Read The One We Answer To: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 3) for Free Online

wave crashing onto shore, and throws me into the wall.  
    Trish lifts to one knee, raises her handgun, fires at the Kin Eaters. Gunfire hammers through the windowless room. A wall of shimmering blue water descends between Trish and the Kin Eaters. Her bullets plough into the water and fall harmlessly to the floor.  
    “Oh fucking christ,” Trish mutters. “These pricks just get less and less fun.”  
    The wolf will slow them, Shiori says in my mind. Join me on this hunt.  
    I ignore Shiori, tuck Pim in the shadows behind the exit door and say, “I want you to run now, sister. Run after the man who said he’d help us.”
    He’s a junkie. But he said he’d help, and right now I have no choice but to take him at his word.  
    “I won’t,” Pim says, her eyes misting. “I won’t leave you, Anik. Not again.”  
    “You must !” I shout, too harsh. Then I force myself to calm; run my fingers through my sister’s long, blue-black bangs. She has our mother’s beautiful hair, and now, when she’s angry and determined, she looks exactly like our mother. “Please, Pim. Promise you’ll run. No matter what? Run and…follow Lily and…”  
    My voice trails off uncertainly.  
    What should I tell her? There’s nowhere safe. Pim already understands this. I won’t lie and tell her there is, so there’s nothing to say…and that more than anything makes my failure hit home.  
    I can’t protect her. My little sister. Fuck. I can’t even protect myself—
    Bring Pimniq , Shiori whispers. She’s safer far away from our usurping alpha.
    Usurping? The question flashes through my mind, but there’s no time to ask what Shiori means. Trish’s gun rings out again, then Connor roars. I know they won’t be able to hold the Kin Eaters—  
    Pim looks at me like she’s waiting for her big bro to provide an answer, a course of action that’ll make this nightmare go away, but when she realizes I don’t have any answers, that I’m just as lost and afraid and overwhelmed as she is, she firms her lips and says, “I will not leave you. I’m stronger than you think. I’ve always been strong! I helped you once already, brother. When that hunter shot you? Or have you already forgotten?”
    “No,” I whisper, “I’ll never forget.” Pimniq is strong. She looks older to me now. Less a child. And I see something else I recognize from our mother: a deep stubborn streak.  
    Pim’s not going anywhere, and suddenly, for the first time since the pale man August Lerrick captured and brought us south, the darkness clouding my heart lifts.
    You are a fool, Anik. A beautiful, broken fool.  
    I whirl and lock eyes with Shiori.  
    She’s pressed in a dark corner, nearly invisible.  
    She shrugs, lifts her thin arm and points behind me.  
    The Kin Eaters glide further into the room, bringing cold air that reeks of rotten fish and low tide and the suffering of the drowned. Connor leaps at the first creature, his wolf jaws snapping, and when he hits the Kin Eater it explodes in a burst of foul seawater that spreads across the room an inch deep.
    The water runs toward me. Laps at my toes.  
    The water is calling me. My lover Sedna is calling me.
    It’s my fault the Kin Eaters are here. It’s me they want.
    “Take me,” I whisper, suddenly longing for the safety and peace and…emptiness I enjoyed as Sedna’s captive. “Take me.”  
    Icy cold water runs over my shoe and down the other side.  
    I can’t lift my foot. The water’s trapping me.  
    Pulling me down.  
    Lily’s on her feet, facing the three remaining Kin Eaters, with Trish standing protectively in front of her. But it’s not the All Encompassing they want.  
    The Kin Eaters dissolve into the floor and suddenly the entire room is flooded in water six inches deep. It washes ice-cold over my ankles and then I can’t move, and the rushing, roiling sound of ocean waves and the lives they’ve claimed slams into me, and from within that haunted drowned