Free Savage Silence: A Dire Wolves Mission (The Devil's Dires Book 4) by Ellis Leigh Page B

unconscious.”
    Ariel sat back, still a little shaky from that taste. “That had to be quite the chemical compound.”
    “It was.” He pulled a huge pot off the back and took it to the sink. “Did you ever try The Draught when it was being produced?”
    “No.”
    “Hmm. Well, that’s what your kidnappers were using to dull the mating bonds of the women they stole. Fucked up the investigation for months. And that’s sort of the base these assholes used for the knockout drug.” Steam rose as he dumped the contents of the pot into a strainer set in the sink basin. “Problem was, when I was shot, the bullet that he’d coated in the stuff lodged in my shoulder. Instead of an easy in and out, the bone grew over it, and that caused some issues.”
    “How long ago was this?”
    “Two years, seven surgeries, and three doctors telling me there’s nothing more to be done.” He shrugged again, wincing when he had to lift the heavy pot out of the sink. “So I grit my teeth when I shift and do my best so no one sees it.”
    “And you ache when you use that shoulder too much.”
    “Sometimes, but I only let it show in my den.”
    Ariel looked around the space once more, eyeing the empty walls and bare windows. “This is your den?”
    The look he shot her, the one of lust and heat and downright need, almost knocked her right off her stool. “Feels like it.”
    It took Ariel a long few moments to regain her thought process, to remember what they’d been discussing. The heat from that one look would burn long after this conversation was done.
    “So why not seek more help for that shoulder?”
    “Because I’m a Dire Wolf. I’m not even supposed to be alive. We keep our secret close to the vest on purpose, so I can’t just go see any shifter doc. If they figure me out and happen to blab, my entire pack is screwed. Besides, your kind is a bit rare as it is.”
    “Shifter doctors? Yeah, we are.”
    He tossed a white hand towel over his shoulder and leaned against the opposite bank of cabinets. The picture of confidence and comfort. And still half naked. “What made you want to be a doctor?”
    Quit staring at his abs. “I didn’t…not really. My pack needed one. The town nearby needed one. So I went to school and fulfilled that need.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it. There was no big draw to help people or save the world. No altruistic feeling of being in service to my fellow shifters. There was a problem, and I fixed it. I wanted to stay close to my pack, to live as far from the city as I could, and being a doctor gave me the skills I needed to be able to interact with the human society around me without questions.”
    “Why didn’t you go back after…” He trailed off, looking slightly uncomfortable, which explained exactly where his mind had gone. He wasn’t the first man to know her story who had no idea how to address it.
    “After I escaped the rape chambers?”
    The fury in his eyes practically burned her skin, and the growl that escaped him felt like sandpaper for her ears. “Yeah.”
    Another shrug, another dismissal of something that she’d taken a long time to decide. “It wasn’t safe there. They’d taken me from that place; I couldn’t go back and give the bastards a second chance or risk the people I’d grown up with. So, when I escaped, I ran west. And here I am.”
    Her words hung heavy between them. A living force of lies and omissions. She could have gotten into far more about her experience—the smell of the men who’d stolen her sense of self, the nights she’d lain in bed covering her ears to keep from hearing the screams of the other girls, the pure terror of her race across the country and away from everything. She could have laid everything out in front of her and let him see every brutal secret. But she wasn’t ready for that, and deep down, she didn’t think Thaus was either. So she held back, kept her language casual and dismissive. And he allowed her that.
    Thaus