Slip of Fate (Werelock Evolution Book 1)
Read Slip of Fate (Werelock Evolution Book 1) Online
Authors: Hettie Ivers
SLIP OF FATE
Werelock Evolution, Book 1
Hettie Ivers
Copyright © 2013 – 2016 Hettie Ivers
Cover Design and Photo © 2016 Regina Wamba with MaeIDesign and Photography
www.MaeIDesign.com
Ebook Formatting by
www.gopublished.com
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents, are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9973429-0-1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to extend a huge thank you to my wonderful big sister for editing this book for me! I have not properly credited her here by name because she writes wholesome children’s novels and therefore can’t actually be seen with me in public ever again now that I’ve taken to publishing werewolf smut. Please know that any errors in this book are a direct result of me ignoring my editor sister’s corrections in favor of my own stubborn “style choices” about things like dangling modifiers and the punctuation of singular possessive proper nouns for names that end with “s.” (Gotta keep my little sis rebel thing going, you know.) This first book is by far the most tame in the Werelock Evolution series as far as sexual content, so it is the only volume in the series I plan to subject my sister to editing.
I’d also like to thank my tremendous saint of a husband for graciously putting up with my writing hobby/addiction/insanity and my general workaholic, perfectionist tendencies. After all of these years, you’re still the hottest, wittiest man I know, and my favorite person to hang out with and talk to about my day, every day. I thank my lucky stars for your filthy, hilarious mouth and the fact that you’re obviously into crazy chicks.
Lastly, an enormous
THANK YOU
to all of my longtime online readers who have both followed me and propelled me along on this journey. This was never supposed to happen and would not have happened without your ongoing support and enthusiasm for the story. It has truly been an engaging, zany, frustrating, and delightful ride, and I can’t thank you enough for all of your inspiration, participation, and contribution to my creative process. Thank you for all of the many hours of fun and laughter.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
I had to pee. Badly. I tried not to focus on that small inconvenience as my body was tossed to and fro with the jerky sway of the dirty, dark, windowless, moving compartment in which I was held captive.
Van. I was inside the back of a van.
This couldn’t be happening to me.
I kept hoping somehow I was dreaming and would soon awaken from this impossible nightmare. Just a few hours ago, I’d stepped off a plane in São Paulo, nervous but giddy with excitement to reconnect with my estranged older half-brother, Raul, whom I’d barely seen in the last nine of my eighteen years of life. I’d been in grade school when Raul had left the States during his senior year of high school to live with his father in Brazil.
Tires squealed and the metal floor rocked beneath me, once again knocking me to my bruised and bloodied knees. I wasn’t sure why I kept trying to gain my feet. It was a futile exercise as long as the van was moving. Maybe because the floor of the van was so cold … and because my jaw ached from my teeth’s incessant chattering.
I was sure I was going to die.
Or worse.
I’d always been a terrible Catholic. For the first time I wondered if there might be some merit in prayer. Hot tears pricked at the back of my eyes. I had to hold it together for whatever was to happen next.
This couldn’t be my end.
The irony was too cruel. I’d spent the last seven months in a virtual daze; lost amongst the living. Slogging through quicksand and fighting to find reason for each breath, recklessly I’d sought to find purchase in that most elusive of anchors forever beyond reach.
It seemed too unfair that I should awaken now—to the surreal shock of my own imminent demise.
For the hundredth time I berated myself for not peeing on the plane when I’d had the chance. I’d been searching out the nearest airport bathroom when three men had grabbed me and pulled me down a narrow hallway out of sight from the main airport foot traffic.
Exhausted though I was from my long, sleepless journey, I’d fought them wildly. Blind with panic and outrage, I’d felt some primal self-preservation instinct kick in, prompting me to thrash and claw at them with every ounce of my strength. I’d tried to scream for help, but I’d been swiftly silenced, and severely punished for my resistance.
I was too numb with fear now to surmise the full extent of physical damage done in those first seconds of the worst terror of my life. But judging by how painful it was merely to breathe, how excruciating to get back up from the floor of the van and to turn at the waist, I suspected my ribs were worse than bruised.
My head pounded where it’d been knocked against a brick wall. My throat burned and pulsed with agony where rough hands had strangled me into silence and submission. My left eye seemed to be swollen almost halfway shut from where I’d been backhanded.
And to my ultimate horror and humiliation, my nipples chafed and burned against the fabric of my thin bra and tank top in reminder of where that one smelly, disgusting animal had disgraced me further into compliance with the promise of far worse violation to my person as he’d mashed my small breasts and twisted my nipples through the fabric of my top.
I’d cried then. Cried and begged and promised them I’d go and without further incident.
With a screech of rubber, the van turned sharply and my head slammed against the metal wall when we came to an abrupt stop. My heart raced when a moment later I heard voices arguing outside the vehicle. I assumed they were speaking Portuguese. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the native language.
I’d been such an idiot to come here
.
I was in a strange country. I had no idea where I was, or how to contact my brother, and no chance of communicating with the locals in their language, should I somehow manage to escape my current predicament. Prayer suddenly appeared a reasonable option.
My only option
.
The arguing escalated as voices rose in anger. My heart dropped to the floor when I caught my brother’s name spoken repeatedly during the heated exchange.
These horrible men knew Raul? While my mind attempted to process this new information, the van pitched forward. It moved only a short distance, however, before stopping once more.
The engine cut. My stomach lurched.
As I was dragged from the corner of the van where I had huddled, the animal squeezed my neck again for good measure. He warned me to keep silent and behave as he bound my wrists behind my back. He was the only one of the three who spoke English. Or rather, he was the only one who had spoken in English thus far.
As I was pulled from the darkness of the van, the harsh glare of a floodlight blinded me. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away as best I could while my captors swore at my side.
The English-speaking bastard dragged me by my upper arm along what felt like gravel beneath my thinly soled sneakers. I couldn’t see a thing, but from the way the light seared through my closed eyelids and my face warmed beneath the glare, I was sure he’d just walked us straight into the spotlight.
“What the fuck is this, Felix?” a male voice demanded. The sound came from the direction of the light. The speaker had no accent I could readily discern. Perhaps he was American? Foolish hope bloomed in my constricted chest.
“I want to see Alex,” my asshole captor, whom I presumed was Felix, responded. “Ugh! Cut that damned light already.”
“Alex is hosting a dinner party,” the male voice wielding the light said. “And you’re not welcome here. You know that.”
“I’ve brought him a gift. Raul’s sister! He will want to see me,” Felix insisted.
The other man huffed. He sounded closer now. I caught the soft sound of feet shuffling along gravel in our direction. The harsh glare of the light burning into my eyelids refused to wane.
“Alex doesn’t sully his hands with petty kidnapping. You’ve got hella nerve showing up here.”
“He will see me! I demand a trade for the girl.”
“Not
interested,” the light source declined. The footsteps halted. “Get the fuck going before Alex finds out you were here.”
I broke then. I wasn’t sure why, but the thought that I might be traded from these pigs, who I feared were sure to abuse me further before the night was through, to a man civilized enough to host a dinner party and who employed a guard or other of some sort who was possibly an American, somehow seemed like a far better prospect at the moment in this tenuous game of my survival.
And I didn’t have any other options.
So when I was summarily dismissed by the unseen light-bearer—my very life casually disregarded … deemed worthless as a trade token—I became hysterical.
“Please don’t make me leave with them!” I bleated in desperation to the faceless stranger behind the light.
“P
-
please,”
I begged, not sounding remotely like myself. A hiccupping sob escaped me, and the fat, hot tears I’d been withholding in the van tumbled forth.
My right cheek scraped against dark gravel a moment later. I was sure it’d been Felix who’d knocked me to the ground, as I heard him above me, cursing in multiple languages, demanding again to speak with Alex and sneering in disgust about how I was too dumb to recognize the true bad guy in the scenario.
The pain in my ribs was unbearable now that I was pressed face down to the ground, my hands bound behind me. And the more I gasped panicked gulps of air into my lungs, the more pain stabbed through my rib cage.
“Fine,” the light-bearer acceded. His voice startled me, as it sounded as if he now leaned directly over me. My eyes struggled to adjust, now that the light wasn’t shining on them. “But it’s going to be your funeral, Felix.”
“Thank you, Remy,” Felix said, exhaling his relief. “I swear he’ll want to see me when he knows I have Raul’s sister.”
“Uh-huh … sure.” The man named Remy sounded unconvinced. I jumped reflexively when I felt warm, gentle fingers brush the matted, dirty, long dark hair from my face where I lay in the gravel trying to rein in my hysteria. “Shh—it’s okay. Let’s get you upright, sweetheart.”
An irrational sense of calm washed over me at the timbre of just those few softly spoken words and unexpected term of endearment. I was caught off guard, wading through a sea of internal confusion at Remy’s unanticipated gentleness and sudden kindness toward me, when rougher hands seized onto my upper arms where they lay twisted behind my back, and I heard Felix order, “Up! Quickly!”
A wild growling resounded just above me. Felix’s hands were torn from my biceps. There was obviously some kind of dog with Remy that I’d not noted before.
“Touch her again,” Remy warned stonily to my handlers, “and I’ll kill all three of you myself before we even reach the house.” His deep baritone, which a moment earlier had been so soothing, now resonated with an authority and dark menace that made my blood run cold.
*****
I realized I must have blacked out as I regained consciousness amid the sound of more arguing in Portuguese. The voices echoed. So much so that it sounded like we were in a tunnel—or perhaps a chapel with high-beamed ceilings? Conversely, it might’ve just been the pounding inside my hapless head.
The last thing I remembered was being lifted from the gravel and the faceless, dark shadow of Remy holding me upright, asking me if I could stand as my head swam and I attempted to regain my vision as well as control of my own wobbly legs to no avail. But when he steadied me with an arm around my midsection, pain sharp enough to make me see stars stabbed through my sorely abused rib cage.
“Alex won’t like this,” a self-assured female voice said. “Get rid of them, Remy.”
“Just get him.” Remy’s words reverberated against my left ear. Comprehension dawned that I was being held bridal-style, nestled securely against a warm, hard body—
apparently Remy’s
. I registered the pulse of his heart beating into my palm pressed flat to his chest and was relieved to note my wrists were no longer bound.