Which was what happened when you were a Founding Family’s daughter and you were dating what was then assumed to be a mere human.

It had turned out that there was a lot more to Butch, of course, but her brother hadn’t stuck around long enough to learn about all of that—and Marissa hadn’t cared. She would have taken her male any way he came to her.

Save for running into Havers at a Council meeting, she hadn’t really seen her brother since.

Until last night, that was.

Funny, she hadn’t spent any time looking back at what she’d once had, where she had been, how she had lived. She had cut herself loose from everything that had come before her mate, living only in the present and the future.

Now, though, as she walked up to the threshold of her brother’s new state-of-the-art clinic, she realized that the whole clean-break thing had been an illusion. Just because you moved on didn’t mean you shed your personal history like a suit of clothes.

Your past was the same as your skin: with you for life, both the proverbial beauty marks … and the scars.

Mostly the scars, in her case.

Okay, where was the bell? The check-in? Last night, they’d come in the ambulance to a different entrance—but Havers had told her to go here if she were dematerializing in.

“Are you here to meet with the doctor?” a disembodied female voice said over a speaker.

Jumping to attention, she pushed her hair back and tried to find the security camera. “Ah … actually, I don’t have an appointment. I’m here to see—”

“That’s all right, dear. Come inside.”

There was a thunk and a push bar was revealed on the door’s face. Giving it a shove, she emerged into an open space that was about twenty by twenty. With inset lights in the ceiling, and concrete walls that had been whitewashed, it was like a prison cell.

Glancing around, she wondered …

The red laser beam was wide as a palm, but no thicker than a strand of hair, and she noticed it only because of its warmth, not because it immediately registered to her eyes. Traveling in a slow, steady sweep from her feet to her head, it emanated from the corner up on the right, from a dark pod that was mounted with bolts to the ceiling.

“Please proceed,” the female voice said through another hidden speaker.

Before Marissa could bring up the fact that there was nowhere to go, the wall in front of her split down the middle and peeled back, disappearing to reveal an elevator that opened soundlessly.

“Fancy,” she said under her breath as she got in.

The trip down lasted longer than a one-story drop, so she had to imagine the facility was not just nominally subterranean.

When the elevator finally bumped to a stop, the door opened again, and …

Busy, busy, busy, she thought as she stepped out.

There seemed to be people everywhere, sitting in chairs around a flat-screen TV over on the left, checking in at a reception desk to the right, hustling and bustling through the center of the large room if they were in scrubs or white nursing outfits.

“Hi! Do you have an appointment?”

It took her a moment to realize she was being addressed by the uniformed female sitting behind the front desk. “Oh, I’m sorry, no.” She went over and lowered her voice. “I’m the nominal ghardian of the female who was transferred from Safe Place last evening? I’ve come to check and see how she’s doing.”

Instantly, the receptionist froze. And then her eyes went up and down Marissa, rather like the laser beam had done at ground level.

Marissa knew exactly the narrative that was going through the female’s mind: Wrath’s unclaimed betrothed, now mated to the Dhestroyer, and most of all, Havers’s estranged sister.

“Will you please let my brother know that I’m here?”

“I’m aware of your presence already,” Havers said from behind her. “I saw you on the security camera.”

Marissa closed her eyes for a brief second. And then she turned around to face him. “How is the patient doing?”

He bowed briefly. Which was a surprise. “Not well—please come this way.”

As she followed his white coat toward a pair of heavy closed doors, she was very aware of many eyes on them.

Family reunions were good fun. Especially in public.

After Havers swiped his card through a reader, the metal panels opened to reveal a medical space as sophisticated and intense as anything Shonda Rhimes ever thought up: patient rooms full of fancy medical equipment were clustered around a central administrative space staffed with nurses, computers and various other kinds of support, while three hallways led off in different directions to what she assumed were specialty treatment pods.

And her brother manned it all by himself.

If she hadn’t known what he could be like, she would have been in awe of him.

“This is quite a facility,” she remarked as they walked along.

“It took a year to plan, longer to build.” He cleared his throat. “The King has been quite generous.”

Marissa shot a look at him. “Wrath?” As if there were another ruler? Duh. “I mean—”

“I provide essential services to the race.”

She was spared having to make any further conversation as he stopped next to a glassed-in unit that had drapes pulled into place all along its interior.

“You should prepare yourself.”

Marissa glared at her brother. “As if I haven’t seen the result of violence before?”

The idea that he would want to protect her from anything at this point was offensive.

Havers inclined his head awkwardly. “But of course.”

With a sweep of his arm he opened the glass door, and then he moved the pale green curtains out of the way.

Marissa’s heart dumped into her gut, and she had to steel herself against wobbling. So many tubes and machines ran in and out of the female that it was like something from a science-fiction movie, the vital mortality on the bed overtaken by mechanized functions.

“She’s breathing on her own,” Havers intoned as he went over and looked at the reading on something. “We took the tracheotomy tube out about five hours ago.”

Marissa shook herself and forced her feet to move toward the bed. Havers had been right to warn her—although what did she expect? She had seen the injuries firsthand.

“Has she…” Marissa fixated on the female’s battered face. The bruising had discolored the skin even more, great patches of purple and red marking swollen cheeks, eyes, jaw. “Has—ah, has any family stepped forward to claim her here?”

“No. And she hasn’t been conscious enough to tell us her name.”

Marissa went to the head of the bed. The quiet beeping and whirring of the equipment seemed very loud, and her vision was way too clear as she looked at the IV bag with its constant dripping, and the way the female’s brown hair was tangled on the white pillow, and the texture of the knitted blue blanket on top of the covers.

Bandages everywhere, she thought. And that was just on the exposed arms and shoulders.

The female’s slender, pale hand lay flat beside her hip, and Marissa reached out and clasped the palm. Too cold, she thought. The skin was too cold, and not the right color—it was a grayish white, instead of a healthy golden brown.

“Are you coming around?”

Marissa frowned at her brother’s comment—and then realized the female’s eyes were flickering, the thickened lids batting up and down.

Leaning over, Marissa said, “You’re okay. You’re at my br—you’re at the race’s clinic. You’re safe.”

A ragged moan made her wince. And then there was a series of mumbles.

“What?” Marissa asked. “What are you trying to tell me?”

The syllables were repeated with pauses in the same places, and Marissa tried to find the pattern, unlock the series of words, grasp the meaning.

“Say it again—”

All at once that beeping in the background accelerated into an alarm. And then Havers ripped open the drapes and the door and shouted out into the hall.