No one was at all surprised when Joshua graduated high school a year early or when he announced that he wanted to be a doctor. For years he’d been the one to patch Chris up and any visiting Sentinels when the shit hit the fan and they came home a little bloody and broken. It had surprised them all when they discovered the Council had plans for Joshua’s talents.

At just seventeen years old Joshua signed a contract with Sentinel council to work for them. During the school year he’d busted his ass getting good grades and working as an intern with one of the Sentinel surgeons in Boston where he attended college. During the summers he went to Europe and trained with some of the world’s oldest doctors, Sentinels who hadn’t quite reached two hundred years yet and they taught him every damn thing they knew.

It was still hard to believe that in less than a year Joshua could very well be a trained doctor working for the Council. After everything life threw at the kid he’d come out on top and Chris couldn’t be prouder. It still amazed him that his siblings who’d been given a f**ked up start like him had come out on top, especially his little bratty sister, who was just dying to get him to talk to her.

He knew that look, that innocent-I’m-not-up-toanything look that she was giving him right now as she absently played with the little dagger in her hand.

“This is really pretty,” she said, holding it up for him.

“Take it,” he said, continuing his assault on the dummy that wasn’t going to last the night.

“Thank you,” she said, sliding it back into its sheath and placing it back on the table by her hip.

“You’re welcome,” he muttered, wondering when she was just going to stop the bullshit and get to it.

“Do you want to go hit the dinner afterwards?” she asked, probably hoping to distract him with food while she plowed him with questions.

“No, and you shouldn’t be out during a full moon. You know we’re not going to let you leave here before sunrise.”

She snorted. “I wasn’t planning on going by myself. I asked if you’d go with me.”

She had, he agreed with a reluctant nod.

For a moment she stared at him, her eyes ever so slowly narrowing on him while he continued his assault on the doomed dummy while he waited for her control to snap.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“I think you should give her a chance,” she finally said.

“I don’t see the point. She’s weak and hopeless,” he said, backhanding the dummy, knocking a large chunk of its skull off in the process.

“But she’s your mate, Chris, and as far as I know you only get one,” she pointed out gently in that same tone he’d heard her use a hundred times on the woman at the shelter she worked at.

“Then I guess I don’t get one, because she’s out of here first thing in the morning.” he said, shrugging like it was no big deal when all he wanted to do was go back upstairs and demand the name of every guy who’d ever touched her so that he could go hunt them down and rip their f**king heads off for touching his mate.

Not that she was an innocent party in all of this. Oh hell no. Izzy was far from innocent. She’d let another man touch her, touch what was rightfully his, when he knew she hadn’t felt one f**king ounce of sexual desire for the men. Sentinel woman were just as f**ked as the men in that department and he knew without a doubt that she hadn’t been wet for any of the men she’d allowed to touch her.

After her little announcement upstairs he’d been hell bent on finding out the truth. It frightened him a little that he had to force himself to take it slow and focus on Sentinel business first when all he wanted to do was find out if she was lying. He knew he could have asked his father if she was a virgin since it was one of things his father could scent on a person from a distance, but he wanted to hear it from her lips.

When she’d answered him like it was no big deal he’d known that she was no better than his mother, who’d f**k anyone as long as she got something out of it. She hadn’t wanted any of those men, yet she’d still f**ked them. The instant he’d realized that he’d gained back control with an eerie clarity and he’d thankfully lost the erection that had threatened his sanity. Now he knew better. He knew what she was and it just made him even more determined to get her the hell away from him as soon as possible.

Jill sighed heavily as she pulled her wavy red, almost brown hair now, back into a ponytail. “Do you mind telling me why you don’t want to give her a chance?”

she asked softly, but he had no problem hearing her over the sounds of his fists connecting with the dummy thanks to his Sentinel hearing. Sometimes it was a godsend, but right now it was just a pain in the ass.

“I’m not interested in counseling, Jill,” he said, hoping she just accepted it and left him the hell alone.

Of course she didn’t.

“So you’re willing to force her into a life of solitude because you don’t want the inconvenience of an untrained mate?” she asked, folding her hands on her lap as she watched him closely, a little too closely.

Normally he’d laugh her attempts to counsel him off, but tonight he just wasn’t in the mood to be analyzed.

“Let it go, Jill,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I know you don’t want to hear this right now, Chris, but you’re being unfair to her. You know the second you hand her over to Eric that any chance that she may have had to make a life for herself will be over. There’s a war going on and no one will have time to train her,”

she pointed out. “She’ll be shipped to one of the islands where she’ll stay until she can prove that she can take care of herself, but even then you know they won’t release her until this war is over.”

He paused his assault on the dummy to look over at his sister. “They’ll never release her,” he admitted.

“Wh-what?” she asked, looking a little stunned by his announcement.

“I said, they’ll never release her. As long as she’s alive and there’s even one Master around that remembers her name she’ll always be a risk,” he explained, not mentioning that with the rejection of her mate and being locked away for any amount of time the Sentinel council would no doubt lose her loyalty, or rather, in her case they would never gain it. There had been a few cases in the past where a mate was rejected and sequestered by the Council only to be released years later bitter and angry and those few Sentinels had sought their revenge. The Council no longer took that risk, so once Izzy stepped onto one of the islands she would never again leave it.

“Oh my god, Chris. You can’t do that to her,” Jill said, sliding off the table and quickly making her way over to him. “She doesn’t deserve to be locked away, especially since you really didn’t give her a chance.”

“She’s had plenty of chances, Jill. The woman is almost twenty-eight years old and is weak and most importantly she’s a coward. There’s not one redeeming quality about her that would make me want to keep her around,” he said, with forced patience. As much as he wished he could tell her to mind her own f**king business, he couldn’t. She was his sister and he took care of her and occasionally had to put up with her bullshit, kind of like now.