18 Tommy #3
His bruised eyes found mine across the room, and for one microscopic, devastating second, the pack bond flared open between us like a door cracked onto a furnace—brother—and I read the whole of it in that half-instant.
Reed’s coming. It’s today. I let them take me to get you the message—and he’d walked into it on purpose, taken the lash on purpose, hung himself on this rack on purpose so that every alpha within running distance would enter this place with the doors Kaia and I needed to open.
He saw my cover. I saw his blood. For one second we held the entire unbearable thing between us.
Then his face shut like a vault.
It went flat and blank and stoic, a wall sliding down over everything, and he looked at me—through me—like I was a stranger who’d wandered in off the street.
Like he’d never seen me before in his life.
Like the bleeding meant nothing and the chains meant nothing and the man trembling in the doorway was furniture.
It nearly killed me. Smothering the wolf was a thing I’d done a thousand times this week, but smothering it now, with my brother’s blood dripping six feet away and his eyes giving me nothing so that I could live—that cost something I didn’t know I had to spend.
The towel slid off my shoulders and hit the floor.
I let my knees buckle. I let the gold drain. I grabbed the doorframe and pulled the babbling idiot up over my face.
“Whoa—oh my God—hey, I’m so sorry—” I threw both hands up, palms out, shrinking, my voice climbing into a watery horrified squeak.
“I was just—I got turned around looking for a linen closet, I fell in the koi pond, somebody said there were towels in the basement, and I think I took a wrong turn at like a gift shop situation, and I did not—I did not know there was a—is that—oh man, is that guy okay? That’s a lot of—that’s a medical situation, right? Should somebody—”
“Get out.” Joss’ dry voice cracked across the room, thick with disgust. He looked at me shaking in the doorway and his weeping eyes filled with a contempt so total it was almost a relief.
A confused soaked terrified human. A weak thing. Exactly the read I needed.
“How did you get down here?”
“I—I really am so sorry, I’ll just—I was hoping for a mud mask, I don’t need to be here for whatever this is, this is way above my wellness package—” I babbled and backed away.
I kept my eyes wide and stupid and never once let them go back to Finn, because going back to Finn would undo me, because Finn was staring at the floor now, holding himself absolutely still, sacrificing the one thing he could give—a brother’s eyes, a moment of not-being-alone—to keep my mask whole.
Stand there and joke while he bleeds. That was the job. The worst job I’d ever had.
Joss crossed the floor, the light streaming, and stopped close enough that the cold poured off him and the stink of him filled my nose. He looked up into my face with his glowing ruined eyes.
“Listen to me, little reservoir,” he said softly. “You wander again—you put your soft confused face anywhere it doesn’t belong one more time—and I will open you up early. I will not wait for the bloom. Do you understand the words I’m saying to you?”
I made my face go blank and frightened and uncomprehending—open me up, what does that mean, why would you say that—and let my chin tremble and nodded fast and hard.
“I don’t—I don’t know what that means but I’m really sorry, I’ll be so good, I’ll go straight to my room, I won’t move, I promise, I’m so sorry—”
The pure animal terror sold it. He read the cower as compliance and the not-understanding as exactly the dumb dormant docility he wanted. The contempt in his weeping eyes curdled into satisfaction.
“Wardens.” He flicked the syringe at the door. “Throw it back upstairs. Dorm B. Lock the gate this time.”
Hands closed on my arms. I let them. I let myself be hauled backward toward the door, shaking and apologizing, the towel forgotten on the concrete, and I did not look at my brother, I did not look at my brother, I did not—
I looked at my brother.
One last time, as they dragged me through the door. He didn’t lift his head. He kept his eyes on the floor and the blood kept dripping. He gave me nothing, the gift of nothing, the gift that kept me breathing.
As the heavy iron door swung shut between us, Joss had already turned back to him, glass syringe rising toward his own weeping eye, his cracked dry voice trailing across the cold concrete like the last thing I’d ever hear—
“Prep him and the other potential male to go up alongside this one. Plug them into the grid tonight. We drain them all the way down.”
The door slammed.
The other?
Eli.
And the cold thing that came up in me then wasn’t the wolf. It was a terrible calm, the calm I’d only ever felt watching a crown fire crest a ridge it was about to come down the other side of, knowing exactly how much time there was and exactly how little.
Tonight. They were going to drain Eli, and Finn, and me dry tonight.
The clock had already run out.