Read Shadow Touch for Free Online Page A

twelve hours, and even when the soldier had fired a few feet from her position, she’d kept her steely composure.
    Then again, maybe she felt like she could cry now that she was alone. Maybe the tears were a girl thing. Tough under pressure, bawl in private. Could be. Yeah.
    Still didn’t feel right. Cam shook his head, no. If Eleanor was going to cry, it would have been when they threw her in the wraith cell. Cam would have been bawling himself to be imprisoned in the facility. Bad things were going to happen to the wraiths down there. He’d have felt no shame whatsoever pleading for mercy to get out.
    No, something was upsetting Eleanor deeply.
    “I think we need to find her shadow,” Cam said. “And now.”
    “I thought that’s what we were doing,” Marshall said.
    Eleanor was weeping, her face in her hands. What had happened? Something had to have happened.
    Twenty minutes staring at the screen. Nothing.
    “I’m going to check on Ms. Russo,” Cam said to no one in particular. “See if she’s okay.”
    His last glance at the monitor showed Eleanor pacing again, wringing her hands as tears streamed down her cheeks. She grabbed the fob at her neck and pressed her panic button. The alarm sounded at his back as he darted from the security center.
    The three minutes it took to pelt back to her room were too long. The soldiers who had been on guard were already inside, a couple more besides. One was reporting an “all clear” to his commander.
    Cam could hear Eleanor arguing as he approached the door. “You get Dr. Kalamos back here right now—”
    He waved the soldiers aside as he entered.
    Eleanor whipped around, eyes blazing with anger on top of some other deep, wrenching emotion. “What have you done to her?”
    “Nothing, I swear,” Cam answered. “We’ve been tracking her, but—”
    “I don’t believe you. I can feel her.” Fresh tears streaked down Eleanor’s flushed cheeks. Her eyes had gone aquamarine with her distress. “What have you done?”
    “Eleanor, we haven’t harmed her,” he said. “We’ve only been tracking her. We have our orders to wait until the morning and turn you both over. I’ve been completely truthful from the beginning.”
    Had the aide arrived early? Now he was really worried.
    “I don’t believe you.” She obviously held him responsible. And damn it all, he kind of held himself responsible, too, though just where he’d gone wrong, he didn’t know.
    “Can you find her?” Cam asked. “I’ll follow. You’ll see she’s just hiding in someone’s apartment or something.”
    The alternative made him very uncomfortable; he hated the idea of someone here getting their hands on her. Who the hell was he working for? Maybe Segue was too much of a good thing. Working here was so good, there had to be a catch; maybe he was finding it now. Shadow, the fae . . . maybe the opportunity to research them came at too high a cost.
    “No, I can’t find her,” Eleanor said, voice raw. “She’s the one who finds me .”
    “Fine,” Cam said, taking her by the arm and pulling her out the apartment door. “We’ll find her together. Search the whole goddamn place, over and over if necessary. Just you and me.”
    And the soldiers dogging their steps.
    They were on the main floor, in the hotel’s renovated grand entrance when Eleanor went still. She frowned, her gaze sharpening toward a wall.
    “She’s that way.” Eleanor lifted an arm and pointed. “She’s hurting. I’m hurting.”
    Cam took her raised hand and squeezed it in his. “Then we go that way.”
    All the way to the middle of the labyrinth, if need be. He had to know for whom he worked. He had to know if he was with the good guys or the bad.
    Eleanor took him from doorway to corridor, through rooms Cam had yet to visit, most empty and in a delayed state of repair. These had to be part of the phase two renovation he’d heard about. None of them was secured, much less monitored. Plastic hung like ghosts