Mira, uninvited and bitter with an acid bite.
She didn’t need to wonder who Kellan wanted to spend his nights with. He wasn’t hers to worry about. He wouldn’t be ever again.
And maybe he never truly was, if leaving her behind had come so easily to him.
Her heart wanted to deny that, but her head was still struggling to make sense of the fact that Kellan had been alive all this time—living just outside Boston in this new, lawless life he’d created for himself as someone else entirely. He’d never tried to reach her. Never cared enough to end her grief and tell her that he was safe—even if that gesture would come with the sting of learning who he’d become. He had simply walked away and never looked back.
The hurt in her chest cracked open wider, but she refused to let it break her.
And she shouldn’t give a damn who Kellan—or, rather, Bowman—decided to share a bed with, so long as it wasn’t her.
Mira swung her bare legs over the edge of the mattress and poured herself a glass of water from the tumbler Candice had left on the bedside table. Her contact lenses sat in a small dish of saline solution, also courtesy of the pretty, raven-haired woman. Mira put them in, then downed her glass of water, grateful for both kindnesses Kellan’s rebel comrade had provided her.
Mira rubbed a damp chill from her arms as she put her feet on the cold floor. She was wearing just her panties and the extra-large T-shirt Kellan had given her out of the chest at the foot of the bed. Her bra and his borrowed sweatpants were folded over a weathered wooden chair. She was about to get up and grab them when the tumbler on the locked door clicked open.
Kellan walked in, no warning or excuse.
His gaze shot to her in his bed. For a moment, she couldn’t tell if it was surprise or regret in his hazel eyes. But there was something dark in them too, something troubled and grim. He stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him.
When he spoke, his voice was coarse like gravel. “You look well rested.”
Mira scrambled out of his bed, all too aware of her state of undress and too conscious of the fact that Kellan was noticing it too. “You look like hell,” she told him, keeping the sarcasm ripe in her tone as she edged away from the rumpled mattress. “I hate to think you had to find another bed to sleep in, with your private quarters turned into my prison cell.”
He grunted as he prowled farther into the room. “Who says I slept?”
Mira watched him, wishing it wasn’t so easy to picture him warming another woman’s bed. For all her mental reassurances that she shouldn’t care what he did—or with whom—seeing him unrested and tense with menacing energy made anger spike in her veins. “Where have you been, Kellan?”
He barked out a caustic laugh. “Masterminding rebel business.” He pinned her with a dark look, showing the gleaming tips of his fangs. “That’s what I do, remember?”
Mira stared at him, taken aback by the barely restrained anger in his voice. His face was taut with aggression, the lean angles of his cheeks and goateed jaw even sharper now. Kellan was mad. Furiously mad.
She watched him stalk over to the clothing chest on the floor like he was marching to war. He stripped off his wrinkled black T-shirt with savage force, threw open the lid of the trunk. His dermaglyphs were livid with color. The swirling arcs and flourishes of the Breed skin markings that covered his chest and biceps churned and pulsed with stormy shades of red and black and midnight blue. Mira swallowed. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something bad.”
He exhaled sharply. “You could say that.”
His gaze met hers, and now his irises were bright with amber sparks, skewering her where she stood. Mira could feel his fury rolling off him, could see it in his hot glare, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her today.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she asked, refusing to be cowed. “You can talk to me, Kellan—”
“Talk to you?” he snarled. “I don’t want to talk. I need to think. This is my problem. You’re not a part of it.”
“I am a part of it, whether you like it or not,” she reminded him. “Whether either one of us likes it or not, you’ve made me a part of