Adan Read online

  Things are not always what they look like.

  Adan has been in a catatonic state ever since the pride rescued him from one of Glass’ labs—or at least that’s what everyone thinks, even the doctors. Jared has tried to find a solution for a year, but Adan isn’t getting better. Jared’s last resource is finding Adan’s mate, and when he finally does, things start changing.

  Yanis has been asked to check if he’s Adan’s mate, and when he finds out he is, he’s scared. He wants his mate to be better, but he has no idea how to help. Adan seems to be breaking down, though, so Yanis spends time with him, until something happens.

  Adan has locked himself in his own mind, scared of what he’d do if he didn’t. He already hurt two men, and the last thing he wants is a repeat of that, but his mate’s presence by his side is making staying in his mind hard. Still, Adan has every intention of doing just that, but the power he’s been trying to suppress flares out, and Yanis is hit.

  When Adan finally comes out of his self-imposed isolation, he’s immediately put to work. Time is running out to find the mole, and Adan helps as well as he can, but will it be enough?

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Adan

  Copyright © 2016 Catherine Lievens

  ISBN: 978-1-4874-0692-9

  Cover art by Latrisha Waters

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books Inc or

  Devine Destinies, an imprint of eXtasy Books Inc

  Look for us online at:

  www.eXtasybooks.com or www.devinedestinies.com

  Adan

  Whitedell Pride Series Book Nineteen

  By

  Catherine Lievens

  Dedication

  To Tanya and Kathy, for helping me making this and other books better, and to my family.

  Chapter One

  Adan watched the wind blow outside his window. Winter was coming to an end, and Adan knew it’d been a year since he arrived in Whitedell. He knew that should make him feel something, but he couldn’t allow himself to feel. Bad things happened when he did.

  The door to his room opened, but Adan didn’t turn to look.

  “Hello, Adan. How are you feeling this morning?” Jared asked. Adan didn’t answer, but that didn’t stop Jared from chatting as he came closer and started taking Adan’s vitals. It was more a habit than because Jared really needed to, because physically Adan was fine, and Jared knew it. “We have another meeting scheduled for you today, and I hope this one will be the right one. We’ve already seen most of Gillham’s single men, so if we don’t find your mate in the ones that remain, we’ll have to start looking elsewhere.”

  Adan knew he should be interested in finding his mate. He just couldn’t bring himself to do so. He kept his eyes focused on the trees outside his window as Jared busied himself. He let Jared move him however he wanted to, and when he had to look away from the window, he stared at a spot on the wall. By now, he knew all the walls and the ceiling by heart. He stared at a crack in the plaster but looked away when the crack reminded him of another one, in another room, a room full of pain.

  Jared touched his hand and Adan curled his fingers away. Jared held his hands up. “Right, sorry. I won’t touch you again.”

  Adan wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that, so he just looked down at his legs. He was thin, thinner than he’d ever been, but he didn’t care.

  It was weird. Adan saw and understood everything, but his mind was strangely muted, like he was there but not quite. He’d been the one to do that, to want it that way after what had happened.

  “You’re as fine as ever,” Jared said.

  Adan looked at him. He didn’t like the sad smile on Jared’s lips, but trying to make it disappear was outside of what he could let himself do.

  “I’m going to go back to my office. Call me if you need anything.”

  Jared always said that, as if he expected Adan to take him on his words and call him. Adan never had, but it didn’t stop Jared from insisting.

  Jared left and Adan turned back to the window. A flash of memory, of glass reflecting Adan’s body, made Adan close his eyes. He didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to feel what he’d felt back then.

  He swallowed once, twice, and tried to go back to his unfeeling state of mind. It was safe. The memories weren’t, not for him, not for anyone else.

  Adan didn’t know how much time had passed when the door opened again. It wasn’t only Jared this time, and Adan remembered Jared telling him another man would come to see if they were mates. He didn’t look away from the wall, not even when someone sat next to him on the bed.

  The man leaned toward him and the nicest scent Adan had ever smelled hit him like a punch in the gut. He looked at the man who was already stirring feelings Adan had fought so hard to keep buried.

  The man was exactly what Adan liked in a man. Dark hair, dark eyes, his skin just a bit too pale, but tall and muscled enough to make Adan feel safe. When he leaned forward, Adan stayed still. The man pressed his nose against Adan’s neck and Adan felt him inhale deeply.

  He suddenly wanted to reach out, to grab the man, because he knew they were mates, but he didn’t act on it. He couldn’t. He started to move his hand, almost against his will, but his mate moved away before he could do as much as twitch his fingers, and Adan stopped.

  “Is he your mate?” Jared asked.

  “Yes,” Adan’s mate answered.

  “Do you want us to leave you two alone for a bit?”

  “Please.”

  Jared and another man Adan hadn’t even noticed was standing there left. Adan recognized the man from another visit, but he didn’t know what his name was.

  “I’m Yanis.”

  The voice of Adan’s mate brought Adan back to the present. He flicked his gaze toward Yanis, but he didn’t move or say anything.

  Yanis sighed. “I don’t know much about you, but I’ll talk to Jared. I don’t want you to feel like you have to mate with me, or even just talk to me. I hope you won’t mind Jared talking to me, though. I think I need to know what happened to you, and I want to help you get better in any way I can.”

  Yanis waited, but Adan couldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. His mate wanted him to get better, but Adan didn’t think it was a good idea. Getting better would mean having to feel again, and bad things happened when Adan felt.

  Yanis stayed a few minutes, his face expectant, but Adan didn’t react to him. He saw the disappointment on Yanis’ face when Yanis got up and went to the door, and he clamped down on the feelings trying to get out. Yanis opened the door and left, leaving Adan alone.

  Adan relaxed and slowly went back to his trance-like state of mind. He kept his focus on the wall, not wanting to see anything, not even the trees. The birds and squirrels he saw in the trees were sometimes enough to make him f
eel, and he’d already had a close call with that today. He didn’t want to push his luck.

  The world was just getting comfortably hazy when the door opened again. Adan briefly wondered who the heck it was, and he wasn’t surprised when Soren sat next to the bed.

  “Hey, kitty cat. How are you today?”

  Soren had apparently decided annoying Adan was the key for him to come back from his inner world. Since then, he’d taken to calling Adan any kind of name he could think of, but usually they referred to Adan’s bobcat half.

  Something shifted in Adan’s mind and he silently panicked. One of the keys to staying in his trance state of mind was to lock his bobcat in the deepest part of his mind. It had taken him a while to achieve that, but he’d managed it just before he’d been rescued from the lab a year earlier. Since then, his bobcat had tried to emerge a few times, but Adan knew only disaster could come from that.

  The problem was that even only thinking about the bobcat could make it react, and that was exactly what Soren had just done. Maybe he was onto something with his pet names, but Adan couldn’t allow his bobcat to come out.

  He retreated into his mind until Soren’s voice became a wordless drone that actually helped Adan to stay in trance. He was finally able to push everything away and sink into his mind. He locked the bobcat deeper and was able to focus only on the landscape painting Jared had put in front of his bed some time before.

  It showed a forest, tree after tree, and it was boring enough that it didn’t stimulate Adan and the parts of him that wanted out. He could feel one of them—not his bobcat—as it tried to get to Soren, to wrap around him, and it scared Adan, so he clamped down on it and focused on the green leaves of the painted tree, and he prayed.

  * * * *

  Yanis had found Ira still with Jared. His best friend had been waiting for him, and Yanis followed Jared into his office after sending Ira on his way. As much as he had wanted Ira to stay with him, the man had better things to do. His mate was somewhere in the house, and he wanted to go find him. Yanis understood, and he knew Darin would always come first. It didn’t mean he didn’t feel alone and confused right now, though.

  “Sit down, Yanis,” Jared said.

  Yanis sank into the chair in front of Jared’s desk. “What’s wrong with Adan? I know he’s catatonic, but apart from that...”

  Jared linked his fingers together and rested his hands on his desk. “He is.”

  “Why?”

  “One hypothesis is that it’s a result of what happened to him in the lab he was found in.”

  “Okay, I get it was hard, but why catatonia? I’ve been in a lab, I’ve seen a lot of other people there, but none of them were like that.”

  “Everyone reacts in different ways, Yanis. We don’t know much about what happened to Adan before the lab, but it probably wasn’t pretty. His pride was attacked and decimated. His parents were tortured and killed in front of him, and he was taken away and locked in the lab.”

  Yanis ignored the irritation he felt at not having answers. His mate had been through so much, and he didn’t know what to do. “Okay, sure. What can we do to help him? Do we know what they did to him in the lab?”

  Jared grimaced. “Not exactly.”

  Yanis straightened. “What do you mean, not exactly? Don’t you have all the files that were found in the labs? Aren’t you working with Glass’ son?”

  “Yes, and yes. We have the files, and we’re working with Morin.”

  “Why don’t you know more about Adan, then?”

  “His files disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, they disappeared?”

  Jared sighed and leaned back in his chair. “When we raided the lab and got the survivors here, we also took all the files we could find. Some were encoded, but Isaiah managed to break the codes and decipher them. We found the files for everyone we rescued, except one.”

  “Adan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Jared tapped a finger on his desk. “We’ve been testing him since he arrived. At first we thought the catatonia was the result of what he’d been through in the lab. We’ve seen terrible things, so we thought that was the reason. It made sense, and he couldn’t exactly tell us otherwise.”

  “You said at first. What do you think about it now?”

  “Keep in mind that these are only hypotheses, Yanis. We don’t know anything for sure, and we won’t until Adan decides to talk to us.”

  Yanis huffed. “Yeah, I get it.”

  “The last tests we did showed that Adan is more reactive than we’d first thought.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “That he’s either coming out of the catatonic state, or that he’s never actually been catatonic.”

  “That’s not really helpful.”

  Jared sighed and raked a hand though his hair. “I know. We have no idea what we’re dealing with, to be honest. We stopped giving him meds because they didn’t work, and we realized there was something more to it before trying the electroconvulsive therapy, but now we don’t know what to do.”

  “Have you tried asking him?”

  “Of course we have. I’ve been talking to him since he arrived here, and I’m not the only one. I know Soren visits almost every day, and I’ve had to kick Nysys and Keenan out of the infirmary a few times because they were making too much noise in Adan’s room. I paid even more attention to him since we realized there was something weird about his catatonia, and I might have noticed something, but I’m not even sure I wasn’t imagining it.”

  “What did you notice?” Anything would be good at that point. Yanis wanted to know everything, and he wanted to get Adan out of the catatonic state he was in. It didn’t matter how he’d gotten into it. Yanis didn’t care about the why much right now.

  “The times when Adan was more reactive, there was something weird.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

  Jared grinned. “Right. I’m not sure I can, though. It’s not something I can put into words easily.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Almost like something was reaching out for me. Something in the room. And there wasn’t anything but Adan there.”

  “Reaching for you?”

  Jared clucked his tongue. “I know it sounds ridiculous. I feel like an idiot even talking about this, but I know what I felt.”

  “Something reaching for you.”

  “Not physically, of course. It was like invisible tendrils of something. Crazy, I know. It happens only when Adan is close, so I’m sure it comes from him. I just don’t know what it means or what it is.”

  Yanis didn’t think Jared was crazy, but he also didn’t recognize what Jared was talking about. “Might be some kind of magic.”

  Jared snorted. “Magic? I don’t believe in magic.”

  “We’re shifters. We literally become animals. Isn’t that a kind of magic?”

  “Not like the weird invisible tendrils kind. There’s actually an explanation on how shifting works, if you want it.”

  Yanis shook his head. “No, thank you. So, where does that leave us?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve tried to talk to Adan about it, I’ve pleaded with him to tell us what’s wrong with him so that we could help him, but he hasn’t talked so far.”

  “Why were you looking for his mate?”

  “I thought finding his mate might jar him out of the catatonia.”

  “Yeah, well, that hasn’t worked very well.”

  “It’s still early. You’ve been with him what—five minutes? Give it time. Sit with him. Talk to him. I know it feels weird, but I think it helps.”

  “And if nothing I do works?”

  “Well...” Jared hesitated and looked at Yanis.

  Yanis leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “This is a last resort, but you could mate with him.”

  Yanis frowned and moved backward
again. “Without his consent?”

  “Yes. I don’t like the idea either, but it would be a way for us to tell what he’s feeling. It wouldn’t do miracles, especially if he’s the one keeping himself in catatonia, but I hope the bond with you will help.”

  “I don’t like it.” Mating without consent was something terrible to do to someone. “Would your alpha even allow it? Would the council?”

  “I haven’t talked to Dominic yet, but I’m sure we can convince him. He wants to see Adan get better as much as we do. You don’t have to decide right away, of course. We’ll try with your presence first and see if it can bring Adan’s bobcat out. I’m honestly not sure what else we can do.”

  “And if mating doesn’t work?”

  Yanis knew what Jared’s answer was going to be just by the look on his face. “If that doesn’t work... mating is already a last resort, so I don’t know.”

  “That’s not something I wanted to hear.”

  Jared smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Believe me, I know. I don’t want to give up, but it’s been a year, and we’ve tried everything we could think of. Adan is not getting better. In fact, he’s getting worse. He’s thinner than ever because I have difficulty making him eat. He doesn’t walk much at all, and only if someone is there to support him. He’s losing his muscle tone.” Jared sighed. “I was hoping finding his mate would help.”

  “I’ll spend as much time as I can with him. I don’t want to lose my mate. I’ll do whatever I can to help him.”

  “I know. That’s why I wanted to find you.”

  “What do I do, then?”

  “Go sit with Adan. Talk to him. Touch him.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “And please, don’t tell anyone about the mating option. We won’t try that unless there are no results, and I want to talk to Dominic first.”

  Yanis left Jared’s office and went back to Adan’s room. Adan was staring at the painting hanging on the wall in front of his bed. He didn’t give Yanis any indication he’d noticed Yanis had come in, not even when Yanis sat right next to him on the bed and took his hand.