Cameron
“She’s been missing for four days,” Wilson says, shaking his head. He looks up at me like he knows what I’m about to say, like he knows what my next question is going to be, but he doesn’t. He has no fucking clue. Wilson Clarke might be the clan leader. He might be the one in charge. He might get to make all of the shots, but that doesn’t mean he knows shit about my sister.
He doesn’t know anything about Ellie.
She’s not dead.
She can’t be.
Not my Ellie.
“Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, Cameron.” Wilson speaks firmly, but his eyes are gentle. He pities me, and that feels worse than the last sparks of hope that are dying in my chest.
She’s not dead.
“You’re a clan leader. Not a psychic,” I say.
“It’s been four fucking days, man,” Wilson says. “You know what that means. You know where she was going. You know, but you don’t want to accept it.”
“Would you?” I scream. I pick up a glass and throw it. The tumbler hits the wall and shatters, sprinkling to the floor in broken shards and slivers. “Would you want to think that scientists captured your sister? Tortured her? Bled her out to see if dragon’s blood really can cure cancer? Is what you’d want to think, Wilson? Fucking answer me, you piece of shit!”
Only Wilson doesn’t say anything, and I drop to the floor, sitting in front of his desk, wrapping my arms around my legs because she can’t be dead. Ellie can’t be dead. She just can’t. My sister is the sweetest, most wonderful woman in the whole fucking world. Lucky couldn’t have taken her and David. They couldn’t have stolen away my niece, Daisy. They just couldn’t have.
After a minute, I hear Wilson move, and he sits beside me on the floor.
“Be careful,” I whisper. “There’s glass.”
“I’ve seen worse,” he tells me.
For a long time, Wilson and I sit in the silence. I let his words sink in because the truth is that I know he’s right. No dragon shifter has ever been taken by Lucky and then returned. That just doesn’t happen. If you’re stolen away by an organization designed to test you, to hurt you, to damage you, then you’re gone. Done. There is no escape. There is no saving. There is no haven.
You’re just done.
“Why did she even go?” I ask him. “There was a plan. We were going to do recon. We were going to get him out.”
“Wouldn’t you have gone, Cameron? If Lucky had taken your husband and your baby, wouldn’t you have done everything in your power to rescue them, too? Even if it meant suicide. Even if it meant you couldn’t return to your clan. Wouldn’t you have gone?”
“Yes.” I don’t bother lying. Not to Wilson. The truth is that I would have made the same choice as my sister. If it had been my partner who’d been captured, and I knew what happened, I would have moved heaven and hell to get them back. If I died in the process, I wouldn’t have cared because living without them would have been worse than not living at all.
“We have to make a choice,” Wilson says, and I know what he’s talking about. As the clan leader, he has to make a call of whether we attack the Lucky division that captured David. When we realized he’d been captured, along with my sister’s daughter, Daisy, we started formulating a plan for rescuing them. We were going to do recon before going in because we really didn’t know much except that one of our scouts saw him being taken into the facility. We knew where it was located, but that was it. We didn’t know how big it was, how many guards they had, or what kind of security they had in place.
All we knew was that David had been spending an afternoon with his child, and he had been taken. How did a bunch of human tech nerds steal a dragon shifter? That part I don’t know. Maybe David had gotten too close to their building and they’d simply grabbed him. Maybe they’d been tracking him. Perhaps he’d shifted to show Daisy what a dragon looks like, and they’d nabbed him.
No clue.
But they’ve already got my sister’s entire family, and although it’s tearing a hole in my heart bigger than I could ever have imagined, I know it wouldn’t be right to send unprepared dragons into battle. Not against humans. Not now when the world is so volatile.
For years, there was this idea that humans and shifters could get along. There were movements designed to make us believe in each other, to create this environment where everything would be okay between our worlds, but now?
Now we have a human president who doesn’t like shifters, and the world has suddenly become a lot less understanding about us.
“We can’t afford to lose more,” I tell him, and Wilson nods.
“We’ll do recon,” he says. “We’ll find a way in, Cameron. We’ll avenge her no matter what it takes.”
“I should clean up the glass,” I whisper, choking on my words.
“I’ll get a broom,” Wilson nods, and he leaves me alone. I stand and walk to the mirror hanging next to his desk. How have I aged so much in four days? Four days, and my sister hasn’t returned. She hasn’t contacted us. She hasn’t done anything.
It’s been four days, and something tells me that if she hasn’t come back, it’s because she can’t. It’s because something more horrible than I could possibly imagine has happened to her and right now, I need to focus on bringing down the bastards responsible.