Chapter 3 Three
Three
Taryn
She saved my life, and I repaid her with lies.
I wasn’t too tired to leave the cave. Well—okay—yeah, I was, but I could have. I’d been too tired to make it here too and we still did.
But the thought of leaving Lin, Brooks, and Caine behind? Of assuming them lost while we made our own way forward?
A bridge too far. A whole galaxy too far.
My loves. My entire world.
Gone. Stolen. Extinguished.
I couldn’t hold my tears back any longer. My body, worn and starving and still over-sensitive post-heat, cried out with every wracking sob, but I couldn’t stop.
My quiet Caine, my sweet Brooks, my gentle Lin.
My Brea. My mate.
All of them, bites or not, my mates.
So I lied, told Brea I was too tired and weak to go looking for help so that she’d leave me in the cave, chilled fingers curled around her knife, giving the guys another day to show up and extinguish this fire of grief in my chest.
When concocting that genius plan, though, I hadn’t thought about the fact that I would be cold, wet, naked, and alone for who knew how long while waiting for Brea. Not to mention hungry.
The heat pangs may have quit, but the hunger pangs were little ogres in my stomach, rubbing their hands and eager to ruin my life.
Night fell again. Every sound made me wince and jump. Which sucked, since the forest was far from quiet. Whistling wind, skittering critters, the occasional crack of thunder and the constant ping of dripping water. They all felt dangerous, predatory.
Taryn Maddox, ladies and gentlemen. Trembling at the thought of roaming squirrels.
At some point in my hysteria, I drifted to sleep.
I dreamed that I walked back to the boys’ apartment. Dream-Me covered all five hundred eighty miles in the span of a wink and stood on the doorstep. Night outside. Night inside.
My hand pushed open the door. It looked the same.
How could it look the same?
Did I look the same?
No. I couldn’t look the same. I wasn’t the same.
I stepped through. My feet didn’t move. My body floated past the kitchen, the sofa, until I reached Lin and Brooks’ room.
That beautiful room where Caine had finally let down his walls for me.
Where the five of us had eventually lain and dreamed together, side by side.
Even Caine, on the floor, head lolled against the side of the mattress.
All our scents were here.
Burning palo santo. Toffee and cream. Pomegranate. Blackberry. Blood orange and cinnamon. A weirdly beautiful potpourri I wanted to bury myself in.
So I did.
Crawled onto the bed. Curled into as tight a ball as I could beneath the covers, pulled them over my body. Waited for the others to find me.
A cracking stick tore me from the vision like a gunshot.
Not a dream. Live and in the flesh.
Loud. Too loud. Too close.
Heart pounded.
Heavy footsteps outside the cave. Big feet sloshing through sodden underbrush. Those weren’t squirrels, not in this downpour.
That was human.
I should move. I should stand, ready to spring forward with Brea's knife. Because after losing all my mates, I wasn’t going down without a fucking fight.
You want me? Better be ready to bleed because that’s the price of admission, assholes.
Yet I sat, heart pounding, Listening to the growing footsteps. My heart was so loud in my ears it almost blocked the sound. And still, I didn’t move.
Oh god if they’d all died for nothing, if they’d protected me with their lives only for me to sit frozen like a damned deer in headlights, I’d never forgive myself. Hell, maybe I deserved to be—
I caught the scent the moment before the footsteps stopped just outside the cave opening, just before a shadow blocked the first rays of morning and a tall shape wedged itself between the rock walls.
Eucalyptus. Cleansing smoke.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t believe my eyes.
Still asleep. Still dreaming. That made sense. I’d wanted my mates home and safe, and here in my dreams, they could be. Maybe I’d never wake up. Just hang out here with them, never have to face my life, face the world alone.
“Taryn?”
Brooks’ rasping voice broke through my stunned haze. I focused on him—his wild curls, his slumped shoulder, the scratches and dried blood over his torso and on one cheek.
My stomach dropped clean out of my body. “Brooks?”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” He lunged for me then, falling to his knees and gathering me up in his right arm. He pulled back, grasping the back of my head and pressing his forehead and nose into my disgusting hair. His entire frame shook, and I realized he was sobbing.
I pulled slightly away, just far enough that I could look at him. Make sure he was real. That he was flesh and not simply the fevered, desperate creation of my own grieving mind. “How—what—”
“Lin and Caine.” Pain lanced his expression, more tears falling down his cheeks.
My stomach plummeted. “Are they—”
“Alive.” He nodded. “Last I saw.” He took a shaky breath, weaving his fingers in with mine. “We watched— fuck—three vans pull up. Too many for us. But we knew if the two of you made it this far, you’d need supplies.” He held up the car keys. “They covered me as I ran out. Best they could, anyways.”
He looked around the small cave, as though the teensy space had anywhere to hide. His jaw clenched as he met my eye. “Brea?”
“She’s okay,” I said, explaining where she’d gone in a rush. Willing myself to believe she was perfectly safe and not on her own in a dangerous forest with not even a knife to keep her safe.
I looked again to his hunched shoulder, looking more closely at the dirt staining it. Except it wasn’t dirt.
It was blood. Too much of it.
“Brooks, were you shot?”
He shrugged with his good shoulder. “A little bit, yeah.”
Leave it to Brooks fucking Arceneaux to refer to a gunshot as a little bit of a wound.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered, grabbing his unhurt arm and dragging him to the cave’s opening, braving the light and open air for the first time in days to look at his wound. And if I was fully nude, well, Brooks probably wouldn’t say no to a distraction right about now.
“I’m almost positive it went straight through,” Brooks said as I paused, giving the gnarly hole a forlorn look. “Clean exit on the back?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “Though I wouldn’t say no to someone checking to be sure there are no shards broken off in your shoulder.”
Brooks shook his head, handing me the gauze to wrap him up. “I doubt there are. And if there are, they won’t do any harm in there. But going to the hospital right now…that could.”
“Brooks—”
“Hospitals are mandatory reporters, Taryn,” he said in a stern tone. “We show up with a gunshot wound, and they’ll contact the police.”
And we couldn’t have that. Not when we knew they were bought and paid for by Wainwright. Who’d also hired the goons to kidnap me mid-heat.
His brown eyes searched mine, fierce and burning. He barely seemed to notice my naked body. Hypnotized by my face, my eyes. I was, too, by his.
Fuck, he could’ve been dead.
Maybe he was thinking the same as he leaned in and absolutely devoured my mouth. Stole my damn breath. Made me see stars behind my closed eyelids.
His hands threaded through the hair at the nape of my neck, clenching and holding me tight to him as our bodies melted together. Bare chest to bare chest, and god he was so warm. Every curve of me pressed against his every angle. My lips moved with his. Our tongues spoke a different language.
Both of us so goddamned grateful not to be alone.
Eventually, we slowed, pulled back, stared into each other’s eyes.
After a moment, he seemed to fully take me in.
My greasy hair with bits of dirt and twigs caught in it.
The tiny scratches that criss-crossed my body like plaid.
And, yes, finally the fact that I had literally zero clothing on.
He sighed, pursing his lips together as he brushed the backs of his knuckles along my temple.
“First thing’s first,” he murmured after we’d retreated just inside the cave once more. “Have you eaten anything?”
Then he pulled a small bag from over his back that I hadn’t noticed, opened the drawstring, and pulled out the most beautiful granola bar I’d ever seen.
“I fucking love you,” I said, snatching it from his hands. It was unwrapped and half gone before the thought that we may need to ration even occurred to me. Still chewing, I motioned to offer the remaining bite to him.
One corner of his mouth tipped up in a smirk. “All yours,” he whispered. “And I’m going to pretend that you didn’t just tell me you loved me for the first time over a granola bar.”
Fuck. That was the first time I’d said it. I swallowed and tore off another bite. “That wasn’t to you.”
“Oh, really?”
“I was talking to the granola.”
“Ah,” Brooks said with an even wider grin. Those fucking dimples would be the death of me. “My mistake.”
The moment was so normal, so like all the other joyful moments with my sunshine beta. I tried to pretend we weren’t sitting in a cave, hundreds of miles from home. That our alphas weren’t all MIA. That we weren’t on the run from a massive corporation with all but endless resources to find us.
For the next few minutes, we didn’t speak. Brooks offered two more granola bars and a bottle of water—all odds and ends left in the vehicle, which he’d hidden a few miles from our current spot.
I made sure there was enough left for Brea, when she returned.
Brooks
I shouldn’t have felt happy. Caine and Lin were down for the count, Brea was…
somewhere. We were now officially on the lam; Wainwright-via-Phoenix Labs was apparently no longer pulling punches, if the massive show of force at the cabin was anything to go by.
That meant Taryn was in constant danger, even more than we’d realized before her heat.
But she was here. In my arms. Breathing and safe for the moment.