Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

Chapter 10

Alec Graves
Rest Easy Hotel
Rio Rico, Arizona

Apparently I'd been injured even worse than I'd realized when I'd passed out at the compound. Judging by how relieved Jasmin had looked yesterday when I'd finally opened my eyes back at the hotel, it had very much been touch and go as to whether or not I was going to make it.

Even with my newly-accelerated healing abilities I'd still been down for nearly forty-eight hours before I finally rolled out of bed without assistance. I was feeling pretty good now—twenty-four hours later—but our medic, a tiny woman named Francesca, seemed almost as rattled by how close I'd come to death as Jasmin had been. I'd been ordered not to participate in any kind of combat operations for at least another two days.

I was pretty sure that she'd underestimated my recuperative abilities by a significant margin, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I needed every edge I could get down here on the border and if she was underestimating me then everyone else would be too. Besides, she had a point in that replacing the amount of blood that I'd apparently lost didn't happen overnight, even for one of the moonborn. The last thing I wanted right now was to end up in another fight for my life only to find out that I was a half-step slower and weaker than normal.

I'd gone to the hotel's outdoor pool yesterday out of desperation. I'd spent too much time lying around in my bed and I'd needed an activity that would get me outside but also avoid running me into the ground in case I wasn't fully recovered.

I'd expected to get some sun and take a long nap, and gotten something completely unexpected instead. I was headed to the pool even earlier today than yesterday, partially because I was feeling better than I had yesterday, but also because I was eager to see if the steady trickle of people who had come to visit me would repeat itself.

There was one hall in the hotel that for whatever reason had been built slightly narrower than the rest of the halls. Some idiot had placed a long series of decorative tables along one side, which made it so that while two normal people could walk past each other in it, if either of them happened to be very big it became a lot easier for one of them to just get out of the way and let the other pass.

Predictably it had turned into a dominance extravaganza. For the most part the moonborn down here on the border were less concerned with dominance posturing, at least outside of their own units, but there was no getting around the fact that there was still going to be some dominance issues any time you put a large number of wolves and hybrids together in one place.

Vincent and his team were the worst. Where the other teams tended to stick to themselves for the most part, Vincent's people seemed to go out of their way to strike sparks off of members of the other teams. The fact that they were the ones who most often fought alongside Brandon in the heaviest bits of fighting meant that Vincent's team overall was considered the most elite set of fighters we had. That should have been enough for them, but instead they seemed positively obsessed with rubbing everyone else's noses in the fact that they were currently the top of the food chain.

As luck would have it, I ran into Vincent in the challenge hall, as it had become known. Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that Vincent practically ran into me. Despite the fact that I was nearly to the end of the hall and he would have only had to wait for a couple of seconds for me to be out of his way, he stepped into the narrow passageway and made it clear that he wasn't planning on giving way to me.

The sheer arrogance and rudeness he was displaying was enough to set my teeth on edge and awaken a surge of anger from my beast, but I just gritted my teeth and stepped off into the tiny space between two of the tables so that he could pass by.