Rabid (Kingdom of Wolves #6) - Ivy Asher Page 0,69

think my mother’s position would protect me forever. I knew Burke was fucked up, but I couldn’t comprehend the lengths he would go to have me. I’m grateful for what my wolf and I did to survive him, regardless of how damaged it has left us. I just wish I could understand what we’re supposed to do with this new wolf she’s dead set on claiming. She should hate Tyran, should want nothing to do with him. And yet every damn second he’s near, she wags her tail like an excited pup and throws my logic and needs right out the window.

With a frustrated sigh, I push up from the shower floor. My leg muscles are shaky and tired, my body in desperate need of food. I’m so hungry I could literally eat a horse right now, and my mouth waters at the thought of gorging myself on meat and blood and bone. Turning the water off, I grab a fluffy towel from a stack on a small table beside the glass shower door. I dry off, hunger suddenly riding me hard.

I find a blow-dryer in a drawer, which makes me smile at the thought of the big bad alpha blow-drying his precious locks in place. I wipe a streak of steam from the mirror so I can see what I’m doing, but the eyes that stare back at me make me flinch in fright. I drop the dryer and step back from the mirror as though a monster is trying to break through from the other side.

“Holy shit.”

My hands shoot up to cover my mouth as though I can trap my shock between my cupped palms and then throw it away. My heart gallops through my chest, distress riding it like a jockey. After a minute, I build up enough moxie to slowly approach the mirror and try to make sense of what I see.

I wipe more steam from the mirror, leaning closer to it as I turn my head left and right. My skin is tan, with some light freckles dusting my nose and cheeks. My lips have the same full pout they’ve always had. But my eyes...the windows to my soul, look like someone took a rock to one of them and smashed it.

My glacier blue hue is normal and untouched in my left eye, but in my right eye, half of my frigid blue iris is cut into with a jagged shard of bright violet. I lean even closer until I’m nearly nose-to-mirror, and realize that no, my left eye isn’t unchanged. There’s the thinnest ring of brown encasing the pale blue.

“What the hell…”

What’s happened to my wolf, to me, is written all over my stare.

No wonder people have been looking at me strangely with a mix of fear and judgment. My wolf is always peering out at them. She’s a constant threat, a constant reminder of what we’re capable of, staring at them between each blink. I think through the unsettling split-vision that occurs when I’m at my most rabid or vulnerable, and it all makes sense now. My wolf and I are constantly fighting to see out of the same eyes.

There’s no gentle back and forth between her and me. We were both crushed together and forged anew by chaos and cruelty, and this is the result of our rushed joining, our need for life-or-death savagery. Our accession was so violent that it’s visible in the torn half of our irises.

I drop my eyes from the mirror just like so many others that have rushed to look away from me. This physical manifestation of what I am inside makes me feel raw and bare. Once again, I’m divided by how much I hate that my wolf and I have been brought to this, but how proud I am that we’ve survived.

Trying to get a hold of myself, I pick up the blow-dryer from the floor where I dropped it and turn it on. I stare into my eyes the whole time I dry my hair, forcing myself to get used to them, stomping out any shame and self-consciousness that tries to take root in my chest as I do.

I cannot cower away from who I am.

No, now it’s time to find my way.

Once my long brown hair is dried, I pack the dryer away where I found it and tidy up. Tightening the towel around my body, I walk to the closed door that leads to the room I was told I’d find clothes