All Chapters of BOUGHT BY THE BEAST: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The symptoms got worse over the next few days.I couldn't keep anything down. Water, crackers, the bland soup David tried to make. Everything came back up within an hour. My body ached constantly, exhausted from throwing up and the lack of sleep.And Caspian barely spoke to me.He'd moved to the couch downstairs. Said he didn't want to disturb my rest with his tossing and turning. But through the bond, I felt the real reason.He couldn't stand being that close to me. Couldn't stand smelling me, feeling my presence, knowing what was growing inside me.It was killing us both.I tried to reach out through the bond, tried to send him comfort, reassurance, anything. But he'd gotten better at building those walls. Better at shutting me out.David watched us fall apart with increasing frustration."This is ridiculous," he said on the fourth morning, finding me hunched over the toilet again. "You two are bonded. You're supposed to be inseparable. Instead you're acting like strangers.""We mig

Caspian's private home wasn't what I expected.I'd pictured something dark and fortified like the safe houses. All concrete and weapons caches and paranoia.Instead, we pulled up to a cabin in the mountains. Wood and glass and windows that overlooked a valley so beautiful it didn't seem real. Isolated but not forbidding. Private but not prison-like."You live here?" I asked as we got out of the SUV."When I'm not being hunted or hunting someone else, yeah." He grabbed our bags, though we barely had anything. "Bought it forty years ago. Figured I'd need somewhere to go when the world got too loud."David had peeled off an hour ago, claiming he had business to handle. I suspected he just wanted to give us space. Time to actually be together without an audience.The inside was even better than the outside. Open floor plan, massive stone fireplace, furniture that looked comfortable instead of expensive. A kitchen that was clearly used. Books everywhere."It's beautiful," I said."It's you

Concrete and steel blew inward so hard the shockwave lifted me off my feet and threw me sideways. I hit the floor on my shoulder, my gun skidding out of reach, and for one blind second all I could hear was the shriek of tearing metal and the high whine in my own ears. Then figures poured through the dust. Lycans, a dozen at least, moving in formation with the sharp efficiency of trained soldiers. They spread through the factory floor in seconds, weapons up, cutting off exits, driving Marcus's remaining men back into corners they would not walk out of. And at the front of them was a man who looked enough like Caspian to make my breath catch. He was a little shorter, a little leaner, but he had the same black hair, the same silver eyes, the same dangerous stillness sitting under his grin. "Brother!" he called out, sounding almost cheerful in the middle of the blood and noise. "You started without me!" Marcus saw him. Saw the Lycans flooding the building. Saw the balance turn agains

The convoy moved fast through the dark.Three black SUVs held formation with their headlights cutting through fog that had rolled in sometime during the fight. I sat in the middle vehicle with Caspian beside me and David stretched across the back on a fold-down medical cot with an IV line running from his arm to a bag hooked on the ceiling. The medic said he was stable and sleeping now rather than unconscious, which was apparently an important distinction. Caspian sat with his head back against the seat and his eyes closed. The dried blood on his jaw had flaked away in patches, revealing skin underneath that looked too perfect and too healed for a man who'd been fighting an hour ago. I watched the trees blur past the window and waited for him to start talking. "You said you'd explain," I said finally. He opened his eyes. "I know." "So explain." He turned to look at me and I could see him gathering words, deciding where to start, figuring out how to make two hundred years of secr

The convoy rolled through streets that looked nothing like I expected.I had been preparing myself for something ancient and hidden, some secret world operating by rules I would never understand. Instead I saw coffee shops with lights flickering on for the morning rush, a gym with floor-to-ceiling windows where someone was already on a treadmill, a grocery store with a delivery truck parked outside. Normal things in normal buildings, except none of it should have existed in a valley that no map had ever recorded. But the normal was a skin stretched over something else. The early morning joggers moved too fast, their strides eating ground in ways that human bodies could not sustain. A butcher shop on the corner had windows fogged with condensation that smelled of raw meat even through the sealed vehicle. Two children on a balcony watched our convoy pass with eyes that caught the light wrong, reflecting it back like animals in headlights. And everyone stopped what they were doing when