Chapter 29

• Gia lay there in the dark, she should have been exhausted and fallen to sleep immediately, especially after the hot shower. She was still amazed by the set-up Deacon had here. He’d started the generator—that he had put in some type of enclosure, and once the door shut, she couldn’t hear more than a low hum of it working. He’d turned on the pump filled the tank and heated it for her, she had no idea how the water flowed from that tank to the large shower head, but it felt like she was standing in a waterfall when it did. The water was the purest she’d ever smelled, with no chlorine or chemical undertones to it at all. While she’d been in there, he’d lit the stove and warmed up the small space, so it was cozy. He wasn’t there when she got out.
• She’d found her backpack sitting on the bed and hoped it meant to use the only bed because she was now burrowed under the blankets that smelled of him. Across the room on the small couch, he’d put a sleeping bag, she stared at it in the dark, would he even fit on that? Should she get up and sleep there? If sleep ever found her. It was so silent; she wasn’t sure she would be able to.
• Her mind kept churning the last few days over and over. Not the first operation, she tried to forget that one. Death wasn’t something she ever wanted on her mind. The second one, however, had changed things on so many levels, she still couldn’t process all of it. She, the sheltered daughter of an Alpha had been involved in freeing enslaved shifters from the curse of their entire community. She wondered how Terah was and if it would be wrong to make inquiries about her? About the others as well, including the men that have been forced to do the bidding of the maniacal one-form captor.