There were certain defining moments in a person’s life, moments that gave you the opportunity to test your true nature and see if you were really the person you thought you were. In a crisis, would you save the day or be a lump of useless, shocky flesh? You never really knew until you were tested.
Rachel had often wondered if she would truly be able to sacrifice herself for others. Or if, when push came to shove, when it was the moment of truth, if she would give in to self-preservation and fight for her own survival instead.
Adrian caught her hand and met her eyes, and for a brief, flaring moment she thought she saw something in them. Something fierce. Something tender. Something that held the promise that perhaps she hadn’t killed everything between them with that sedative injected into his back.
He swore under his breath and wrapped one hand around her nape, the warm weight unbearably familiar. Then he was bending to take her mouth with a kiss that was dominant and demanding and seized absolute possession, reasserting his claim on her soul, as if there had ever been a doubt.
Another of those defining moments, that kiss. When she realized she was the kind of woman who would always melt for this man, even when the world was falling down around them.
They say you can’t keep a good man down, but the truth is with enough horse tranquilizers, you can drop just about anyone.
Adrian drifted up through the layered fog of his consciousness, the sensation oddly familiar, mirroring the memory of his wings catching air current above air current to lift him higher into the sky. The distant memory.Panic wanted to arise, but the fog wouldn’t allow it. The pharmaceutical cocktail they’d been feeding him was thorough, dulling everything. His senses. His thoughts. His ability to shift. But not his will to fight. That still burned, an angry ember in his gut, fueling this latest push toward consciousness.He became aware of his body in a hazy, detached way. Muscles heavy and aching. Head throbbing. How long since he’d moved his arms and legs? He didn’t want to think about how badly his muscles must have atrophied by now.His throat was so raw and dry it felt like it had been lined with sandpaper and his eyes stung and burned from a dozen needle pricks. An endless source of fascination for the bastards, his eyes. Gauze and surgical tape bound the top half of his face—either in a half-assed effort to bandage the latest wounds to his corneas or an attempt to blind him, hooding him like the raptor he became, as if that would make him more docile.He’d often overheard them talking—when they didn’t realize they were in range of his hawk-fine hearing—complaining about how troublesome he was, debating how to deal with the difficult subject. Messing with their experiments was one of his few sources of pleasure and he took a fierce satisfaction in being as disruptive as possible, refusing to be cowed.The rough fabric padding the restraints at his wrists itched, chafing the skin. Instinctively, he tried to call to the hawk, but the dense, syrupy fog blocked his other half from rising.It was a mistake, he knew. The block. The doctors had argued for hours about whose fault it was. One of the drugs they’d given him was designed to force a shift so they could observe the process—but it had been designed for felines, and avian shifters were a different breed entirely.His body had rejected the shift, violently, and at the time he’d been viciously satisfied. Served the bastards right if they broke their own toy because they were too busy shooting him full of shit with side effects they didn’t fully understand.But now—however many months later—the vindictive satisfaction had faded and he felt the loss of his feathers like a missing limb, a piece of his soul that had been hacked away with pharmacological amputation.The door slid open with a pneumatic whisper. Soft footsteps. A whiff of delicate, feminine perfume.
