The Bear's Runaway Bride: A Paranormal Shifter Romance by Amy Star

Author:Amy Star [Star, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Niomie grunted but tried not to scream out as one of the monks behind her tightened a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and hit her hard on the shoulder with an open palm, forcing her forward. Two other monks had joined their ranks with Carbines hanging off their necks on canvas straps while the remaining brotherhood had dispersed, a select few tending to their fallen comrades.

She hadn’t planned to fire a single shot, not really. They had fired at her first, but she couldn’t help wondering if some subconscious part of her had let them see her, just so that she’d have a rationalization to pull her own trigger. It wasn’t anything like shooting rabbits or deer. Her knees were still shaking, and she felt a giddiness that verged on paranoid nausea. The two monks who had chased her had managed to pull of several rounds before she’d turned and fired at them with the ease and accuracy of a gifted hunter. Two bullets, two deaths. They hadn’t even screamed, just made pitiful moans as they toppled over.

“Move!” the Brother behind her said again, giving her another cuff in the back.

She knew where they were taking her before they got there—the long Z-shaped staircase that was mounted on stilts led up one side of the cavern to a small wooden alcove that jutted out of the stone. The Brother behind her knocked against the double wooden doors, ornately carved with the shape of bears, and a voice issued them in. A spacious room had been hewn out of the rock here as well, and decorated with the lavishness of a king.

Ironwood furniture gleamed in the lamplight. Red satin and silk brocades adorned the walls, and a heavy smell of incense and some exotic perfume seeped from burning sticks on either side of the chamber. Behind a giant desk, sipping at a China teacup full of orange pekoe, the Abbot was a quintessential messianic figure. His pockmarked skin held itself like a ghostly veil, and sometimes Niomie felt as if she were staring at a ghost, or someone who had one foot in the grave and was halfway there.

He watched as the Brother led her in, and the two other monks shut the door behind them, standing guard outside the room. Gently, he lowered the cup from his colorless lips and regarded the woman in front of him, a woman he had selected himself and who had escaped, only to return to them.

Niomie,” he murmured, “I knew you would come back to us.”

“Fuck you,” she spat.

The Brother behind her kicked out her knees and she clenched her teeth in pain as she fell forward. The Abbot made a tsk sound as if gently reprimanding the other man and rose himself. His cloak was black, but there was a distinct ruby red line stitched into either side that ran up his ribs and under each arm, marking him as the leader among them.

“What did you hope to accomplish?” he asked, studying her huddled at his feet.

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