Wolf Rain (Psy-Changeling Trinity #3) - Nalini Singh Page 0,19

A fantasy that could never come true, but it had helped keep her sane.

The golden wolf put a bottle of water in front of her. “A five-year-old pup eats more than that,” he said, his scowl doing nothing to lessen his beauty.

Memory’s fingers tightened on her fork.

While she considered stabbing at his hand in pure aggravation, the wolf sprawled back in his chair and drank. His throat moved, his muscles and tendons strong. “You know the identity of the person who put you in that hole?” he asked after finishing two thirds of the bottle. The clear gray of his irises were edged with amber.

As if he was half wolf right now.

Memory focused on his primal nature as a renewed and enraged fear threatened to grip her throat and squeeze, squeeze. Renault had done that at times, deliberately cut off her air for no reason but that he could.

You can never win. A sinuous whisper that dug into her mind. I’m inside you.

She’d scrubbed and scrubbed in the shower before, but she didn’t feel clean. She wondered if she ever would. Or had the monster’s evil stained her forever, leaving an endless taint that would haunt her till death?

Plas cracked, water spraying out onto her hand.

Memory stared at the half-crumpled water bottle. She hadn’t realized she was clenching it so hard. Even now, her hand was locked around it like a claw.

“Imagining it’s his neck?” The growly edge in the beautiful wolf’s voice was back. “Can’t blame you. Personally, I prefer to just rip off the head. Blood’s a bitch to wash off though—the laundry team keeps threatening to throw out my clothes.”

Memory very carefully opened her fingers and flexed them. The bottle was losing water from the crack she’d caused, so she got up, found a glass, and poured the liquid into it before retaking her seat. Her movements were nothing as graceful as his, but she was in control of them. No one would ever again turn her into a marionette.

“Give me a name.” Eyes gone even more amber held hers, the quiet words a promise of retribution.

Memory parted her lips, but Renault’s name stuck in her throat, a jagged hardness that cut. Chest heaving, she gulped down half a glass of water. Her fingers clenched on her fork again afterward, the metal cold and hard in her grip. Her skin heated, her hair seeming to prickle with electricity under the towel she’d wrapped around the wet strands.

“Hate” was a hard word, a hard emotion. But Memory hated Renault with every fiber of her being. Even the idea of saying his name made her gorge rise. Yet that very hate was why she was alive. She’d survived while holding on to her own sense of self to spite him.

“Eat first,” the wolf said, his not-human eyes watchful. “The talk can wait until you’re not in danger of disappearing.” The growl had returned. “I think a bird could take you on right now and win.” A pause, then, “Not a predatory bird. A sparrow.”

Memory scooped up a big bite while staring at him.

Eyes shifting to pure amber, he leaned across the table and whispered, “Stop taunting the big, bad wolf, little E.”

That was another thing—why did he keep calling her an E? She knew about the newly rediscovered designation, had watched the comm reports with fascination, but she wasn’t one of them. The Es were healers of the mind, and Memory was no healer. She was a monster.

The bite she’d taken threatened to get stuck in her throat, but she made herself swallow. She had to become strong so she could tear Renault to pieces. Her one vulnerability was gone. She’d buried her affectionate Jitterbug under the open sky as she’d promised. Renault had nothing to hold over her anymore, no living creature he could threaten to harm when she got too intransigent.

“Renault,” she managed to get out past her ugly distaste. “His name is Erasmus David Renault and he is a murderer who likes to slowly strangle his victims to the edge of death, then bring them back, only to do it over and over again. When their brains finally shut down, their hearts dead, he hacks off a piece of their hair as a souvenir.”

The golden wolf had gone motionless at her first words. “How do you know?”

“He told me,” Memory lied, because while shut up in her cage for months at a time between Renault’s “outings,” she’d grown and educated herself. At first, she’d done so