Trapped With the Alpha (Balfour Shifters Book 1) by Emily Minton, Julia Keith Page A

doesn’t make sense. It’s imperative I know everything, from all angles, so I can try to make sense of this before approaching the boys.”
    Rolling away from him and onto my back, I look up at the blue sky peeking out through the treetops. “Umm, well, I don’t really know a lot more than what I already told you. One second, I was coming back to you in bed, and then the next, I seemed to just be frozen in place. I was unable to move, even though I could still talk.”
    “Could you hear me?” he asks, sounding confused.
     “Yeah, I could hear everything. You tried to get to me, called my name over and over, but there was something keeping you from getting too close. You were screaming and smashing your fists against the barrier. I could hear and see everything you were doing, but you couldn’t hear me. No matter how loud I yelled, you couldn’t hear anything I was saying. You were becoming so frantic, I stopped trying in the hopes that you would calm down.”
    He rolls to his side, looking right at my face. “Then what happened?”
    “Then, it was like I blinked my eyes, and everything was the same but it wasn’t. I was still in your chambers, and you were laying right there in front of me. When I tried to touch you, I couldn’t feel you anymore,” I explain, trying to find the correct words.
    “You shifted into your wolf and tore the entire room apart. Then, you shifted back and fell to sleep. I could tell it wasn’t a natural sleep, and it scared the hell out of me. I tried to call for you, but you never woke. I finally just gave up and curled into a ball on the floor beside you, and I spent the rest of the night just crying. I couldn’t even feel the floor beneath me, Brody. I was just all of a sudden nothing, as if I had become a ghost. For a while, I thought I had died.”
    “I don’t remember much of that night. I remember you being there and fading away, but most of it is just a blur,” he admits, twirling a lock of my long hair around his fingers.
    “You slept the entire night through, until a servant came in and started screaming. After that, you seemed to go about your day as if everything was normal. You never asked about me, never looked for me. You did nothing, and that broke me even more.” My words come out on a broken sob.
    Brody reaches up to wipe the tears that are now falling in earnest from my eyes, silently giving me his strength so that I can continue. “I cried for days, unable to comprehend what was going on. I just wanted to give up. I had never in my life felt loneliness like that, and I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to do nothing but lie in your bed and wish for death to take me. I was positive that anything was better than the hell I was living.
    “Sadly, I didn’t have the option of staying in bed and wallowing. Every time you moved, I was forced to follow. No matter how hard I fought it, I was dragged behind you like there was some invisible force pushing me from behind. I even tried hanging on to the bedposts while you walked out of the room, but that didn’t work. As soon as you were out of eyesight, it was like I blinked and was right beside you again. It was part of my curse, to stand by your side and never be more than a ghost.”
    Unable to continue with the story, a sob escapes me. Reliving that moment is the worst form of torture, even worse than being forced to watch Brody jump from bed to bed. By the time he was doing that, I had come to terms with the fact that there was an unknown force at play. “When you went on with your life, took other women to your bed, it was horrible. In the beginning, the pain was so unbearable that I don’t think I could find words to describe it.”
    “I’m so sorry, Izzy. You have to know, I would never had done any of those things if I had remembered you.”
    “Watching you with those other women was like a knife to the heart.” Even though I have more than enough words to describe that feeling, nothing more comes out.