Wolf Six's Salvation A Shifter Love Story - Krista Lakes Page 0,1
the waste bin out. What a Friday night I have planned! she thought to herself. Trash and grocery shopping. Who knew grad school was going to be so much fun?
She stepped on the foot pedal to open the trash can lid, reaching inside and wrenching out the bag. The last thing she wanted to do was put her shoes back on and go back out into the late January weather, so instead she just set the trash bag on the porch to pick up and take out when she went out for the groceries. She immediately went and put a fresh bag into the trash can, thinking of what she was going to have for dinner.
Pizza. The idea came to her quickly and she grinned. Much better than grocery shopping. The healthy eating could wait until she had enough time to breathe. She only had a little bit of reading since she had managed to stay on top of it for the week. She grinned, thinking of the delicious toppings she would get. Maybe she would even splurge and get the cinnamon bread.
Chloe reached for the phone in her backpack to order from her favorite restaurant before remembering she had forgotten it in the charger that morning. Since she technically wasn't supposed to have it on in the lab or classes anyway, so she hadn't been too worried about it. She hurried to the bedroom, finding the little green light blinking with another missed call.
The missed call was her mother’s number. She didn't even have to listen to the message to know what she wanted. When are you coming home again? Claire could almost hear her mother's worried tone in her head. She rolled her eyes and smiled as her mother's voice spilled into her ear, using the exact wording that Chloe had expected. Chloe hit delete knowing she would have to add a call to her mom to the night's plans.
Then there was the saved message, one that she had heard that morning before she had headed out the door. She had saved it because she wanted to make sure she hadn't misheard it, but as she played it again, she knew there was no mistaking what it said.
"Check Fort Baskerville."
It was barely a whisper, but the words were clear. Chloe stared at the phone in her hand, trying to make sense of the whispered message. She knew it wasn't a wrong number. It was a hint about her brother. With a shaking hand she hit delete, unwilling to take the chance of the wrong person finding it on her phone.
Weak in the knees, she sat down on the bed. A picture of her and her brother sat on the nightstand, the two of them forever captured in a happy summer squirt-gun fight. Her brother's green eyes twinkled out from the photo, forcing her to remember.
Blake was ten months younger than Chloe, almost to the day. Irish twins, her mother had called them. "You two should have been twins. You just got here first," her mother used to say with a wink.
Blake had been small and shy as a child, and Chloe had spent many recesses and summers protecting him from bullies and bigger kids. Despite the sudden growth spurt and muscle development in high school, Chloe still felt protective of her younger brother.
Blake had joined the Army almost immediately after graduating high school. After being the one who had been picked on for so long, he said it was his duty to give back and help protect others. Chloe and her mother had tried to dissuade him, but he had been determined. That was three years and a year-long tour-of-duty ago.
His first deployment to Iraq had been difficult for Chloe. She still felt the need to protect her younger brother, but that was difficult to do from a thousand miles away. She had been grateful that he had emailed every day when he could, and when he couldn't he would let her know not to worry. She had all of his emails stored in a file on her computer and every letter in a box in a drawer on her nightstand. She didn't need to take the letters out of the box to remember what they said. They were usually some funny story about his squad mates or something he had seen in the market. It was never anything terribly important but she had memorized every single one since he stopped writing.