Impulse had her grabbing for the door handle, ignoring the low growl of her stoic companion beside her in the driver's seat. Corinne climbed out of the vehicle and walked a few paces up the private drive toward the iron gate. A gust of cold wind blew across the snowy landscape in front of her, chilling her face and making her burrow a bit deeper into her thick wool coat.
At her back, she felt a sudden heat emanating toward her and knew that Hunter was there now. She hadn't even heard him get out of the car to follow her, he moved so stealthily. His voice behind her was low and deep. "You should remain in the car until you are safely delivered to the door."
Corinne stepped away from him and walked up to touch the tall black bars of the closed gate. "Do you know how long I've been gone?" she murmured. Hunter didn't answer, just stood in silence behind her. She closed her fingers around the cold iron, exhaling a short puff of steam on her quiet, humorless laugh. "This past summer, it would have been seventy-five years. Can you imagine? That's how much of my life was stolen from me. My family up there in that house ... they all think I'm dead."
It hurt her to think of the pain her parents and siblings had gone through with her disappearance. For some time after she'd been taken, Corinne had worried how her family was coping. For so long after her abduction, she'd clung to the hope that they would search for her -
that they would never stop searching until she was found, especially her father. After all, Victor Bishop was a powerful man in Breed society. Even back then, he'd been wealthy and well connected. He'd had every means at his disposal, so why hadn't he torn apart his city and every one between here and her prison until his daughter was found and brought home?
It was a question that had gnawed at her every hour of her captivity. What she hadn't known then was that her abductor had gone to sick lengths to convince her family and all who knew her that she was no longer alive. Brock, who had been her childhood bodyguard long before he'd become a warrior for the Order, had taken her aside after her rescue and explained all that he knew of her disappearance. Although he'd been gentle with the facts, there could be no softening the horrific details of what Brock had revealed to her.
"A few months after I was taken, a female's body was pulled from the river not far from here," she told Hunter quietly, repulsed by what she had learned. "She was the same age as me, the same height and build. Someone had dressed her in my clothes, the very dress I had been wearing the night I was taken. They did something more too. Her body ..."
"The woman had been mutilated," Hunter interjected when revulsion made her own words trail off. She glanced back at him in question. He met her gaze with a matter-of-fact look.
"Brock has spoken of your disappearance. I am aware of how the body had been altered in an attempt to conceal the victim's identity."
"Altered," Corinne replied. She dropped her chin, frowning over her right hand, the one that bore her distinctive Breedmate birthmark. "To convince my family the dead female was me, her killer or killers had also cut off her hands and feet. They even took her head."
Bile rose from her stomach as she considered the cruelty - the utter depravity - it would take to do something like that to another person.
Of course, the things Dragos had done to her and the other Breedmates imprisoned in his laboratories had been only fractionally less heinous. Corinne closed her eyes tight on the barrage of memories that flew at her like bats from out of the darkness: Dank concrete cells. Cold steel tables outfitted with unforgiving, inescapable, thick leather cuffs. There had been many needles and probes. Tests and procedures. Pain and fury and utter hopelessness. The terrible, soul-wrenching howls of the mad and the dying, and those who were lost somewhere between.
And blood.
So much blood - her own, and that which was regularly forced down her throat so that she, like the other females who'd been taken, would remain youthful and viable specimens for Dragos's twisted purposes.
Corinne shuddered, wrapping her arms around the deep, cold void that seemed to blow through the center of her now. It was a hollow ache, one she had been trying to keep at bay for a very long time. It had only cracked open wider in the days since her rescue.
"It's cold," said her stoic escort from Boston. "You should return to the vehicle until I've seen you safely delivered to the house."
She nodded, but her feet remained still. Now that she was standing there - now that the moment she'd prayed for for so long to come true was actually happening - she wasn't sure she had the courage to face it. "They think I'm dead, Hunter. All this time, I haven't existed to them. What if they've forgotten me? What if they've been happier without me?" Doubt pressed down on her. "Maybe I should have tried to contact them before I left Boston. Maybe coming here like this isn't such a good idea."
She pivoted around to face him, hoping to find some sense of reassurance that her fears were ungrounded. She wanted to hear him say that her sudden attack of nerves was nothing more than that - something comforting that Brock would have said if he'd been with her now. But Hunter's expression was inscrutable. His hawklike golden eyes stared at her, unblinking. Corinne blew out a soft breath. "What would you do if it was your family up there in that house, Hunter?"
One bulky shoulder lifted slightly beneath his black leather trench coat. "I have no family."
He said it as casually as he might remark that it was dark outside at the moment. A statement of the obvious. One that didn't invite questions, yet only made her want to know more about him. It was hard to imagine him in any other way than the sober, almost grim, warrior who stood before her. Hard to picture him with the softly rounded face of a child instead of the bladed angles of his cheekbones and unforgiving, squared line of his jaw. He was impossible to imagine without the black combat attire and arsenal of blades and weaponry that glinted within the folds of his long coat.