13. Threaded Through My Veins
THIRTEEN
THREADED THROUGH MY VEINS
Seven
“ I know my way to the mess hall,” I muttered. The new agent who had taken over from Dawson smiled tightly. She was the one who had been there the last time I’d been raped. The time I really didn’t like to think about.
I wanted to hate her for that. But something about her stopped me. It could have been that she reminded me of the one in the labs—the one who had been kind to me … Greta, that had been her name.
“I know you do, Seven,” she said in a quiet voice that made me think there was kindness in her, too.
I scowled. I didn’t want to feel anything other than hatred for these people and what they did to me. Even if she had shown me compassion afterward… she still sat back and witnessed my violation in the first place.
“It’s not time for my lunch shift yet,” I protested.
The female flicked me another glance. “I was given instructions to deliver you to the mess hall a little early today.”
“Right,” I muttered. There seemed no point in asking why my routine was being turned on its head. But then again, my routine had been nonexistent since the incident with Twelve. Since they’d knocked me out with a record dose of tranquilizers.
The last couple of days had been a haze of drugs that had kept me in a strange, not quite awake, not quite asleep state. I had no real idea what had happened or where I’d been. I thought I might have been taken to the labs at some point—there was a hazy memory of Mercer’s snide voice in my ear …
This morning had been the first time I’d felt close to normal again. Awake. Lucid.
But every step closer to the mess hall felt like a step closer to just another situation I wasn’t prepared for.
The doors appeared before us, and a hot, pulsing sensation bubbled under my skin.
Mine. MineMineMineMineMineMineMineMineMine.
The female opened the door.
I inhaled …
Salt air and damp earth.
My skin flashed with heat. I clawed at my arms, scanning the crowd of R Block inmates who were blocking my way. Keeping me from …
I pushed through them, following an imperative that made no sense to me.
I spied him at a table, golden head bowed, fiddling with some odd pieces of card. The others all watched with that stillness of those unsure of whether they were predator or prey. They gathered in a rough semicircle around his table, giving him a wide berth.
As if they were waiting for some signal to attack. The air was tense with hostility.
He was a new face. An outsider. An unknown. And he was close enough to Baxter to get a guided tour of the place.
But he was definitely one of us. He smelled like a Shifter.
He smells like he’s Mine , the whisper insisted.
I swallowed, and it was like I could taste his scent lingering thick on my tongue. I swallowed again, letting saliva coat my suddenly parched throat. I needed a drink.
Drink from him. Lick him, drag your teeth over every inch of him, sate this unquenchable thirst …
What was wrong with me?
That hot pulse under my skin intensified, and without thought, I stormed past the others, marched across the space they’d put between themselves and him until my thighs hit the metal table.
“Why are you here?” I demanded, then cleared my throat. My voice sounded husky, breathless.
His scent! This close, it filled my nose. Threaded through my veins …
His shoulders stiffened, his hands stilling on the picture cards he was flipping onto the table. He didn’t look up, but his nostrils flared, his lips parted, then pressed together. His throat bobbed.
“So …” he said, his voice deep but steady. My legs trembled. “There’s only one of you who isn’t a complete coward.”
A chorus of low growls behind me, the tension in the air a palpable thing. An agent muttered a warning, and they fell into a pulsing silence. I sucked in air, stupidly filling my lungs with that scent. The scent that prickled at every nerve ending in my body … even the ones I wished it would leave alone.
Especially those ones.
And then he tilted his head back to look at me.
I lost my breath.
Long, straight nose, full, pouty lips. An image of those lips curved into that wicked smirk he’d tossed my way that day in the lab filled my mind.
He was stupidly handsome. Of course, I’d known that. How had I let it catch me off guard again?
His hair flopped into his greenish-brown eyes … which burned like fire up at me. Burned out of that tanned face, from beneath furrowed, golden eyebrows. His nostrils flared again, his chest expanding. He was sucking in my scent the same way I was with his.
Mine. Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!
“Are you going to answer my question?” I demanded roughly, forcing the whisper into the darkest corner of my mind. I smacked my hands down on the tabletop. His cards slipped from the odd formation he’d laid them out in, a couple scattered on the floor. He bent with a low growl to collect them.
Behind me, our audience of hybrids echoed a chorus of grumbles and hisses. Their barely concealed hatred throbbed in my chest.
That’s not what that feeling is , the whisper informed me.
“Why am I here? That was your question, right?” he asked, raising one of those perfect eyebrows at me. A hint of amusement twinkled in those hazel eyes.
I dug my fingernails into my palms, willing away the itch to tangle them in that golden mop on top of his head. To tilt his head back and to the side and run my tongue …
Yes! Do it!
“Yes,” I rasped, clearing my throat again. “Why are you here?”
A slight smirk tilted the corners of his mouth, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They burned but somehow remained cold.
“Why am I here, in this chair, trying to play solitaire in front of that pack of weirdos?” he mused, his eyes flicking behind me. The ‘weirdos’ he was referring to didn’t make a sound, but the tension emanating from them was like fire against my back. All my instincts screamed to not leave my back exposed to them. But I couldn’t drag my eyes away from him.
The golden male gave his head a shake, gathering the scattered cards back into a pile and flicking them with expert fingers. I gritted my teeth against the sudden … urges … that filled me at the thought of what else those fingers could do.
“Or,” he continued, his voice rough, his eyes darting to mine and away again. “Do you want to know why I’m stuck in this hellscape sci-fi movie prison, being injected with God knows what to stop the monster inside me from coming out to play?”
I blinked, ignoring the ache in my gums. My teeth wanted to sharpen, wanted to be ready to pierce skin, to draw blood …
I tried not to breathe, tried not to let any more of that scent into me. My brain was scrambled enough as it was. I opened my mouth, trying desperately to work out what I wanted to say, and his essence flooded in. Every thought fled my brain.
His tongue darted out, daubing his bottom lip, his eyes meeting mine again for a scant moment. Not long enough. I exhaled, wondering how long I could last without taking another breath.
“I’m just here to play cards. And you …” he glanced up at me again, the jolt of our meeting eyes shooting straight to the center of me. “You’re here to play, too.”
I gaped at him.
He smirked, but those eyes were hard. Cold fire.
All sound was sucked from the room except for the scrape of my chair as I sat opposite him, tugging myself closer.
What was I doing?
Exactly what you should be , the whisper insisted.
“Cards?” I asked.
Those hazel eyes softened into something less like fire and more like … twinkling. “Yes. Cards.” He leaned closer as if to conspire with me, holding out the pile of black and red pictures to me.
I reached out, heat sparking when my finger brushed his as I took them.
Ignoring the way that heat melted through my skin and into the center of me, I spread out the pile in front of me, peering at the odd symbols. Many of them had a number in the corner and a corresponding number of symbols arranged in strange patterns.
He cleared his throat. “Fifty-two cards, four suits, two colors. The black ones are spades and clubs, the red are diamonds and hearts.” With one finger, he reached out and slid two black cards and two red cards from the pile in front of me, laying them out for me to see.
I glanced at the designs on the cards, then up at him, finding him watching me.
“And …?” I prompted.
His jaw twitched.
“Each suit has thirteen cards. Two through ten, and then a … a Jack, a Queen, and a King.” He paused, his throat working. “And an ace.”
He reached for the pile, flicking through them to show me cards with elaborate pictures of two-headed characters on them, a J, Q, or K in the corners, and then what I assumed was an ace card, with one single symbol in the center, and A’s where the numbers were on the other cards.
“So … why isn’t the ace just called a one?” I asked, sitting that card beside the one with the same red symbol on it and a seven in the corner. I swallowed hard seeing my name … my number in the corner.
“Because,” Jack began, picking up the card with the J’s in the corner and toying with it, “an ace doesn’t always equal one in card games.”
I scrunched up my nose. “That seems counterintuitive,” I argued, leaning back and folding my arms, eyeing him with a raised eyebrow. “And what’s the point of all of this, anyway?” I gestured to the pile of pictured cards.
Jack’s eyes blazed that gold they had the day in the lab. My breath caught in my chest.
“To have fun,” he murmured, his voice taking on that low, growly tone. I clenched everything to stop myself from shivering at the sound of it.
We will have so much fun with him , the whisper crooned.
I bit my lip, and a suddenly sharp tooth pierced it. Those gold eyes went hooded, and Jack reached across the table and slid the cup of blood towards himself. Took a long, noisy slurp. His eyelids fell shut.
He had gold-tipped eyelashes.
A tiny runnel of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. The smell hit my nostrils.
My stomach clenched. The whisper cackled in delight. I snarled—if I hadn’t been so fixated on the smell of him , I would have realized sooner.
One vicious swipe of my arm and that half-drunk cup of blood went flying. It smashed into the wall, crimson splattering onto the white concrete as a growl ripped from my throat, and my claws shot free of my fingertips.
His eyes flew open, no longer gold.
“What the—” he snarled.
Hell broke loose.