Destiny and Deception Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand as it shivered like a panicking animal caught in a trap. Stop shaking . It shook harder. Shoving it into my coat pocket, I looked toward the house, the porch and turret shrouded in a swirl of growing snow and gathering gloom.
    A shadow moved, darkness smeared over darkness, and Max appeared, cradling Mother as carefully as if she slept in his arms. The car’s trunk glowed in the dark, and I watched him lay her in the back, careful to not knock her head against the trunk’s edge. He hesitated, staring, as I slowly closed the trunk, shutting Mother away in darkness.
    “I should come,” he said, his voice as rough as the stubble that marked his jawline.
    “ Nyet .” Max and I might war over little things, but regardless of the fact he tried to kill me once—and nearly succeeded—I did not hate him. So I would spare him this if I could. “ Nyet .”
    “You cannot do it. Not by yourself.”
    I glared at him, wondering if the cure had dulled his superior night vision. Could he read my eyes even now? I considered the task and my abilities.
    “Alexi. I am right. You hate it, but you need me to come along.”
    He was correct. On all counts. Mother was a … How could I say it without lessening the fact it was Mother in the trunk of the car? A burden? Nyet . A difficulty? Never. A … I struggled to put a name to it until it occurred to me that Mother wasn’t involved in this at all. Not anymore. Mother was gone. This was her body—something her soul (presuming such things existed)—had shrugged off.
    “Sasha.” He invoked my nickname as only Max could: like a boy who still looked up to his big brother. The same way he used to say it when we were all just little scraps of flesh with no idea of what we were or what we were destined to become.
    “ Da , Maximilian,” I conceded. “Will Pietr…?”
    “ Nyet, ” Max assured. “Jessie has him— occupied —in his room.”
    “Lucky Pietr,” I muttered, sliding into the car and trying to not think about what we were going to do. And where.
    “ Da, ” Max said with a sly grin that somehow still came easily to him. “Lucky Pietr.”

CHAPTER THREE
    Jessie
    Lucky me, I was alone with Pietr. In his room—one of the locations my father still held as taboo when it came to where Pietr and I spent our time. And yet, lucky Dad, nothing was happening regardless of location or proximity.
    I wanted to scream.
    Although I’d been sent to distract Pietr, just being close to him was distracting me .
    He’d crawled out of his bed (and a bit of his depression) and made himself busy. Already . Maybe this was denial: Counselors say grief comes in stages, and denial is one of the earliest. I didn’t care, because Pietr—climbing out of sorrow so fast—was amazingly encouraging.
    But even as encouraging as it was, there was still something odd about Pietr after the cure—something softer, something quieter, something …
    Less .
    What if the alpha wolf had been such a big part of Pietr’s makeup that removing the wolf reduced him to something much farther down the food chain?
    Something simply human.
    “I do not know if I can respect a school that believes we have such a great need for upper-level math,” Pietr muttered, bent over the papers on his desk. “What time is it?”
    That question—asked with increasing frequency—shook me. Pietr had been born with an internal clock that began ticking obnoxiously in his ears with his first full change. To know that his last change deafened him to it—or wiped it out entirely—was frightening. But on the edge of his bed, my fingers twisting in the bedspread, homework and the time was far from my mind. Pietr— alone —was the only thing on it. “Seven … ish?” I guessed.
    “Seven-ish?” he snorted, and pulled a watch out of his desk drawer. A watch I’d never seen before.
    “Is that new?”
    He nodded, examining the small clockface. “Seven-ten,” he said with a tone just short of authority.
    “You’re not