Page 112 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

One

Riva

A painful tightness fills the middle of my throat. Before I’ve even opened my eyes, the urge to clear it grips me.

But I can’t seem to swallow. I can’t make a sound.

It’s not a lump in my throat but something squeezed against my neck from the outside.

My eyes want to spring open. My muscles are braced to jerk into attack mode. But instead my body reacts as if I’m moving through mud.

My eyelids lift sluggishly. My arms and legs squirm against a firmly padded surface.

And jar to a stop when they hit restraints clamped around my wrists and ankles.

I blink with the same blurry sluggishness, fighting to clear my hazy vision. A room comes into focus around me: shadows along the walls but bright light streaming over the center of the space where I’m trapped in this seat.

It’s like a dentist’s chair. Except I don’t think those normally lock you in place.

Of course, I’ve never been to a proper dentist before, only seen them in TV shows and movies. It could be the reality is much more frightening.

But why the hell would I have been kidnapped by a dentist ? Some psycho tooth doctor was so desperate to clean my teeth?

My head’s been filled with mud too. My thoughts seep along dampened circuits.

There was something, right before?—

We were in the facility—we’d gotten a bunch of shadowblood kids out?—

Running down the stairs after Jacob, urgency thrumming through my nerves. Dashing down a hall and into a room?—

Unbreakable walls thudding into place around me. And Jacob?—

Not Jacob.

He called me Moonbeam .

My heart lurches, and my limbs yank against the restraints even though I can already tell they’re built to withstand my supernatural strength.

But as the resurgence of shock and anguish crashes over me, I’m remembering what happened next.

The gas that poured down from the ceiling in a thick lavender gush, blotting out the man I was staring at and clouding my mind into nothingness.

That’s where the memories stop. I have no idea what happened between that moment and waking up here, now.

Panic trickles through the sludge in my head, sharpening my senses.

Where are my guys? Were they caught too?

What happened to the kids we got out—did Rollick and his people get them to safety?

Where the hell am I?

I open my mouth, wanting to call out, but the pressure against my throat chokes off any sound beyond a slurred mumble. A fresh chill winds around me.

I won’t be able to scream like this. I can’t defend myself with my strength, my claws, or my killing shriek.

Whoever’s holding me knows exactly what I can do and figured out a way to chain all of my talents.

I clamp down on the jolt of terror with the instinctive discipline honed by years of training and combat in the ring. Freaking out isn’t going to help me.

I have to focus.

When I draw my awareness inside myself to settle my nerves, I pick up on the faint prick of sensation in the two thumbprint-sized blotches that mark my collarbone. The marks that formed when I slept with Andreas and Dominic for the first time.

They’re here, wherever here is. Somewhere nearby, anyway.

But I can’t tell any more than that they’re within maybe a hundred feet of me in different directions, and that they’re alive. What state they’re in beyond that, I haven’t got a clue.

A soft rasp from behind me jerks me out of my thoughts. A shift in the air that tells me a door has opened.

My pulse stutters, and I hold myself still to track the sounds.

Careful footsteps tread across the floor toward me. As I turn my head toward them, an unfamiliar man comes into view.

He walks until he’s nearly in front of the chair and stops there, facing me. His blue eyes study me assessingly.

I assess him right back.

He’s decently but not epically tall, with a fair bit of muscle under his polo shirt and slacks. Strong but no match for me if it comes down to hand-to-hand combat.

A military-short cropping of carrot-red hair tops his face. His features have a hardness to them that makes me think of military discipline too.

Faint wrinkles mark the corners of his mouth and eyes, and when he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the light from overhead catches on a few faded strands amid his red hair. I’d guess he’s in his late forties.

He isn’t wearing the typical metal helmet and vest that the guardians usually do. But I was captured in the depths of a facility. He must be with them, right?

I manage to push a few words from my throat, rough and faint but audible. “Who. The fuck. Are you?”

His thin lips form a reserved smile. “Someone who believes you can be more than what’s been offered to you so far, Riva.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I grimace.

“Someone. Who can’t. Talk?”

He lets out a light chuckle that makes me want to punch him in the face. I wasn’t making a joke.

Then he motions to my throat. “I’ll take the clamp off as soon as I’m sure you aren’t going to turn that unexpected power of yours on me.

It really wouldn’t be in your best interests, and I’m sure you’ll realize that for yourself.

But I’d rather not take my chances before then, having seen how dire the consequences can be. ”

Yes, enduring one of my screams should not be on anyone’s top ten lists of how to go. My power craves all the pain it can provoke while it’s breaking its targets’ bodies.

That doesn’t mean this prick doesn’t deserve every bit of the pain I could deal out.

“Where. Guys?” I force out. My throat is aching just from the little bit of conversation I’ve been able to carry out.

“Your fellow shadowbloods—the ones you grew up with—are being held in their own rooms. They’ll be given the same opportunity. But you do seem to make a lot more trouble when you’re all together.”

His tone is dry, but I catch the more ominous implications. If we’re kept apart, we can’t plan a joint escape.

And escaping alone would leave the others in this man’s hands, possibly to punish for our rebellion.

If I scream this guy to pieces, I have no idea whether I’d be able to even get out of this room afterward, let alone get to Dominic, Andreas, Jacob, and Zian. Or how many other people might be working in this place who’d make me—or them—pay for my actions.

But the thought brings back the image of the guy who led me into the trap at the last facility I entered—the guy I grew up with but believed was dead.

My throat constricts for more reasons than just the restraint before I croak out, “Griffin?”

“I don’t think it’s time to get into that subject just yet,” the man says evenly.

“Let’s focus on getting you out of that chair.

I don’t want to hurt you or the others. I’ve been trying to get control over the Guardianship for years so that I could take our endeavors in a different direction.

This is your second chance. But you have to show you’re willing to give me a chance. ”

Every word coming out of his mouth sounds like bullshit to me. I narrow my eyes at him.

“Not. Trusting. Anything. Until. I see. Guys.”

By the end of that sentence, my vocal cords are outright throbbing. I’m not sure I’ll be able to say much else.

The man’s mouth tightens. His gaze flicks away from me, toward the door, as if something has drawn his attention there.

His frown deepens, but he steps to the side as another set of footsteps approaches.

He wasn’t the only one who came in. Someone’s been listening from just inside the door.

My body tenses all over again, not that it ever really relaxed. And then the last face I ever expected to see appears in front of me.

My heart stops.

My brain wants to think it’s Jacob I’m looking at. That’s what would make sense given everything I believed.

But just as in that final moment in the facility, I can pick out the differences. The slightly longer fall of his blond hair. The posture that looks a tad looser than Jacob seems to be capable of these days.

The emptiness in the sky-blue eyes that used to shine with every bit of shared joy we could scrounge up in our old prison.

“I’ve checked on the other guys,” says the man who must be Griffin, in a measured voice that holds no hint of emotion whatsoever. “Precautions have been taken when it comes to their powers, but they haven’t been harmed. I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I thought Clancy meant to do that.”

He glances at the older man—Clancy?

My captor raises his chin. “There. You’ve heard it from one of your own.”

Is the guy in front of me ‘one of my own’ anymore? He doesn’t sound like the Griffin I knew.

I watched that Griffin take a bullet that tore right through his back and chest. I watched the blood burst out of him, the mix of crimson liquid and black smoke that earned us the name “shadowbloods.”

I saw him crumple like a rag doll as if all the life had already left his body.

My face twitches with a wince, but I manage to cough up one more word, my gaze trained on the impossible figure before me.

“How?”

Clancy answers. “The Guardianship has always had excellent technology at our disposal. The shot only nicked Griffin’s heart rather than puncturing it. It took some time, but between our doctors’ expertise and the innate shadowblood ability to self-heal, he made a full recovery.”

He nods to Griffin. “Why don’t you show her the scar?”

Griffin’s face remains completely placid, almost dazed, as he reaches for the collar of his button-up shirt. Has he been drugged like the other guys said the guardians did to them after our first escape attempt?

He eases open the top two buttons on his shirt and pulls the fabric down and to the left.

He’s healed, but a reminder of the injury remains. A whorl of darker, ridged scar tissue marks the pale skin of his upper chest.

Right where the bullet hit him in my memory of that night.