Beneath the Broken Moon: Part One: Shifter/Vampire Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

Do you have any idea how worried your mother was about you? We were about to send out a search team.” He placed his hand on my uninjured shoulder and drew me into his side. “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to my girl.”
    Even as he said those words, his tone was flat. Maybe he didn’t want anything to happen to me, but he wanted that so I could be mated to some influential Alpha’s son. I knew he wasn’t concerned for my well-being, and he never bothered to deny it.
    While I was growing up, I witnessed many arguments between my parents. Particularly he liked to snarl that his only offspring hadn’t been a boy. That Mom was at fault for not bearing more children.
    When my mother gave birth to me, something in her body gave out. Her womb couldn’t handle having a pup within it. Mom liked to say my birth was a miracle, but I didn’t agree, not when Father made me feel otherwise.
    Grimacing, I glanced up at him.
    He shoved me toward his office on the ground floor. “Come now. I’ll call Dr. Matthews. Your mother is waiting to see you. Go show her you’re okay.”
    I walked through the French doors into the large bookshelf-filled room with its grand oak desk, positioned facing the door. The sting of being sent here when I was younger never went away, regardless of the many times I’d been in the room since.
    My mother leapt from a chair angled toward the large stone hearth. “Oh, my dear! Come. Let me look at you. What trouble did you get yourself into?” She crossed the room to me, her light brown eyes wide with concern.
    “They raided the Teatro . Chandra and I ran, but they caught up to me and shot me.” My gaze landed on the other chair as my cousin stood.
    “Carmela, you’re alive,” she said. “I hope you’re okay.” She smiled, but there was something off about her tone of voice, as if she knew something I didn’t. “We were so worried.” She didn’t give away anything more. Could she be trying to warn me? If only I could decipher what she was hinting at.
    Father’s voice came from the other room, most likely using his treasured analog phone. He was a business owner, which gave him a certain level of influence; probably one of the factors that contributed to my family not being lower class like other werewolves. With that influence, he sometimes had the ability to go outside the norm of what others could or couldn’t get. The phone had been a gift from one of his loyal clients. They were fairly rare and expensive these days, unlike before the disaster when almost everyone had a cell phone.
    “You should sit down, sweetheart. You look pale.” Mother guided me to the chair Chandra had vacated. Leaning my head back against the chair’s plush upholstered fabric, I closed my eyes and brushed my fingertips over the cottony splint holding my arm in place. My shoulder still burned in agony, and whatever sleep I’d gotten at the vampire’s didn’t seem to help the drowsiness weighing me down now.
    If the bullet had been lead, I might’ve been able to shrug the injury off, but that wasn’t the case. The Cazador had known what I was. They’d shot me with silver. Fear chilled me to the bone.
    “Are you cold? Here, I’ll fetch a blanket,” Mother said from nearby, but I didn’t pay her much attention. Goosebumps rose up over my skin, and pain gnawed on my shoulder like a dog with a bone.
    Weight descended upon me, and I blinked my eyes open. Mother smiled as she tucked a large wool blanket around my shivering body. “Does that help any? Should I have your father light a fire?”
    “She does not need a fire, Katarina. She needs the doctor to examine her.” Father walked around from the back of the chair to tower over us. “Who fixed you up?” He tugged the blanket down, his gaze dropping to the arm secured to my side.
    “I don’t know, Father. I passed out.” I couldn’t tell him it had been a vampire. For some reason, they weren’t able to smell Derek; it probably had to do with