Chapter 34
Kiana
“No!” Irene said sharply and broke contact. I jumped and opened my eyes. She was pale and trembling. “My apologies. That was a vision from my past, and it has nothing to do with you. Please, try again. For me.”
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She took my hands, and I blew out my breath and closed my eyes. It took a little bit longer to relax, but when it did, I surfaced somewhere else.
“You have to be quiet,” I whispered. “I know you’re in pain, but you have to be quiet, because if you don’t, he’ll hear you. If he hears you, he’ll remember you. Please.”
A small dark room. There was a rough rug beneath my bare feet. It was made of rope, wound around and around again to protect my skin from the splinters of the wood, but sometimes, I thought the rough fiber of the rope was even worse.
It didn’t matter. The rug was necessary. Camouflaged tool so I could one day make my escape.
The whimper sounded again, and I crawled away from it to the small window. I was being punished. I’d spilled hot coffee on his guest. A mistake. Scared little hands that trembled too much, but it didn’t
matter. I was back in the room.
I knew what happened here.
Outside, I saw two figures. My father and his guest. A terrifying man.
“He’s in place,” the man said stiffly, “but the others are suspicious.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck!” Ragor snapped. I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized his voice. “It doesn’t change the plan.”
“It does. This plan is contingent on everything going exactly right. We wait.”
Ragor growled. “How long? A month? Two?”
“Three or four. Years,” the man said. “You need to be careful. Your little hobbies need to stop.”
“What hobbies?”
“I know what you are doing, Ragor. I can smell the blood from here. We have found the void. There’s no need to keep searching. Keep your head down and wait.”
“Fine,” Ragor said sullenly.
“Your patience will be rewarded. I promise.” The man walked away, and Ragor turned to the small
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window. “How is she doing, Kiana? Does she want to play some more?”
I turned to the poor woman, barely clinging to life. Of course she didn’t want to play.
They never did.
“Kill me, child” the woman whispered. “Please. I can’t take any more.”
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“I want to play, Kiana. He thinks I’m going to stop just because he said to? I obey no one; I am the one obeyed,” my father growled. The fury in his voice made me shudder, and I crawled back to the woman and placed a hand over her nose and mouth.
Tears poured down my cheeks as I stole what little life she had left.
He would be angry when he found out. He would be so angry.
“What the fuck,” Troy roared. He pulled me from the memory, and I tried to scramble free, but Irene grabbed my hands and squeezed. “What the hell was that?”
“A vision,” Irene murmured. “And not the one I saw. A memory, am I right? But one I suspect we were meant to see. Kiana, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Forcing a smile, I slowly pulled my hands back. “I’m fine. I remembered some of that already, The woman, but not the conversation.”
“It wasn’t important to you at the time, but I suspect it’s very important now. Your father was kidnapping women and children, yes?”
Numbly, I nodded. “He wanted his own pack. He wanted to breed the women, but apparently, I was the last child he could have. When that didn’t work, he decided to take children.”
“No.” Irene shook her head. “According to that vision, I think your father was looking for something in those women. They found what they were looking for, and he was ordered to stop.
Think back about the victims he took. Did anything strange happen to them? Did he want to keep any of them alive?”
I shook my head. “No. None that I can think of, and he didn’t have a particular type that he liked.”
“So why was he ordered to stop?” Irene got up and paced. “Maybe it’s tied in together. In the vision that I had, I was in the woods, but I was you. I was running, and someone was chasing me, and then I passed through this brilliant light show of purples and golds.”
“Well that’s a memory. It’s one of the spell traps in Wisteria Woods.”
“No, it wasn’t a trap.”
“But it is.” When Irene looked at me blankly, I tried to explain further. “That’s how I see them. Bright
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and beautiful colors. When I touch them, they sort of fill me. Like… my voice trailed off.
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“Like you’re a void,” Troy said flatly. “That’s why your father was taking women. He was looking for
a fucking null, and he had one right under his nose the whole time.”
My skin chilled. “That conversation that we just saw happening? That was between my father and the red wolf. It was right after I ran to the Darkwyn coven. No more than a few weeks.”
“Can you give me an exact date?” Troy asked.
I shook my head. “No. I didn’t have a phone or anything, so it was hard to track dates. It was the first woman he’d taken after I returned. It was cold, so winter. We had another winter, and then he
took Cora the next fall. So almost two years before you came. That’s five years ago. Does that
help?”
Troy’s face hardened. “Five years ago, Morven became an alpha.”
“In place,” I echoed.
“The alphas aren’t meeting by chance,” Irene said in a low voice. “He needed a way to get to you, and now he’s about to waltz right onto your property.”
“He’ll never touch her,” Troy growled.
Irene got a strange look in her eyes and glanced down at the water. “I was channeling the water and I was connected to her. So tell me, alpha Troy, how is it possible that you saw the vision?”
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