Page 173 of Jagged Souls

With a heavy heart, I strip out of my clothes, then start to shift into my wolf form so I can fight the woman I love. So I can try to protect her from herself.

I drop to my knees as my senses become enhanced – my ears elongating, the network of nerves in my nose growing. I dig my claws into the wooden floor, a low growl ripping through my throat as the skin breaks all along my back.

But despite the pain of my shift, the real agony is inside. Because I’m fucking reminded that I’m cursed. That once I help her, once she’s no longer broken and the sight of her no longer kills me to see, I’m going to have to leave her once more.

I slam a fist into the ground, splintering the planks of wood. I want to rip the world to pieces. I want to go to war with the gods just so I can keep her.

But I am not a fool.

They’ve taken my entire family from me already, and I fucking know that Siome is being punished because ofme. Because I kept a part of her with me all this time, using her memory to get through the bane of my existence.

I howl in pain as that knowledge rips through me.

She screams in agony as her shift still continues.

I’m going to have to let her go.

But I don’t know if I can.

Don’t know if I’m strong enough...

Leaving her the first time nearly broke me.

Her screams turn into snarls, her werewolf form nearly complete. Her beautiful red fur haunts me in my dreams. A rusty red that enhances the brilliance of her ruby eyes. But it is her scent that has me freezing.

Stilling.

Feeling like my soul’s just been knocked out of my body.

My beautiful little helfire is in heat.

Fifty-Two

Antonio

Micha’s fists vibrate from how hard she clenches them, and I’m hit with the memory of Siome’s rage. She told me to go to hel so many times. Cursed me, hated me. Then pushed me to be better.

To change the world to make it safe for her. For us.

For the little pups she carried.And look how bad I failed.

“Bring herback?” Micha snarls, her words twisted with all of her pain – but still so minuscule compared to what’s inside of me. “You expect me to kiss your feet and thank you for this?” She lunges at me and grabs my shirt. Her empty eye sockets narrow as she trembles. “You killed her!”

“No,” I say, wrapping both my hands around hers, and push down my memories of Siome. I stand, dragging her to her feet. “Saukilled her. I was just the gun she used to pull the trigger.”

“She was a baby!”

“A fetus,” I reply flippantly. “Incapable of feeling pain until twenty-four weeks.”

“Ifelt it!” she screams, her pulse beating so damn hard at the base of her neck.

“And I felt the death of mymate,” I say. “You cry over a clump of cells that could not feel, while I mourn a mother who understood her babies had been murdered and she was dying. Who I couldn’t even comfort by telling her they were okay, and I would raise them in her absence. Sau killed her but only after she knew that pain.

“Yet, you only wonder how I could do such a thing as eat a baby?” My words vibrate through my chest, choking the air from my lungs. Spat with such venom, with such fuckingagonythat I’m struggling to control it. “I ask you how you can kill an adult and claim it’s any different. If you take that same kid, and I kill him eighteen years later, would you see me as a monster then or just a soldier?”

I lift my head from her ear, but my grip on her body does not loosen. My fingers are tight, white-knuckled, the rage in my chest burning out from my soul. “What innocence we put on babies as if they are special,” I sneer. “When dogs have more personality. Cows and pigs and all the animals we eat and beat and don’t give a damn about.”

“It’s different,” she says.