by Lynn Graeme
Only Yours
A Bloodhaven Novella
by
Lynn Graeme
Copyright
Only Yours © 2014 by Lynn Graeme
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is purely coincidental.
License Notes: Thank you for downloading this book. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About the Author
Excerpt
Chapter One
She looked as pretty as a goddamn picture. So damnably put-together.
He, naturally, did not.
Jamal Mousenn glared at the woman standing beside his hospital bed. Glared at her, glared at her spring-sky eyes, glared at the slash of blood-red lipstick that persisted in calling attention to her mouth. Long ash blonde hair curled down one shoulder, curtaining a strand of pearls that rested around her vulnerable throat. Those pearls glinted at him like a wink—a wink that was more of a taunt as Jamal lay there clothed in no other armor but a hospital gown and one hundred and ninety pounds of pure, unbridled male aggression.
That aggression was just dying to be funneled somewhere, and here was this newcomer presenting an attractive little target, complete with a bright red-lipsticked bull’s-eye. Jamal seethed with eager resentment.
“Good morning,” said the vision in pearls. She smiled and extended her left hand. “Terris McLachlan, Moran Industries. Agent Saba said you’d be expecting me.”
Jamal glowered. Her hand hovered between them for several heartbeats before she withdrew it to her side.
Her smile didn’t even waver. “Thank you for seeing me today.”
“Did I have a choice?” he snarled.
She laughed as if charmed. Which only proved how false she really was, because Jamal didn’t do charm. Her laughter drifted like effervescent bubbles through the antiseptic air, light and free, stirring him to his very bones. Jamal gritted his teeth and ignored the sensation. He wasn’t falling for her pretty tricks.
It was as if she didn’t comprehend how swiftly a wounded predator could lash out. How easily a swipe of his claws could shred flesh down to the bone. She appeared unaffected by his black glare, its veritable array of razor-sharp daggers seeming to merely glance off of her. Damn human didn’t even have the good grace to flinch.
Instead, she turned to set her soft-sided case down on the narrow table abutting the wall. So, foolish enough to turn her back on him. She either didn’t realize the vulnerable target she presented or she was willfully ignorant. Neither options boded well for her common sense.
The third option, of course, was that she considered him far too infirm and feeble to present any sort of threat to her. If that wasn’t a blatant insult Jamal didn’t know what was.
“I hope it’s all right that I asked to start in the afternoon. Not the best time for you, I know—you need your rest—but I had an appointment this morning that I couldn’t reschedule.”
“Like getting your nails done?” Jamal glanced at her hands as she turned around to face him. Pale and smooth, with a perfect pink manicure. Unmarked by the harsh realities of life.
Well. At least she had both hands.
“Nothing that indulgent, I’m afraid. It was business-related.” She approached him again, impeccable smile still in place. “Thank you for being able to reschedule. I understand you were unable to make our first meeting because you had to be moved for security reasons.”
Jamal stared at her with suspicion. “How much were you told?”
“Not much. The Council kept all that information confidential—as it’s wont to do.” Her expression took on a wry cast.
Jamal didn’t argue the point. The Council policed shifter behavior in the city of Bloodhaven, and as one of its agents, he knew all too well about the dark, convoluted bonds of secrecy that entwined its reach. For humans, their law enforcement process typically dragged on in a series of legal proceedings and red tape. The Council, however, wasted little time when it came to its outlaws. It acted as judge, jury, and executioner all in one, and the less the human community knew of the ways in which it hunted down and punished its rogues, the better.
Terris McLachlan shouldn’t even have been informed about the aforementioned “security reasons”—never mind that the term had been as vague as hell—but for the fact that she was supposed to have visited Jamal several days ago. An impending threat had scuttled that plan, however. He’d been rushed from the ICU to a safe house at the time. He supposed the Council had had to tell her something when she ended up arriving at the hospital only to be faced with an empty bed.
The doctors had protested moving Jamal in his condition, considering he’d only just survived a vicious bloodbath. The nurses, on the other hand, had likely erupted into cheers as soon as he’d left the building. Poor bastards must’ve also cursed the air blue once they found out the threat was neutralized and Jamal would be returned to their safekeeping once more.
He’d already developed a less-than-stellar reputation during his stay here. Despite the specially soundproofed walls, his keen shifter sense of hearing had picked up on the muttered conversations in the hallways. Nurses and medical residents alike had resorted to drawing straws whenever it came to attending him. They’d borne the worse of his foul temper from the very moment he’d roused from surgery.
Jamal didn’t care. He preferred their annoyance to their pity. Snow leopards weren’t known for their sociable nature anyway.
Now he was back to being trapped within these stagnant white walls. Stuck in this bed, locked in place, unable to get away from the guilt and anger battling for dominance inside his head.
Three dead agents, all because of him.
The last thing he wanted right now was to deal with someone like Terris. Jamal hadn’t even wanted to meet her in the first place. Now that he had, he wasn’t any further impressed. This was the representative Moran Industries had sent? What kind of medical representative was she?
Oh sure, she had impeccable poise with not a hair out of place. But for that distractingly red mouth, she kept the rest of her makeup light and professional. She clearly knew how to present herself … except for the fact that she wore a flowery silk dress that skimmed just below her knees. Except for the fact that she clearly came from money, and adorned herself in pearls and heels and too much cheer good for his liking.
The entire combination grated on Jamal’s nerves. She looked like she was going to an English tea party instead of attending a client consultation. Even she didn’t take this meeting seriously. What a joke.
At least she had the good sense not to wear perfume. Most humans never thought about that when visiting the hospital’s shifter wing, which had been specially designed to accommodate its patients’ enhanced senses. Fine, then. She had a little good sense.
Not much
in the way of self-preservation instincts, though.
Still, she was a statuesque woman, a veritable Valkyrie of taller-than-average stature and too-wide shoulders. Whatever Jamal might resent about her picture-perfect appearance, she had that going for her, at least. Those shoulders prevented her from looking delicate. She’d probably been a competitive swimmer in her youth.
“I understand your other injuries are healing quickly. That’s good.”
Jamal bared a mocking set of teeth. “What do you care? That’s not why you’re here.”
His self-control must be improving. Only a few days ago, he would’ve flung a meal tray at her just on the basis of her trivial comments. A meal tray, an empty bedpan … any object within reach to send her screaming from the room.
Terris simply looked at him, unafraid and kind. Far too kind for his liking.
“Does it hurt?” she asked softly.
And there it was. The reason the tea party princess was deigning to grace him with her presence.
Jamal clenched his left fist as bitterness, thick and pungent, coated the back of his tongue. His nails dug into the palm of his hand. It was his dominant hand, and now—as that screaming voice in his head reminded him over and over—his only hand.
He could still feel a vicious tingling at the end of his right wrist. Ghost pains, they’d told him. Sometimes a gentle pull of muscles that no longer existed, sometimes a white-hot agony that seared him from the inside out in the middle of the night. It came and went at will. Like ghosts.
Fury and despair crowded out the air from Jamal’s lungs as he stared down at his right forearm. It rested by his side atop crisp wide sheets, its wrist ending in a cruel, bandaged stump. Below his wrist, nothing else remained but empty space.
Empty. Absent. Gone.
Does it hurt?
Stupid question. There were so many ways to define pain.
Perhaps guilt was the most grievous pain of all. Jamal was a senior-level Council agent, yet years of experience under his belt hadn’t prevented him from making a careless mistake. A single, cocky, stupid, careless mistake. That was all it’d taken for a pair of vicious rogues to catch him off-guard, to rip his hand off with their teeth before tearing their claws right into him.
He’d been found curled up on the forest floor, too out of his head with pain, an ever-widening pool of blood staining his uniform and seeping into the dirt beneath.
Jamal could’ve perhaps withstood the loss of his hand and his other injuries as justifiable punishment for his error in judgment, but that hadn’t been the worst of it. Three other agents on his team had been killed in the woods that day. Three agents dead as a consequence of his actions.
That knowledge cut Jamal deeper than those tigers’ teeth ever could.
Isobel Saba, Jamal’s friend and fellow agent, was the one who’d found him in the forest that fateful day. She was also the one who’d spoken to the head of Moran Industries, resulting in this consultation. The company was the nation’s leading manufacturer in shifter-related medical and pharmaceutical products, and apparently was making its first foray into the arena of prosthetic limbs. This rep, she’d said, would assess his eligibility for a prosthetic hand.
As soon as those words had come out of Isobel’s mouth, Jamal had flung an IV bag at her. Damn cheetah never even batted an eye as the bag smashed against the wall behind her.
“You’ll thank me later,” she’d told him, ignoring the spilled saline inching toward her boots.
“What’s the point?” he’d shouted. “What’s the point in replacing my hand when there’s no way to regain those lost lives? Brodie, Yvor, Gettis. All of them gone! They’re never coming back!”
“I know,” Isobel had replied quietly. “We’ll each of us have to find a way to accept that.”
She’d left before he could reach for the meal tray.
Guilt scored Jamal with its poison-tipped fangs. He wanted to roar at the Valkyrie to leave, to leave him in his wretched solitude so that he could scream out his rage. It was his fault, all of it. He’d led the charge, had been too eager to hunt down those suspects that he’d led his teammates into those woods and right to their deaths. Like cattle to an abattoir.
What good would a prosthesis do? Provide him with some semblance of normalcy while his fallen comrades would never draw breath again?
Not that he could escape it now. Isobel had compounded the matter by letting the Council know what she’d done. The Council had then pointedly encouraged Jamal to go through with it.
“A shifter-specific prosthesis wouldn’t be a bad thing,” his superior had observed the day after Isobel’s visit. “We need more options for our agents. You could test out those options.”
“Be your guinea pig, you mean.”
“You’ll be whatever we want you to be, Agent.”
Jamal knew when to read between the lines. Neither could he deny the truth behind those words. Whatever the Council wanted him to be—test subject, guinea pig, dissected insect pinned to a corkboard—he’d do it. If whatever slice-and-dice experiments Moran Industries conducted on him meant that other maimed agents had a shot at a normal life, then maybe—maybe—he could atone for his sins.
Yeah, it hurts.
The key issue, of course, was that a shifter-specific prosthesis didn’t exist. Whatever Moran Industries was promising, it was enough to tempt the Council into buying this bridge. Jamal couldn’t figure out if Moran was just that convincing or if the Council was just that desperate.
The Council took care of its own. It paid for its agents’ medical and rehabilitation expenses, and didn’t dismiss them for injuries sustained in the heat of battle. Impairments such as a missing eye meant nothing as long as the agent could do his or her job effectively. A missing limb or appendage, however, was another story. Agents could heal quickly after combat due to their inherent shifter nature, but they most certainly couldn’t regenerate a limb.
In the past, agents who lost a limb had no choice but to be put on desk duty. It was too risky to send such an agent out on a mission, no matter how capable they were, because they’d immediately be at a disadvantage the moment they faced off with a full-bodied rogue.
Some of those agents adapted well to their new occupational roles behind the desk. Others, however, were too accustomed to the nonstop action and adrenaline they were used to encountering out in the field. Unable to cope, they often went into a rapid decline, and either left the Council entirely or self-medicated with devastating results.
In some ways, to suddenly lose their identity as an active agent was more traumatic than losing the limb in the first place.
Medical advances had come far over the last several years, but shifter prostheses hadn’t come far enough. Currently, artificial limbs were only useful to shifters who remained in their human form. It wasn’t as if the bio-plast composite that made up most artificial limbs these days could shift along with the wearer. If the wearer wanted to shift, they’d have to remove the limb first before assuming their animal form—and then be confined to three legs the entire time, leaving their prosthesis aside with their clothes until they shifted back into human form to put it on again.
All well and good if the shifter was an ordinary citizen who had the luxury of taking their time. Council agents, however, navigated a never-ending onslaught of violence and danger on an everyday basis. They needed to be able to shift into their animals quickly and with ease. They didn’t have time to fumble around with removing a prosthesis, unstrapping bands and removing balls from sockets in the middle of a raid.
All it took was a second of distraction for a newly-shifted rogue to ambush them and tear them apart. Jamal knew that only too well.
So if there was a chance that there was an alternative out there—a chance that its maimed agents could regain functioning limbs and appendages with the ability to shift and engage in brutal combat in one smooth flow—the Council wanted to know about it.
That, Jamal supposed, was where he came in
.
And why not? After the way he’d fucked up in the woods, it was the very least he could do. His colleagues and fellow agents were his family—the only family that mattered, anyhow. If they wanted him to walk through fire, he would. If they wanted to use him as a guinea pig, he’d do it with his head held high.
And if it turned out Moran Industries had been leading them on, he’d be the first in line to make sure the company regretted it.
Jamal studied Terris with a healthy dose of skepticism. If she presented him with the standard line of removable prostheses that were already out there in the market today, he might as well call a stop to this meeting right now. Just because he was confined to a bed didn’t mean he was willing to waste his time. If she dared to try to convince him otherwise, he’d forget about swallowing his pride for the Council and throw something at her anyway.
Maybe a pillow. He could throw a pillow. It was soft enough—wouldn’t really hurt her. Would only minimally muss her makeup.
He could think of other ways involving soft pillows that would muss her makeup.
Jackass.
Why couldn’t she have shown up wearing an ill-fitting pantsuit? It would’ve been easier had she taken an impassive look at him, then whipped out a silver suitcase to present a supermarket selection of artificial hands to choose from. Third row, first one on the left. Price check, please.
She had no right to look so lovely. And she had no right to smile down at him like that, a benevolent angel regarding a common street rat at his lowest point. He didn’t need her pity.
His lip curled. “Tell me, Ms. McLachlan: are we going to play out this monumental farce to the end?”
“Please, call me Terris.” She smoothed a hand over her hair, even though not a strand was out of place. “What monumental farce would that be, Agent Mousenn?”
“I don’t want a removable shit prosthesis. If that’s all you’re here for, if you’re here just to turn the pages of a fucking manufacturer’s catalog, you can go ahead and leave right now.”