How Beauty Saved the Beast (Tales of the Underlight) Read Online Free PDF

through whatever Psych 101 Hauk was experimenting with.
    Stupid boy. That’s what she got for sharing.
    “What actually happened the night you were burned?” She blurted it out, not thinking how inappropriate the question was.
    He paused.
    “Oh, damn, Hauk, I’m sorry. That’s not—”
    “I don’t remember,” he said.
    “What do you mean, you don’t remember?” She positioned herself in the corner, just like she’d been the night she’d done nothing but scream for somebody to save her like some helpless princess.
    Hauk stood tall in front of her instead of crouching into ready position. Apparently he was willing to tell her more. Think about Hauk’s story , not what happened . “I remember the fight I had with my guys that afternoon. I remember being alone in the CHU before the fire. One of them came back, and then it’s a jumble of hospitals, helicopter rides and morphine dreams until I woke up in BAMC.”
    Jolie already knew there had been eight men in the fire that had consumed the CHU—containerized housing unit—they slept in. Hauk was the only survivor. He’d been blamed, court-martialed while he was still in the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center and sentenced to life in prison for arson and first-degree murder. He’d escaped the hospital and joined The Underlight. Most of The Underlight’s members led regular lives outside the organization, like Jolie did. But some, like Brayden, lived in The Austin Underlight’s secret headquarters, off grid and out of the system. Hauk had moved in mostly because he believed in the mission, but also because being a fugitive left him few options.
    Jolie had never doubted he’d been wrongly accused.
    She also hadn’t known he’d had a fight with the men of his squad just hours before the incident. “A fight over what?”
    His eyes wandered away from hers. “Over…things they’d gotten involved in.”
    The dark shift in his tone caught her attention. “Illegal things? Like, bad illegal, not like smoking a little weed or whatever? What were they doing?”
    His eyes dulled in sadness as he said, “It’s not that I don’t trust your discretion, but they were friends. Or they had been at one time. I keep my mouth shut and they died heroes. I’d rather their memory stay that way.”
    She bobbed her head in acceptance. Keeping silent in honor of their memory was an action she could respect. But this was a new twist to his story. Hauk had caught his squad, the guys under his command, engaged in something malicious. They’d fought about it. Then the place they slept in burned to the ground. “You had a motive,” she said then added quickly, “Not that that’s your reason for staying silent. I didn’t mean that.”
    He hesitated. Nodded.
    “And you don’t remember anything? You told me your blackouts didn’t start until two years after that, until after you were out of the hospital.” When Hauk got really upset during a fight, he would sometimes mentally check out and turn into a crazed whirlwind of destruction. She’d seen him twice now, both times when someone had threatened her. Hauk had ripped his way through adversaries like a tank, and one of those times he’d dismantled a van with his bare hands to get to her. In that state he was out of control. Totally capable of killing seven men who’d done dishonorable things and then had the stupidity to pick a fight with him over it.
    Hauk shook his head, but she could see the doubt in his eyes. “It’s medically common for a blackout to happen during traumatic events, like burning eighty-two percent of your skin off. It’s not necessarily one of those blackouts.” The inexplicable ones. “I didn’t have one of those until two years later.”
    “Did you have a reason to have one of those in the two years you were in the hospital?”
    He clenched his jaw. “No.”
    Jolie took a deep breath as she digested that. Magic and secret societies and Pagan temples and dark secrets and hidden pasts.