THIRTY-NINE #3
More.
Time is weird.
Ewan is still near the first body, one hand pressed to his side and face pale with pain. His eyes are locked on me. Through the bond, I feel him there, bright and terrified and aching to reach me.
Not away.
Never away.
Kaito reaches him first, one hand on his shoulder to keep him from trying to get up too fast.
“Don’t,” Kaito says, voice tight. “You’re hurt.”
Ewan ignores him, eyes planted directly on me. “Kota.”
I look over at him.
There he is.
My big, stupid lamp.
Smoke and clove.
Alive.
I step toward him and the guard standing with Valeria tenses. I don’t even know when they arrived, but I know the Alphas don’t tense with them.
Kaito’s head snaps toward the guards so fast the nearest one takes half a step back. Then he says, “Lower your weapons.”
No one moves.
I blink at him.
Fletcher’s voice cuts in, rougher than I think I’ve ever heard it. “He said lower them.”
The first gun dips, and then another.
Xeon doesn’t speak at all. He simply moves until he’s between me and the nearest guard, frost and steel cutting through the blood-stained air.
Not threatening me.
Shielding me.
Maine tries to get past Fletcher, but Fletcher catches him around the chest. It’s not rough, just firm enough to keep him from running through the blood and bodies.
“Let me go,” Maine snarls, struggling against the Alpha.
“Not yet,” Fletcher says. “Look at her feet.”
“My sister—”
“I know.” Fletcher’s voice cracks around the word. “I know. But she’s standing in blood and broken glass, and if you rush her, she might slip. Or you might, and then she gets one more thing to blame herself for. Breathe, kid.”
That trickles into my brain a little weirdly. Not all the way, but enough.
I look down.
Glass.
Blood.
My boots planted in both.
My knee hurts suddenly.
My wrist too.
My throat.
My neck where Ewan’s bite pulses under my collar, hot and alive and scared with him.
The hallway comes back in fragments, small pieces splitting through my brain.
Bleach.
Concrete.
Blood.
Smoke and clove.
Wild honey and rain, faint under a copper tang.
I look at Davis, and then the others.
“What?” I ask.
My voice sounds normal, but that seems wrong.
No one answers.
I frown at all of their faces. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Ewan makes a sound. Not quite a laugh, and not really a sob either. More like a strange sound caught between the two. He reaches for me from where he’s kneeling, not scared of my hands and not scared of the blood that coats them. Scared I’m not seated behind my own eyes yet.
The bond pulls so hard toward him that I sway.
Kaito sees it and his hand tightens briefly on Ewan’s shoulder before he lets go.
“Easy,” Kaito says to me, not like an order. Like a cautious bridge he’s offering to me. “Come back slowly.”
My stomach turns and, slowly, I look down at myself again.
Blood.
So much blood.
Not mine.
Most of it’s not mine.
My stomach turns again, but not enough. Not the way it should. And that scares me more than Davis ever did.
Mercer pushes through behind Valeria. His face is gray by the time he takes in the bodies on the ground. When he looks at me, he stops dead. Not afraid of me exactly. No. This is worse. It’s like he’s realizing something very important.
“Kota,” he says gently. “Can you tell me what happened?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Because I know what happened, and yet I don’t.
Davis trapped us and his men grabbed me. Ewan got hurt and then the world became all clean and simple and red.
Kaito’s eyes are on mine now, and he understands first. I see it land inside him. Not the science of it, but the shape of the thing.
“She wasn’t just defending herself,” he says.
Mercer looks at him sharply.
Kaito’s jaw tightens. “Something triggered.”
Mercer grows incredibly still then, and a guard even shifts.
Valeria whispers from where she remains standing, “Triggered what?”
Kaito doesn’t look away from me. “The thing NOVAC built into her.”
My heart releases one awful beat.
Mercer’s face changes, all the color draining out of it so quickly I wonder if he might faint. He doesn’t. Instead, he mutters, “No.”
It’s not denial. It’s horror. Not at me, but at what was done to me.
His gaze drops to my bloody hands and clothes, then to Davis, and then back to me.
My bite pulses and the bond flickers. Ewan’s fear brushes against mine, warm and split open.
Mercer swallows harshly.
“She didn’t go feral,” he says, but no one speaks.
“She didn’t lose coordination. No random aggression. No infection behavior.” His voice goes thin, quick, and clinical, because apparently terror needs somewhere to sit back and relax. “Targeted response. Threat elimination. Accelerated physical output. Pain suppression. Scent alteration.”
“Mercer,” Valeria says quietly.
He looks at me. Not like a girl, or like an Omega, or even like Conrad O’Reilly’s kid. He looks at me like I’m an answer he’s spent six years hoping would never have to bleed out in front of him.
“She’s not just surviving the virus,” Mercer says quietly, and the hallway falls into a deathly silence. My stomach drops, but his gaze remains firmly fixed on me, stunned and struck with grief all at once. “She’s responding to it.”
No one speaks.
Not Valeria.
Not the guards gathering close to the fallen bodies.
And the silence that hangs between me and everyone else is awful and heavy.
Ewan gets to his feet despite Kaito’s hissed warning and crosses the blood-slick floor toward me. He’s slow, limping, and pressing a hand to his side, but his eyes never leave mine.
The guards tense again, and Fletcher growls low in his chest before warning them, “Don’t.”
Ewan stops in front of me. Close enough for smoke and clove to reach through the metal in my nose, and close enough for the bond to flare brighter. His face is pale and his mouth is tight with pain, but when he lifts his hand, it’s steady.
But he doesn’t touch me yet.
He shows me his palm first.
My throat works with a rough swallow.
“I’m covered in blood,” I rasp.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I can see that.”
“I killed them.”
“That you did, Tiny Terror.”
“I think…” My voice cracks in a way I can’t stand. “I think something killed them through me.”
His eyes shine, but not with fear. With fury and grief and something warm enough to hurt.
“Then we find out what,” he says. “And we make sure it never gets to take you for a ride without permission again.”
The words pack a harder punch than they should.
Permission.
Choice.
Mine.
The cold under my skin shudders and breaks, and I step into him before I fully decide to. His arms close around me even though blood smears across his chest, his shirt, his skin. He doesn’t flinch, though. He doesn’t even hesitate, even if his breath shakes against my hair as he exhales.
Behind him, Kaito turns toward Mercer. His voice is quiet and deadly as he says, “Start explaining.”
Mercer doesn’t answer straight away, because he’s still staring at me like the past has climbed right out of its grave and put my face on. And, for the first time since Davis put his hands on me, fear slices through the blood haze and settles chillingly under my ribs.
Because I know that look.
I know exactly what happens when people stop seeing a person and start seeing a possibility.