Free Taken by the Beast (The Conduit Series Book 1) by Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley

was a hesitation there I hadn’t felt before. Something that made me feel tethered to New Haven.
    Maybe the reason I wanted club manager job was for the control. Maybe, with so much spinning in orbit around my head—so much that I couldn’t grab or change or fix—I felt compelled to find any situation I
could
control. And The Castle was just that.
    Thinking of the club brought an image of Abram to mind, and I sighed. Was it The Castle I was drawn to … or was it
him
? I tried to think back to other jobs I’d had before, and never had thinking about work make me think about my employer’s eyes, or arms, or chest, or lips.
    I gripped the steering wheel tighter and gave myself a little shake.
Snap out of it, Char
. The truth was, I was only thinking of Abram right now because I felt bad for him. He had seemed so defeated. Of course I couldn’t get that image out of my mind—who could? All I wanted to do was save him from that misery. Lord knows I couldn’t save myself from mine.
    I mean, it was either that, or I just wanted the job because he didn’t want me to have it.
    So I either want to help him or piss him off. Real healthy, Char.
    Those thoughts, along with a little concern about whether the tables would look like they did on the website swirled in my mind.
    On a long, dark stretch of highway with woods on either side, Lulu’s car made a loud pop. I had never been much of a driver. It wasn’t really a necessity in New York. As such, I didn’t really know what was going on when something about the steering changed the car startled swerving across the emergency lane.
    I jumped, gasping. Tightening my grip on the wheel, I jerked back hard the other way. The car fishtailed and spun across the empty highway until it skidded sideways into a tree.
    Despite being thrown back, my seatbelt kept me in place. Still, it hurt like a bitch and shook me up pretty badly.
    I stumbled out of the car, kicking off my heels and cursing my incessant need to dress up even when only the employees at a furniture supply store would see me. A quick assessment of the car revealed the culprit for my distress: a flat tire.
    Wow, Char
.
That’s pretty special
.
    Only I could have such a disastrous reaction to something so basic. The flat tire may as well have been ancient hieroglyphics for all I knew about it.
    As I stared at the shredded rubber, chewing my lip, my agent’s voice scrolled through my mind. “Pretty girls shouldn’t do that sort of work,” she’d said one day in reference to women learning to change the oil in their car. “It ruins the hands.”
    I looked down at my hands now. They were
useless, but damn if they weren’t stunning. I rifled through the front seat until I found my cell phone. No signal.
    Ugh! I hate this place.
    So much for Triple A. Maybe if I walked back toward town, I could get a signal. It was only a couple of miles, and for all I knew, only a few steps until the signal kicked back on.
    I grabbed my purse and took a look around. The road was dark, though, sandwiched by thick tree lines and without a single street lamp. Not exactly my idea of an inviting nightly stroll.
    A sense of uneasiness crept over me. Here I was, all alone, in the dark, and without any way to call for help.
    Would walking down that road even be safe?
    Would staying here with the car be safe, either?
    I thought about the girl in the club—her dead, open eyes. I thought about the missing girl, about what might have happened to her. I thought about the girl in the next town over, the one who had been found in these woods … not too far from here. She’d had markings all over her and a face that could easily be confused for my own.
    But if I worried about that now, I was just as bad as the backwoods townsfolk who spun tall tales about forest monsters being the culprit.
    A howl, sharp and terrifyingly close spiked a shiver down my spine. My muscles tensed as something primal and instinctive turned on in my brain. I grabbed at