47. The Prize
FORTY-SEVEN
THE PRIZE
Jack
F ind her! Fuck her! Bite her! FIX THIS! the monster roared, battering at my brain. Let me out, and I’ll do it!
I clamped down on him, forcing him back. I was too fucking angry, too fucking … devastated … to look her in the face. To know that she thought so little of our Join that she could rip us apart without so much as a second thought.
“So fucking what if I bled a little when she did!” I growled, raging my way through the spruce trees. But the pain of that stomach wound was so fresh … and so were the things Blaire had said. About how she almost died from Roman’s wounds …
“Fuck!” I snarled, my hands balling into fists. My shoulder smacked into a tree, and with a furious shout, I turned and slammed my fist into the bark. My knuckles screamed, but fuck, I could handle that pain. Fucking better than this burning ache in my chest … the fucking itch in every skin cell to return to her.
“What made her think this would be the fucking best outcome?” I raged, punching the tree over and over and over. Bloody smears stained the bark, and the tree groaned under my onslaught.
But I wasn’t fucking finished. I had enough fucking anger in me to tear this whole forest down around us.
“Jack!”
The call barely registered in my ringing ears. I kept punching. Wood split, but that didn’t matter.
“Jack, stop! You’re bleeding!”
I glanced up and saw her standing there, wide-eyed, face distraught.
Fucking good. She can feel how I feel.
I hit the tree one more time, putting every fucking ounce of my rage into my punch.
It groaned and cracked, and in a spray of timber shards, the tree toppled, taking out several other trees as it fell with a booming crash. The ground shook.
I felt no fucking better.
“Jack,” she pleaded, stepping closer. I held up a hand. I couldn’t be near her.
I needed to be nearer to her.
I swiped at the bloody mess of my knuckles, a bitter laugh rattling out of me. “Hey, it worked! I’m a bloody, broken mess, and there you are, completely unharmed. You got your way.”
Seven reeled back as if I’d slapped her. Something lurched inside my chest, but I pushed that feeling aside, letting the heat of my anger burn it away.
Fuck her. Bite her. Get her back! the monster moaned.
She doesn’t want us back! I snarled.
“That’s not why I—” she began, but I turned and punched another tree, silencing her as my blood sprayed from knuckles split almost to the bone.
“I get it, the whole thing … Joining with me … that was just a game gone wrong for you, wasn’t it?” I sneered, rounding on her. “You got to have some fun with me, but Joining was a step too far, wasn’t it? Was Farida’s fucked up offer just convenient timing for you? A perfect excuse to get rid of our Join, the thing you never really wanted to begin with?”
Seven’s face went from pained to furious, and she stormed towards me. I backed away, not wanting to touch her.
Wanting to touch her more than fucking life itself.
“This—you—are not a game to me!” she shrieked, thumping her fist against my shoulder. I held my ground, gritting my teeth against the zing of pleasure, of rightness, that her touch invoked. Even if she was touching me in anger, in violence.
I wanted her anger. It was better than her fucking pity! I wanted her to feel the rage that I felt. Wanted her to be suffering as much as I was.
“Then what the fuck was all this for, then? What the fuck am I to you?” I demanded, the words burning in my throat because this was getting dangerously close to talking about feelings. And I didn’t want to talk about my feelings. I wanted to punch another fucking tree or ten.
“You’re … you’re the prize I get when this is all over!”
Her fist landed on my shoulder again. It knocked me backward in my shock.
Did she just say I’m her … prize …?
Fuck yes she did! Now fucking sink your cock into her, and your teeth, and fucking show her what she wins! the monster pleaded.
Instead, I gaped at her. Her eyebrows shot up as if she was as shocked as I was that those words had fallen out of her. But then she took a step closer to me. And I didn’t back away, didn’t try to keep that all-important distance between us.
“Having you, Joining with you, feels … felt like winning,” she muttered, her eyes fixed on my bloodied knuckles. “If you died in there, because of something they did to me … then what’s the point? What do I have to fight for?”
“For the revenge you deserve!” I rumbled, my throat suddenly thick. “To make them pay for the way they abused you. To help get the others out, so they don’t have to live with it a second longer, either.”
“Oh, great!” she snapped, hitting me again. This time, I was the one stepping closer as her eyes glistened with unshed tears. My chest felt too tight.
“I lived my whole life wanting to hurt them the way they’d hurt me,” she said, her fingers twitching by her sides. “I thought that was enough, until I met you! Now … I can see a life afterward. I finally have something that’s just for me … for us … and if you’re not there when I come out the other side of this … that’s a loss I will never be able to get over.” Her voice caught on the last words, and I just couldn’t keep my distance a second longer.
I reached for her, tugging her close, wrapping her up in my arms. She pressed her face into my chest, inhaling deeply.
“You smell like freedom to me, Jack,” she mumbled against my skin. “And I want my freedom … with you. So, if breaking our Join is the only way to give you some tiny little bit of protection when we put ourselves back into that place … then I’ll take it, in the hopes that it gives us enough of an edge to get our freedom on the other side.”
“Fuck, Bloss,” I murmured, my lips finding the top of her head. More words bubbled up my throat. Words that I’d tried to say more than once … but somehow, right now, in the aftermath of all the shit, it seemed like all those other times hadn’t meant what they would right now.
“I … I’m so fucking in love with you it scares me. And when you let Farida break us apart … so easily … it was like you never wanted … us.”
She blinked up at me. “You … you love me?” she squeaked.
A ghost of a smirk tugged at my mouth. “You love me, too, Seven. I’m the ‘prize’ you get at the end of all of this, remember? If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
“Did you … and you still feel that way, even without the Join?”
I swallowed heavily around the lump in my throat. “You’re the fucking bravest girl … woman, I’ve ever met,” I rasped, thumbing away a tear running down her cheek. “Everything you’ve lived through, it was enough to break someone … but you didn’t let it break you. You came out, beautiful and strong and determined. When you carried me through the forest the night we escaped … I was sort of infatuated, even then. And then you showed me how shit I am at hunting, and I was a total goner, even if I wasn’t prepared to admit it to myself back then.”
I lifted her chin, swiping at more wetness on her cheeks. She sucked in a ragged breath, her expression miserable and ecstatic and terrified all at once. Like a mirror to the turmoil churning inside me.
“I hate not feeling you in here,” I said, gripping her hand and pressing it to my chest. “Something that I never knew was missing, it slotted into place when we Joined. And now you’re gone … and I feel fucking incomplete … and I can’t hear you in my thoughts … and what if … what if they take you away, and I can’t hear you, can’t communicate with you … can’t know what they’re doing to you, or what you’re doing to them, or if you’re winning, or if they’re hurting you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, but they were burning, and a tear trickled out. Her lips, warm and soft, kissed it away. That touch was like a balm to my fucking tortured soul.
“Even before we Joined, I could feel you,” she whispered. “I think we will still be able to feel one another now. And remember that … pull, the day you flew off to scout? You’ll still be able to find your way back to me.”
“What if they drug you, and that fucks it all up?” I asked, pressing her closer to me. Not wanting to ever let go of her … knowing I would have to … that I’d have to let them take her inside that fucked up place. Knowing I’d have to trust her to survive, the way she had for twenty-five years.
“Listen to me,” she said firmly, gripping my face in her hands. “Nothing they can do to me will ever keep me from you. I’m going to go back in there, and I’m going to make them pay. And I’m coming out the other side, with you, Jack. I will find you, no matter what. If I have to tear that place down with my bare claws to get back to you, I will. And Baxter, and Mercer, and all of them, they’re fucking idiots if they underestimate me.”
My face split into a shaky smile. “That’s my Blossom. Now, let’s go fuck those assholes up.”
And then, to celebrate, we’ll fuck and bite and make her Mine again , the monster added.
Well, that was some real fucking motivation to get through this alive. Getting to relive Joining with her? Worth every fucking moment apart.