Read Online Girl from Jussara by Hettie Ivers - Free Book Online

door. He closed and locked it. When he turned to face her, she was confronted by the sight of his full frontal nudity on display.
    “We’re not leaving this bedroom until I’m satisfied that you can do it,” he declared.
    Lupe bolted upright in order to stubbornly scowl across the room. Kai’s eyes had reverted to his human shade of brown, and she was less afraid of him now. “I will scream my fucking head off—”
    “Try it and I’ll temporarily disable your vocal chords,” he threatened. “This is happening, Lupe. You and I are going to work past this trauma of yours before you behead another soldier and tempt Alex to do more than just take away your choices in life.”
    “It was an accident. I was startled! Those beasts would’ve—”
    “I am not Alcaeus,” he cut her off with a silencing hand gesture. “I am not blinded by hopeless unrequited love for you and therefore incapable of seeing through your manipulation tactics and general female bullshit.”
    “That is”—she gasped—“you just … I do not—”
    “Did you know that months ago, while I was tending to a full-grown male werewolf in the infirmary”—Kai began to pace—“listening to his cries of agony as his half-amputated leg regenerated itself, that it was still your pain that I scented, so much stronger than my patient’s, all the way across the compound here at Alcaeus’ house, where you were watching your damned telenovelas?”
    “They’re good shows,” she croaked defensively, pulling the bed sheet up around her shoulders. Seeing Kai’s nudity on display was somehow causing her to feel more and more exposed in her flimsy nightdress.
    “In pain we find forgiveness,” he lectured. “Deliverance. But you won’t allow yourself to feel your pain. So you make it someone else’s.”
    She shook her head. “Th—they’re good shows.”
    “I know what you’re doing when you’re up here sobbing your eyes out in front of the television.” He paused in his pacing to aim an accusing forefinger at her. “You’re finding a way to relive the pain of that day in your mind through those actors. Through those ridiculous stories.” He smacked the back of his hand against his open palm. “Again. And again.”
    She said nothing.
    “But every now and then, you let your mind slip away from Emily’s pain in that São Paulo prison, and you start thinking of all the things you could’ve done differently that would’ve saved your parents, don’t you?”
    She wouldn’t answer that.
    “You think I haven’t done it with Maribel? You think I won’t do it for the rest of this purgatory sentence that is now my life? I will never know, Lupe. Never know if I could’ve saved her. But you”—he stabbed his pointer finger through the air at her—“you’re wrong to wonder. Because nothing you could’ve done differently would’ve saved your parents.”
    She finally cracked and snapped, “How’s it different? You don’t know th—”
    “I knew Nahuel Salvatella!” His soft brown eyes shifted to iridescent blue in a flash of wild anger. “And I promise you, he would’ve killed your parents no matter what. There was never anything you could’ve done differently. No possible scenario in which they ultimately would have lived.”
    “If I’d said no—”
    “You’d have gotten them killed sooner.”
    “You don’t know—”
    “Yes,” he growled, allowing his irises to lighten further and his canines to elongate as he charged forward to stand next to the bed. “I do know. Nahuel was a jealous, covetous bastard, and he wouldn’t have wanted to share you with your human family.”
    Cautiously, she began to scoot backwards on the bed, away from his glowing eyes and enraged expression. And sharp canines .
    He pursued her, climbing atop the mattress. “Obviously, he never meant to lose his head and murder them right in front of you in such a messy, gruesome display of embarrassing werelock incompetence,” Kai disparaged as he