Page 284 of Immune

“Mercer,” Valeria says quietly.

He looks at me. Not like a girl, or like an Omega, or even like Conrad O’Reilly’s kid. He looks at me like I’m an answer he’s spent six years hoping would never have to bleed out in front of him.

“She’s not just surviving the virus,” Mercer says quietly, and the hallway falls into a deathly silence. My stomach drops,but his gaze remains firmly fixed on me, stunned and struck with grief all at once. “She’s responding to it.”

No one speaks.

Not Valeria.

Not the guards gathering close to the fallen bodies.

And the silence that hangs between me and everyone else is awful and heavy.

Ewan gets to his feet despite Kaito’s hissed warning and crosses the blood-slick floor toward me. He’s slow, limping, and pressing a hand to his side, but his eyes never leave mine.

The guards tense again, and Fletcher growls low in his chest before warning them, “Don’t.”

Ewan stops in front of me. Close enough for smoke and clove to reach through the metal in my nose, and close enough for the bond to flare brighter. His face is pale and his mouth is tight with pain, but when he lifts his hand, it’s steady.

But he doesn’t touch me yet.

He shows me his palm first.

My throat works with a rough swallow.

“I’m covered in blood,” I rasp.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I can see that.”

“I killed them.”

“That you did, Tiny Terror.”

“I think…” My voice cracks in a way I can’t stand. “I think something killed them through me.”

His eyes shine, but not with fear. With fury and grief and something warm enough to hurt.

“Then we find out what,” he says. “And we make sure it never gets to take you for a ride without permission again.”

The words pack a harder punch than they should.

Permission.

Choice.

Mine.

The cold under my skin shudders and breaks, and I step into him before I fully decide to. His arms close around me even though blood smears across his chest, his shirt, his skin. He doesn’t flinch, though. He doesn’t even hesitate, even if his breath shakes against my hair as he exhales.

Behind him, Kaito turns toward Mercer. His voice is quiet and deadly as he says, “Start explaining.”

Mercer doesn’t answer straight away, because he’s still staring at me like the past has climbed right out of its grave and put my face on. And, for the first time since Davis put his hands on me, fear slices through the blood haze and settles chillingly under my ribs.

Because I know that look.

I know exactly what happens when people stop seeing a person and start seeing a possibility.

FORTY