Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) - J.R. Ward Page 0,75

was held against a strong chest. With her head angled away from the horror, and her body supported, she couldn’t think of a reason to pull herself together, and as she let out a moan, a low, deep voice spoke to her in soothing syllables.

Although she couldn’t follow the words, Daniel’s murmuring was the only thing that kept her on the planet.

He was still holding her when Eastwind walked in.

“We haven’t touched anything,” she heard Daniel say. “And he pulled the trigger just as she got to the open front door.”

Lydia intended to lift her head and speak.

But in the end, she had no voice.

Later that day, much later, Lydia walked to work.

After everything that happened, she needed the fresh air, and with her car at Paul’s Garage, she had no other option than showing up on the back of Daniel’s bike.

Considering Candy was the only person on-site, it probably would have been okay, but she felt like she had to breathe by herself for a while. God, there seemed to be fifty percent less oxygen in the atmosphere than there usually was.

As she went along the side of the county road, she was aching from head to foot, proof, she supposed, of the mind/body connection: She wasn’t injured. She hadn’t overexercised. She wasn’t sick. But her muscles throbbed as if she had been put in a tumble jar, no surface on her left unbattered.

She and Daniel had stayed for a couple of hours at Rick’s house, out on his lawn, in the sunshine. She had remained sitting up, her arms balanced on her knees until her elbows had lost feeling and so had her dangling hands. Beside her, Daniel had stretched out flat on the mostly brown grass, his legs crossed at the ankles, one arm under his head. He had been like a dozing dog, lifting his lids at sounds that were outside the bandwidth of chirping birds, occasional cars out on the county road, and dim conversation inside the house.

The two of them had watched the other sheriff’s officers come. Had witnessed the coroner arriving in her boxy van. And when it had come time for the black body bag to be removed from the house on a gurney, she and Daniel had gotten to their feet.

It had been incomprehensible that Rick Marsh had been alive just that morning, in the veil. At that fence line. With a bomb in a duffel bag.

But some things shouldn’t be easy to make sense of.

Sheriff Eastwind was the only other one who had stayed the whole time. And during one of the lulls, he had taken their statements. Around noontime, she and Daniel had finally left, with him dropping her off at her house before he’d gone into the WSP for a shower.

They hadn’t said much. He seemed to understand that she needed space.

Not like it had helped. At all.

Back at her house, she had eaten some cereal and discovered she was ravenously hungry. An old box of Near East’s rice pilaf had solved that problem in a calorically dense, nutritionally deficient kind of way. And as she’d sat down to eat, she’d thought of Daniel and his health kick …

Coming back to the present, she looked around at the deep green of the conifers and the gray of the road and the bright yellow dotted line that cleaved the pavement in two. Overhead, the mostly cloudless sky was a resplendent blue, and the glinting yellow sunshine was proof that no matter how long and hard the winter, the spring always came.

As her eyes started to tear up again, she wiped at them.

The good news was that she was coming up to the WSP’s driveway, and she could focus on opening the mailbox and taking out whatever was inside. Pulling the black door down, she reached in for the bundle of letters and pouches—and the normalcy of picking up the daily delivery felt all wrong.

She cradled the modest load to her chest as she walked down to the main building.

In the parking area, Candy’s car and Daniel’s Harley were side by side.

Rick’s Jeep would never be under that tree again.

Lydia didn’t go to the front of the building. She took the mail to the clinic entrance. It was locked, so she used her key, and she opened the door slowly. Motion-activated ceiling lights came on, flickering to life and illuminating the otherwise dark area. Everything was so neat, so clean, the stainless steel counters gleaming, the cupboards closed up, the