She’d never seen her little sister look so scared, and whatever tiny part of her brain could even still think started hating herself right then and there for having put poor, gullible Tricia in this position. She reached out and grabbed her sister’s hand.
“It’s okay,” she managed to say. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m going to go get Mom and Dad,” Tricia said. Her wide eyes were filling up with tears. “Gretchen, you’re bleeding so much.”
“No, please.” She felt her hand slipping on Tricia’s, but she fought to hold on. “Please. Just give it a chance. It hurts, but I know I can do it. I know it’ll work.”
She was still repeating that five minutes later, when she finally passed out.
*
Tricia’s bite left a horrible scar.
The whole experience had landed Gretchen in bed for two weeks, with a shifter doctor and nurse almost constantly at her side. She’d needed IVs and blood transfusions—human blood transfusions. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit anymore.
Her shoulder wouldn’t stop throbbing, and she still sometimes threw up unexpectedly, like her body was trying to reject the last of whatever poison she’d managed to force inside of it.
Tricia couldn’t look at her without crying. Her parents had hugged her, grounded her, and then hugged her again, stroking her hair and telling her to never ever do anything like that ever again.
And Gretchen had promised she wouldn’t. She knew better now.
When she tried to be more than she was supposed to be, other people got hurt. She cost her family money and trouble, and she made everyone sad. It wasn’t worth it. She didn’t want to be the kind of selfish monster who would destroy everyone else around her to get what she wanted.
Lying in her bed, with a thick wad of gauze still on her shoulder, Gretchen had reinvented herself.
She wasn’t Gretchen the Dud. She wasn’t Gretchen the Mistake. She was going to be Gretchen the Babysitter, Gretchen the Responsible: the girl who took care of other people and never worried about herself. She was going to be Cool Gretchen, the girl who could shrug off all her worries instead of bothering other people with them. From now on, nothing was going to bother her ever again—or if it did, she was going to keep it to herself, bottled so far down inside her heart that even she would someday forget that it was there.
But I’m still here, said the familiar voice. I promise, you’re not crazy. You really are feeling something—
Gretchen ruthlessly turned her back on the voice. She imagined building up a wall in her head, cutting the voice off from the rest of her mind.
No, she wasn’t crazy. Because she didn’t hear voices, nope, definitely not. She didn’t hear an inner animal that she now knew she definitely didn’t have.
Her family was right: that was all just an overactive imagination and wishful thinking.
She was as human as anyone could possibly be, and if any part of her felt differently, she would run away from it until it left her alone. Because she couldn’t keep doing this. She couldn’t keep hurting other people and breaking her own heart.
She was human, and that was all she would ever be.
And nobody needed to worry about her. Nobody at all.
1
Cooper had a view.
Once upon a time, he would have taken that for granted. And by most people’s standards, this wasn’t much of a view. Just a distant line of trees: ungraceful-looking loblolly pines, their shapes crisscrossed by the wiring of the fence.
But Cooper didn’t look at the trees. He looked at the sky.
He could still remember what it felt like to fly.
The chilly mist against his wings as they sliced through clouds. The bright morning sky and clear, glittering night. The sheer, heart-pounding exhilaration of rocketing downwards and pulling up only at the last possible second. He’d been an adrenaline junkie back then.
He’d been a lot of things back then.
Once, Cooper Dawes had been a sworn US Marshal. He had hunted down dangerous fugitives and kept federal witnesses safe from harm. His job had been his whole life., and he’d poured his heart, mind, and soul into it.
And on the rare days when it had all felt like too much, he’d taken to the skies, and it had always cleared his head.
Now he didn’t have the job.
And all he had of the sky was this single window in Cellblock D.
Prison meant he was a Marshal who would never work for justice again. Justice had spoken—loudly—against him.
Prison meant he was a griffin shifter who would never fly again.
And six months into his life sentence, it was painfully clear that prison also meant being bored out of his mind.
Cooper was in Block D, protective custody. It was where the prison stashed inmates who were deemed to be in need of additional safeguards—mostly because half the men in the prison’s general population wanted to kill them.
As a Marshal, Cooper had personally worked shifts doing prisoner transport for this exact penitentiary. On top of that, some of the most dangerous men inside it, high-level drug traffickers and mob kingpins, were there because he’d tracked them down. Being in protective custody was probably the only reason he was still alive.
But he hated it. His yard time was strictly limited—not even an hour a day walking around in circles on a scrap of asphalt and dust—and it was still the only bright spot he had. He stared out the window every day until the time finally came around.
And when it did come around, like today, all he could really do with it was burn away some excess energy and then retreat into himself, sitting on the bleachers with whatever book he’d gotten from the prison’s library that week. Even in the yard, with the other protective custody prisoners around, he really only had himself for company. Keeping his distance had
