The Beast Within. Suzanne Mcminn
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level of Dante’s Inferno. He would either find the answer he was looking for, and soon, or the thing inside him would destroy him. He almost didn’t care which anymore.
But he could still save Paige.
“Give me the paper.” He all but ripped it out of her hands. Without intending to, his fingers brushed hers. Fire flashed through his veins and it took a strength of will honed by two years of loneliness to slowly move away as if he hadn’t noticed.
He didn’t bother to read the documents. He signed his name and pushed it back at her. “Take it. And go home. Don’t come back. Ever.” He wanted her out of here, before she found out more. Before he hurt her more than he already had.
She folded the papers back into her rain slicker, tucked the pen in her back pocket. Then she looked up at him with her shining blue eyes.
“Kieran—”
Her voice, heartbreakingly soft now, trailed off. The anger was suddenly gone from her eyes, replaced by concern. Concern for him.
“It’s been two years,” she went on. “They looked for you, but—” She shook her head. “Phil was dead. You were gone. Brian quit the agency. PAX closed the project. It’s over for everyone…but you.”
She didn’t understand that it would never be over for him. And just hearing her talk about the past, about people he’d cared about, made it all worse. His partner, Phil Bennett, was dead. Brian Kaplin, his assistant, had left PAX—probably disillusioned, too. And now Paige was leaving the League.
Every person connected to him had been destroyed in one way or another.
“You have what you wanted, Paige. Go. You don’t belong here.” He couldn’t bear her pity. He turned away from her damning eyes.
She said nothing for an interminable beat. He prayed she would walk away.
“You don’t belong here, either, Kieran.”
He might not have even heard her whispered words if not for the sharpness of his too-keen hearing. He didn’t want to hear them.
But she went on.
“You shouldn’t have run away from PAX. You should have stayed and faced their questions. You broke your word, turned your back on your duty, on—”
Her. He’d turned his back on her.
“And for what?” she said, louder now, her voice rising against the sound of wind tearing through the pines and palmettos.
The sky was darker. The storm was coming.
“Paige—” He didn’t want to turn back, to look at her again. He didn’t want to feel, and he couldn’t look at her without feeling.
“What are you doing here, Kieran? Living alone—on this deserted island. Like an animal—”
He wheeled on her.
“I am an animal, Paige.” His voice came out in a snarl, and her eyes grew large. She took a step back from him, but he didn’t let her get away. He was scaring her, but he had no choice. He had to make her understand one thing. She had to leave.
He gripped her arms again, shook her lightly. “Go away. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Her gaze was suddenly overbright. “Too late.”
He deserved all of the stabbing accusation in her eyes and he knew it. Years shuffled through the foster care system had left its mark on her just as his own biological but miserable home life had left marks, too. Then he’d done the worst thing he could do to someone who’d grown up as she had. He’d abandoned her.
Another long moment passed. Wind howled.
“Paige—” He didn’t know what he’d meant to say. There wasn’t time to finish. He had let his feelings for Paige distract him, consume all his senses.
It had been a terrible mistake.
A shot cracked past his ear. He thought at first it was a tree snapping in the storm. Then Paige crumpled in his arms.
Chapter 2
The world as she knew it shifted, changed. Pain seared her temple, sudden and nearly blinding. The ground on which she stood swayed, seemed to open a chasm into which she dropped—yet it was no chasm that enclosed her but rather Kieran’s arms. Paige was hit by confusing sensations of safety, rightness, fear—but the pain made it all impossible to sort.
She could only stare up at him, locked in by his fierce, protective, angry eyes. Those eyes held her, kept her from the fast-swirling darkness.
The gathering storm over the barrier island receded until there was nothing but Kieran’s arms, Kieran’s eyes, Kieran’s heat.
Then he was gone, somehow, in the time it took her to blink. He’d lowered her to the ground—she knew that. She could feel the soft-packed forest floor beneath her cheek, smell the dirt and the moss. Now a shadow blurred past her eyes.
Low, lithe, dark.
The form streamed across the earth like a ghost, only it was real, she was sure of it. She watched it bound, lifting through the air toward another blurry shadow—a man. There was another sharp explosion, and she realized he was shooting, only comprehending then that she must have been shot. Her gaze spun around wildly, desperate for some point of connection.
Where was Kieran?
The world wavered, and she felt lost. Bright bursts of light crackled before her eyes. She knew she was going to lose consciousness, and she made a desperate attempt to stave off the enfolding blackness, blinking hard, clearing her vision with an effort. The dreamlike quality of the scene gripped her in fear.
The bounding creature reached the man, snarling in lethal fury, and she knew it for what it was. A wolf. Faster, more powerful, larger than any wolf she’d ever seen.
The man stumbled backward, screamed. The wolf latched on to his throat, and they were both down, in a struggle for life or death.
Paige jerked up from the ground, her mind crying Kieran’s name, but pain streaked immediately through her head and she couldn’t make her lips form the word. The world around her tilted, turned black.
The image waved into her consciousness, blurry, shifting, rippling like water. It was the wolf, red now. Dripping blood. She kept staring, baffled and scared, slowly understanding what she saw.
It wasn’t blood. It was some kind of dye. Ochre. She’d seen art like this before, in museums and books. Feather drawn, crude yet sophisticated at the same time. This was not the wolf she’d seen bounding in the shadows of the stormy forest. That wolf had been real. This was another wolf, created by some primitive hand, springing against a stone backdrop, wild and beautiful. Running free. Hard as the immutable surface on which it was painted and gentle as the soft, blowing breeze that seemed to sweep back its fur.
The wolf pulled at her heart in some inescapable way that baffled her even as it held her fast in its lonely, lost world.
Paige stared at the figure illustrated on the rock surface above her head, her eyes adjusting to the low light, the source somewhere beyond her view, her mind coming awake in dreamy increments. Finally, she tore her gaze from the rock with a sharp force.
Where was she?
She moved, started to push up on her arms, but pain dropped her back down onto something soft, padded. Oh God, her head throbbed. Her whole body ached. And then she remembered—
“Kieran?” she whispered, her voice coming out raw, hoarse.
“Don’t move.” He appeared above her, and she realized he must have been there all along, at her side. But for how long?
“Where am I?”
“Callula Island.”
“No, I mean—” Callula Island.