I nod, careful not to make a sound. Cliff's command holds my throat closed like a hand.
Adam hooks one arm under mine, his grip firm on my elbow. "On three. One, two..."
He lifts.
My knees buckle the second I'm vertical, and Adam catches me, steadying me against his side. The movement sends a cramp tearing through my abdomen, sharp and mean, and my whole body flashes hot for a second. Sweat prickles across my shoulders, and a fresh rush of slick slides down my inner thighs.
“Oh, shit,” Adam whispers. Then I feel him look at Cliffbehind me. There’s a beat of charged silence, and Adam starts moving faster.
He grabs my scrub bottoms and holds them open at my feet, his eyes fixed somewhere around my knees, giving me as much dignity as the situation allows.
"Step in," he says, his voice low and careful, like he's talking to something wounded. "One leg at a time."
I let him guide my foot through the first leg hole, and the second the fabric touches my skin, my whole body recoils. Every nerve ending screams in protest.
The cotton is coarse and dry and wrong, scraping against skin that's flushed and oversensitive and begging to be bare.
It feels like putting on sandpaper.
My thighs twitch and my hips try to pull away and a silent snarl stretches across my face. Adam sees my reaction, and pauses, his hands hovering, his honey-brown eyes flicking up to mine.
"I know," he murmurs. "I know it hurts. I'm sorry. We have to be fast."
He pulls the pants up in one smooth motion, and the elastic waistband settles against my hips, and I want to claw them right back off. The fabric traps the heat against my skin, damp and suffocating, and every seam and fold feels like it's been designed specifically to torture me.
Adam reaches for my scrub top and holds it up. The front is ripped, a long tear running from the collar to the middle of the chest where Cliff tore it off me. “Shit,” he whispers, then voices cut through the air from outside.
They’re new, two, firm tones overlapping with the crunch of boots on dry earth.
“What are you two doing here?”
"This is a restricted area.”
Cliff goes still. His eyes snap to Adam across the dim tent, and something passes between them.
Outside, Perrin's voice cuts through the tension with a laugh. Bright and easy. “We made a delivery for Angelica. My packmate only needed five minutes in the shade. The heat out here is brutal.”
One of the guards responds. Flat and unimpressed. Perrin laughs again, louder this time.
Then another voice rises above the rest. It’s the alpha from earlier, the one who talked the first guard down. He's right outside the tent flap this time, and he's not speaking to the guards. He's speaking to us.
"Cliff. Move. Now."
My stomach cramps at the sound of his voice, making me want to groan, but I manage to hold it in.
“Coming.” Cliff says, then he picks his shirt off the ground.
Adam jumps back into action. He tosses my torn scrub top aside without a word. His jaw tightens and his movements shift from careful to urgent.
"Here." He grabs the hem of his own T-shirt and pulls it over his head.
His torso is lean and defined, more muscular than I expected, his pale skin is smooth and warm-looking in the dim light. But my view is cut off as Adam bunches up his shirt in his hands, opens the neck hole, and guides it over my head gently, working my arms through the sleeves like he's done this before.
It’s clear that dressing someone who can barely function is something he knows how to do.
The fabric settles over my shoulders and against my chest.
And his smell hits me.
