Free When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel by J. K. Beck

in.
    She’d been the one to help decorate the public rooms. She’d tossed out Tomas’s moldering settees, replacing them with beautifully carved tables and chairs, pricey at the time, now priceless.
Important things happen within these walls
, the decor announced, and they did. They truly did.
    Back then, she’d had a hand in those decisions. She’dstrode through the double doors that led to Tiberius’s office with impunity, always welcomed by his smile, always drawn to his side. He’d asked her opinion, sought her counsel, and trusted her above all others.
    But that was a long time ago.
    Now Caris had an escort. Now the vampires she passed in the hall sneered and whispered and called her a traitor.
    Before, happy memories had enveloped her, triggered by little more than the scent of the hallways. Now those memories of happy times were subsumed under a dark haze. He’d shot her. He’d knocked her out.
    And he’d sent her away from this place that she’d once loved so very much.
    She forced her steps to stay even as she walked beside her guard, concentrating on picking her feet up and putting them down. Trying to keep her mind empty of everything except the physical necessity of moving down the hall.
    It wasn’t working.
    The things she wanted to forget were pressing up against her. Memories were writhing like black clouds. Circling her. Haunting her.
    And as she walked, those dark memories swallowed her, as deep and black as the oily, roiling sea of pain she’d swum through as she clawed her way back to consciousness so many years ago.
    She’d been shaking. A nightmare swirling inside her head, and she’d awakened in a terrorized state, confused, freaked, her daemon roiling and the wolf snapping for release. She’d fought desperately to pull it in—tried to prevent the change, but she couldn’t. Thewolf wanted to come out, and even all her vampiric strength couldn’t hold it back.
    It came
. She changed. Her body shifted, pulled, ripped itself out of her control, muscles stretching, bones elongating. Pain so vivid it seemed alive.
    Beside her, Giorgio screamed, and her eyes flew open. She realized too late what it meant that he was there—and she couldn’t have done anything about it even if she’d realized in time. The change had her, and she was too new to have gained any control in the weren state.
    She breathed, and the plague burst out upon him.
    He knew it, too. He grabbed her arm, tugged her toward the containment chamber, then thrust them both inside. As she writhed and snarled on the ground, trying to force the wolf to retreat, he tapped a code into the keypad, locking them in. He took a step toward her, but already he was unstable. She watched through a lycan haze as his skin festered and his nose bled. As his mouth turned black.
    By the time the wolf was in retreat and she was Caris again, he was delirious. And by the time Tiberius arrived at the safe house and peered through the containment room window, Giorgio was dust.
    Caris looked up, her chest tight with self-loathing and regret, only to meet Tiberius’s horrified eyes.
    “I didn’t—When I woke up. I couldn’t—” Her throat was thick, her mind unable to process what she’d done. What she’d become.
    “He had a family,” Tiberius said, his measured words filtering through the intercom. She knew him well enough to know that he was holding in an explosion.
    “I—I can learn. I can control it.” She felt the tears stream down her face. “I just need time.”
    Their eyes met and held, and it seemed as if all the time in the world passed between them. Then he shook his head. “You fought the last hybrid at my side, Caris. You know exactly why we had to kill it.”
    “Please.” She wasn’t sure what she was begging for, because right then she believed he was right. She looked at the pile of dust that had been Giorgio, and she knew that, yes, she deserved to die.
    But this was Tiberius, the man who was supposed to protect