Sabrina's Clan Read Free Page A

shoulder against the doorframe and his arms crossed.
    Sabrina gasped. “What do you want?” she demanded, her heart racing.
    “I think we got off to a rough start.” His voice was back to deep and rumbling once more. “As I’m staying on this floor with you, I thought I should try to amend that.”
    “It’s not like you’re going to be sleeping here,” she pointed out. “You just need somewhere to park your clothes and shower and change. We don’t have to be best roommates. I am running very late.” She moved toward the door, hoping he would naturally step out of the way as she got closer.
    His arms dropped and he did straighten up. He just didn’t move from blocking the doorway.
    She stopped, frustrated. “You need to let me leave.”
    “You’re a woman of contradictions, aren’t you?” He was staring at her with a slight frown as if he really was puzzled.
    “As I’m beneath your level of caring, I don’t have to answer. Will you move?”
    He did move. He stepped in front of her. Very close.
    Too close.
    She tried to move back. He caught her arm. “Shh…” he said, almost absently. He was staring at her face. Then he did something unexpected, something she would have said he was incapable of doing, given what she knew of him so far.
    He brought his hand up to her face and very gently, so softly she almost couldn’t feel it, he ran his fingertip over her cheekbone, just under her left eye. “How did you get it?”
    She hadn’t covered it up properly with the makeup. Damn. She had been too hurried. She was still hurried. Time was ticking on.
    Because of her acute awareness of passing time, Sabrina dispensed with all her usual sidestepping and social considerations. “When I was eleven, my foster father tried to rape me. I hit him over the head with a bottle. He punched me in the face. I had eight stitches. They said it was my fault, that I had been provocative.”
    He tilted his head, studying her. “Does the corner office help balance it out?” he asked curiously.
    Her breath shuddered as she drew it in. “It helps,” she said softly.
    “I would have killed him. My tribe would have applauded me for it.”
    Her heart squeezed again. I wish you had, too. And for an instant, deep satisfaction touched her at the idea of the monster she had been forced to call “Paul” lying in a pool of his own blood, his eyes open and still. Then horror rose in her at the animal reaction. “I don’t have a tribe,” she said stiffly. “I’m an orphan.”
    “You like the idea of me killing him, don’t you? Blood vengeance is one of the most primal human instincts. The tribes understood it. Now, it’s considered vulgar.”
    “Your whole profession is an ode to ancient history,” Sabrina reminded him.
    “You can tell yourself that, if it lets you sleep. Without us, your world would be far less civilized.”
    Sabrina wanted to refute him, except that in the last year or so, since she had found out she was pregnant and had stepped half-way into Riley’s strange world, she had seen and heard things that would have given her nightmares. The only reason she could sleep at night was knowing that Riley and Nick were out there most nights, getting rid of the freaky shadows.
    “Do you resent that no one gets to know who you are?” she asked him. “That you have to creep around pretending to be human and no one thanks you for the job you do?” It was a blunt question, but he wasn’t being delicate, either.
    “It is what it is,” he said.
    “Bullshit. You don’t accept any of it. You hate it.” She didn’t know where her certainty came from. Perhaps her people skills had improved since she’d started her job. There was a cynical edge to Nyanther that underlined his words and behavior and his expressions and spoke of tightly held emotions.
    He was frowning again. Even being called on the lie didn’t seem to move him. “It is true that in my time, the clans knew what we were.” He sounded like he was