Whispered Visions (Shifters & Seers Book 3) by Tammy Blackwell Read Free Book Online

balanced one another perfectly, and her butt and boobs stuck out just the right amount to make your eyes linger. She was hot. Ridiculously so. And yet Layne couldn’t stop himself from comparing her to the redhead who had gone a few days without a bath or brushing her hair.
    He was insane. But knowing you had a problem was the first step in getting better, right?
    God, he hoped so.
    “Perhaps you’re right,” Pari said moving towards the door Alistair and Mack had left through moments earlier. “Maybe it is as simple as walking out. Here.” The door opened easily for her. “Go on. Give it a try.”
    She was setting him up. Even the little ankle biter she’d sent away earlier would be able to tell it was a trap, but Layne’s major personality flaw, aside from crippling apathy, was a brand of arrogant stubbornness passed down from generation to generation of Hagans. Yes, it was a trap. And by God, he was going to walk straight into it and burst through the other side.
    He didn’t say anything as he walked out the open door. He figured the roll of his eyes said everything needing to be said. The door led to a hallway that looked like something out of a Stephen King novel. The carpet was a deep crimson with a swirly gold pattern. The walls had dark wood panels on bottom and were papered with a pattern done in deep crimson with hints of gold on top. The ceiling was the same kind of wood as the bottom of the wall. The space where the wall met the ceiling was filled with wood carved into the same swirling pattern as the gold on the carpet.
    Perfect symmetry, yet it was way more creepy than beautiful. He’d have to ask Maggie why that was.
    “Redrum. Redrum,” he muttered to himself as he crept down the hallway. He tried a few of the doors, mostly finding rooms empty of everything but dust. At the end of the hall was another door. He tried it, but the handle wouldn’t turn.
    Layne spread his legs, bracing himself, and then rammed his shoulder against the door.
    It didn’t even rattle.
    He tried it again, putting more force behind the shove. The door stood unmoved as if he hadn’t done anything more than look at it. His shoulder, on the other hand, felt as if it might not be in the exact right location.
    “That,” Pari said from behind him, “is a vault door painted up all pretty to look like a normal door. It can only be opened from the outside, where two fully armed guards are standing with the American-made semi-automatic rifles they’re overly eager to use.”
    Well, that would be why the door wasn’t budging.
    “And if I made it past the guards?”
    “Everything is alarmed, and there are always at least five more members of the SHP here, although it’s usually more. They aren’t all trained, but each and every one of them believes we are something other than human and shouldn’t be allowed to live.”
    There was a chance he’d underestimated their captors. The odds weren’t in their favor, but if he could get the door open, escape might be possible.
    “How often do they open this?” he asked, already calculating how to best take out two armed guards without getting himself good and dead.
    Pari looked at him as if she knew exactly what he was thinking and considered him the world’s biggest idiot for even entertaining the idea. “We get one hot meal a day, but they only deliver it when we’re in our suite with the doors closed. Other than that, it’s closed.”
    Lizzie had followed them down the hall. Layne wished she hadn’t. She looked like she would crumble if he breathed too hard, not that she would ever admit it. She could be on the cusp of passing out and would swear that she was good to go for another mile.
    What she needed was someone to take care of her when she refused to take care of herself.
    “Lizzie, you look like hell—”
    Her bourbon-colored eyes narrowed to slits. “Funny, somehow personal appearance has slid down to the bottom of my shit-I-care-about list in the past few