Winter Lost

I’d hung up the first time and gotten an audio CD of what Bonarata had done over several hours after I’d disconnected. If I listened when he called, he said at the end of the CD, he’d be more merciful. If I hung up, he’d enjoy himself. The length of his victim’s suffering was my choice.

If this was going to be one of those calls, I was going to have to do something more than just keep calm, or Adam would drop his important business to come save me when I was in no danger at all.

I shared two bonds with my mate—the bond that made me a part of the Columbia Basin Pack that he ruled, and the more intimate mating bond. I knew how to shut them down hard so that very little information traveled from me through them. Adam had shown me how to do that.

My mate understood that sometimes being part of a werewolf pack could be overwhelming to someone who’d spent most of her life on her own. Sometimes I desperately needed to be alone again. He knew that. He’d shown me how to find solitude when I was bound to him and to the pack—and to the vampire Stefan.

Because that was the other bond I held in my soul. Stefan was careful. Like Adam, he knew that if he tried to hold too tightly, I’d chew my metaphorical foot off to be free. Stefan wasn’t going to know about this call. I always kept that bond as closed as I could manage, and Stefan was used to that.

But after our pack and mate bonds were silenced and I was spirited off to Europe, Adam wasn’t so sanguine about me closing down our bond, even though he could still sense me. We’d had to figure out something else.

Adam had been married before, but I was his first mate. That should have meant that both of us struggled through how to deal with our mating bond, but he’d been an Alpha since before I was born, and that gave him a distinct advantage. The mate bond was different from the pack bonds, but the rules they followed were written in the same language, figuratively speaking. He understood how the magical ties worked better than I did, and he’d figured out something that would give me privacy when I needed it without causing him to overreact.

Shadowing the bond, he called the new method. “Pull veils across the path until it’s difficult to see through,” he said. Pack magic, I’d discovered, involved negotiating through a lot of metaphors. Instead of closing it down like a faucet, I layered our bond with stretchy and filmy curtains. The metaphor gave me a method that worked as long as I didn’t worry too much about what the curtains were made of.

Sitting cold and frightened in my old van, I pulled the shadows around my bonds until I was alone in the night with the vampire. On the phone, I reminded myself. He was on the phone.

There was a sharp noise that made me jump. It took me a moment to realize the sound had come from the earpiece.

Maybe it had been a slap, because it was followed by a pained squeak. Then someone started crying. It wasn’t a cry for attention—those kinds of cries are about hope. Someone will care. Someone will do something about the situation. There was no hope in the sound I heard.

Most of Bonarata’s calls were voiceless, just me listening to environmental sounds—a street or woods or inside a building—until he hung up.

The last time he’d hurt someone, it had been a man. We’d had a package delivered from Romania with body parts in it a week later. Adam had traced it to the facility it had been mailed from, but no one there had remembered the package or who had mailed it.

That’s when I’d gotten the new phone and the calls had stopped. It had taken eight days for him to figure out how to contact me again.

I should hang up. I knew I should. He couldn’t make me answer the phone. But I couldn’t leave this person—who sounded like a child—alone with the vampire.

“There, there,” crooned the familiar deep voice. In my twenty-dollar earpiece it lacked the resonance it had in person. That didn’t make it any less scary. I felt like I needed to hear every nuance in order to predict where the attack was coming from.

I pushed my earpiece deeper into my ear, and the sound got a fraction more clear.

“Are you scared?” he asked, a faint amusement in his voice that did not vanish when he repeated his question in French. “Tu as peur, ma petite?”

“Oui.” And now I could tell the child was a girl. A little older than I’d first thought—though that didn’t make it any better.

The speed and raggedness of her breathing told me that she was way beyond scared. Me, too. I was so scared for her—and there was not a thing I could do about it.

I put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t make a sound. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

His next word was a whisper. “Bon.”

There was a gasp that sounded more like a noise a kitten might make, followed by a high-pitched whine. I sat frozen in my seat, listening to the wet sounds of Bonarata feeding.