flowing through my veins and spreading throughout every part of my body.

I was both dismayed and buoyed when I perceived Alex’s fingertips skating delicately over my forehead and damp hair, taking care to avoid the area surrounding my injury. It was disappointing that despite all the pain I’d endured, he’d obviously not been damaged in the least. Yet at the same time, I realized perhaps this was a positive indication that I was not his true mate after all.

Much to my annoyance, I found both his touch and his scent undeniably soothing. And I noted he smelled even better somehow in my altered state, if that was possible. When the heat suffusing me became overwhelming, I tried to ignore it and just concentrate on Alex’s pleasing scent, but as my discomfort increased, I simply wanted it to stop.

“Just a little more, Milena,” Kai’s voice said, “… almost there.” I tried to tell him
no,
that I didn’t want anymore, that it was too hot already and I felt like I was about to catch fire, but I couldn’t regain consciousness, much less speak.

A large, masculine hand engulfed mine. “It’ll pass, baby,” Alex murmured, pressing lingering kisses to my eyelids in an intimate, endearing gesture that left me mystified. “Just take a bit more,” he appealed. “Please
, please
heal for me, little girl,” he pled softly and so sweetly I had to struggle to remember he was my enemy; he was the worst of villains.

Because for a mad second I was struck by an overwhelming, irrational inclination to do as his beguiling voice beseeched, despite the fact that he was the reason I’d subjected myself to injury in the first place, in my insane attempt to destroy him.

“But I’m still here,” he baited humorously in a hushed, conspiratorial tone, his knuckles ghosting tenderly over my recently abused cheek. “You have to heal so you can finish me off properly.”

I wanted to laugh with him at the absurdity of it all, but my body wouldn’t respond to my brain’s desires, and I could feel the dark void calling me, pulling me into its scary vortex of nothingness again.

“Rest,” he entreated. “I’ll be here. I won’t let the darkness take you.”

I resurfaced from nothingness sometime later to find myself free of gravity, floating peacefully atop a warm bed of clouds. Logically knowing that clouds were made of water still hadn’t prepared me for how wet they felt beneath and surrounding my skin, though, as they lapped over me in gentle waves, rocking me peacefully back and forth. I felt gloriously boundless. Weightless. I’d not expected death to feel so divine, and yet I should have.

I wondered when my mother would come for me. I decided I could wait in the clouds for as long as it took until she did.

“No one is taking you from me,” Alex’s familiar baritone penetrated through the clouds. And then I
felt
him in the clouds with me—his hard, muscled chest and shoulder sliding against my bare upper back and cradling my head as his arms encircled my waist.

He sounded angry. Irritated. His body felt tense. I realized he even smelled different. He smelled tense
.
Tension had a scent?

I wondered how we could both be in the heavenly cloud space together if he weren’t dead as well. And if he were, how had we wound up in the same place?
And why did it feel like I was completely naked in the clouds with him?

“You are not dead,” he spoke through what sounded like clenched teeth. “You’re
healing.”
His voice was strained, agitated. “You’ll be able to wake up again soon. Please, stop thinking about death. Just rest for me, Milena.”

I did my best to appease him. Because he’d said my name like it was warm chocolate budino that time. And because he smelled better when he wasn’t so tense.

So I let go of all concern, stopped thinking about why I might be naked adrift in clouds, and just focused on how good it felt to be floating in the warmth of both the heavenly clouds and Alex’s arms, as wrong as the latter might be.

He groaned and mumbled something in a language I couldn’t discern as his fingers stroked my belly and my rib cage. I wished I understood what he was whispering on about, as he sounded rather vehement about it. But he only translated one word on a growl before the nothingness found me again.
“Mine.”

I felt distinctly more lucid later when an acrid, cloying scent irritated me from my peaceful space of nonexistence.

“Any change?” Alex’s anxious voice seemed to accompany the scent, the stench becoming stronger as his voice drew nearer. “Did she stir?”

“No.” It was Kai who answered.

“Good,” Alex exhaled.

He’d obviously just returned from being elsewhere, and while it shouldn’t have bothered me in the least, it did.
He’d left me?

And he’d returned smelling perfectly awful! Like he’d bathed in cheap fragrance. Women’s fragrance?

I wanted to recoil from him and his strange stink when I felt the soft surface I was laying upon dip beneath his weight. As he sidled up next to me, his body radiated none of the tension I’d felt earlier when he’d been in the clouds with me, and his mood seemed markedly improved.

“How’s my girl?” he inquired, peppering soft, affectionate kisses over my healed cheekbone. I had a vague sense of the point at which he’d slipped into my mind, and once I felt him settle and begin searching, I decided not to hide my displeasure. I purposely projected to him how much I thought he reeked of trashy perfume.

He swore and grunted something to Kai about “fucking side effects” before switching the conversation into Portuguese. He abandoned the space at my side, continuing to grumble in his language as he stomped away, slamming a door behind him.

To my shock, I heard Kai erupt into a fit of smothered laughter seconds after the door slammed. Then he patted my hand and told me I was making brilliant progress and that I would be waking up soon. I got the impression he was referring to more than my physical progress.