Dire Desires: A Novel of the Eternal Wolf Clan Read Online Free Page A

you?” she demanded. She might not have been trained in the warrior ways, but she circled him as if ready to fight.
    “I’m just like you.”
    “A mental patient?”
    Jinx grinned. “Let’s take a walk.”
    “To remind myself what I can’t have? No. Besides, I’m not allowed to.”
    “I didn’t say we were coming back.” He barely spoke the words, but the way her eyes widened, he knew she’d heard him clear as day.
    •   •   •
    Gillian wanted to ask this man with the long reddish brown hair why he’d do that. But really, she was too busy being drawn into his eyes.
    Something deep inside of her that wanted the moon was also drawn to this man.
    She never trusted, but the rustling said to now.
    “How long have you been here?” he asked with a sidelong glance out the single window on the door.
    He was built like a warrior from gladiator times—she’d seen the show on the TV in the main room. He looked as though he could do anything.
    “Does it matter?” she finally asked.
    “To me, yes.”
    “Five years this spring.” She wouldn’t give him a date even if he asked outright. She needed to keep something for herself, had learned the importance of doing so in a place like this.
    A scream tore through the late-afternoon air, sailed in through the window and made her cringe. “It’s like that all the time,” she told him. “Worse on visiting day.”
    “Do you get many visitors?”
    “You’re my first in over a year.” Over three years, actually. At some point her parents had given up. There were care packages, clothes she never wore, books she never read. Nothing that could be of any value to her.
    “You’ll stay with my family,” he told her. “They’re all like you. I’m like you.”
    She didn’t know what he meant, but the rustling did, was chomping at the bit to be with others like herself.
    She didn’t ask how he planned to do anything. He simply pointed to her pants. She slid them on and he knocked on the door.
    “She wants to walk with me,” Josh Todd said.
    The orderly looked between them. “Not without a major dose of tranquilizer.”
    No choice,
the rustling said, but Gillian shook her head and backed away. Too many injections made her feel odder than she already did. She could barely get her equilibrium during the past six months to begin with, never mind the last five years that passed in a blur of sameness.
    Except for the escapes, the only time she could actually breathe, time had ceased meaning anything at all.
    This wasn’t going to go well at all. Josh Todd spoke to her in a low voice, but she lunged past him and threw herself at the orderly.
    She hated him and this place. Hated the visitor too, who’d promised her too much and then didn’t come through for her.
    So what was the point of sitting here like a good girl, telling them, “Oh no, I don’t need to go outside—I’ll just stay here.”
    The next time she left, she wasn’t coming back. The decision had been made but it would be on her own steam.
    The orderly was coming with a dose of tranquilizers and she didn’t want them. Even though the other man told her to take them, that they would help with the escape, she wouldn’t submit.
    Nothing inside of her ever truly would.

Chapter 3
    T his wasn’t going well. Jinx grabbed her and she fought less in his arms. But she still fought, which brought more orderlies and more drugs and she ended up strapped to the bed, drugged to the gills and unresponsive.
    And it was all his fault. Guilt, his familiar friend, rushed over him as her glazed eyes stared up at him.
    You promised, they told him. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, they added for good measure.
    “We’ll get out,” he murmured, squeezing her hand as his heart broke for how she’d had to live. He couldn’t imagine, although now he understood the dark look in Stray’s eyes when he talked about his time in solitary captivity. The people who worked here didn’t know how lucky they