And the entire world stopped breathing.
Mine to Possess
Nalini Singh
Psy-Changeling, book four
ebook, 304 pages
Published February 5th 2008
ISBN 9780575100008
Clay Bennett is a powerful DarkRiver sentinel, but he grew up in the slums with his human mother, never knowing his changeling father. As a young boy without the bonds of Pack, he tried to stifle his animal nature. He failed...and committed the most extreme act of violence, killing a man and losing his best friend, Talin, in the bloody aftermath. Everything good in him died the day he was told that she, too, was dead.
Talin McKade barely survived a childhood drenched in bloodshed and terror. Now a new nightmare is stalking her life--the street children she works to protect are disappearing and turning up dead. Determined to keep them safe, she unlocks the darkest secret in her heart and returns to ask the help of the strongest man she knows...
Clay lost Talin once. He will not let her go again, his hunger to possess her, a clawing need born of the leopard within. As they race to save the innocent, Clay and Talin must face the violent truths of their past...or lose everything that ever mattered.
I'll confess. I had a very vague recollection of Clay when I turned to this book. So while I considered, briefly, skipping this installment, I couldn't very well turn down a childhood friends to lovers story. And what a story it is! The beginning had me holding my breath right alongside Clay as he chased the "ghost" of a woman thought long dead.
After years of abuse at the hands of her foster parents, Talin is eight when Clay loses control over his beast and literally tears her foster father apart, leaving a young, severely traumatized Talin covered in the blood, organs, and bodily tissue of the deceased. Clay is taken to prison, mercifully transferred to juvie, while Talin is sent to another family that offers her the safety of a home she's never known before. But the trauma remains and she's forced to ask that when Clay is released, to tell him she was dead.
It's the destruction of that news that sends Clay off, and into the hands of the DarkRiver Clan, where he is finally able to learn of the culture of the leopard changelings. Something long denied him, being the half-changeling son of a human mother.
Her having run from him, still terrified to this day, tears at Clay's heart but it's the revelation of the countless men she's slept with that brings him to his knees. She's tainted and broken, far from being his once strong, best friend Tally. What's worse- Talin is slowly dying.
*This* is the book I've been waiting for in this series. It's predecessors can't hold a candle and hopefully the goodness bleeds into those that will follow because this, this was good!
4 out of 5 stars.
Previously in the series:
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