Page 322 of Immune

And then there’s a quiet place I can sense through our bond. The place where Xeon should be. The missing thread doesn’t make her any more free, and I can see that much every time she looks for him before she remembers she can’t feel him there.

It makes her look like she’s just missed a step in the dark right after she took three steady steps without assistance.

“Mate, stop brooding at her,” Ewan says without looking my way.

I frown. “I ain’t brooding.”

“Oh, my bad,” he scoffs, moving one headphone from his ear. “You’re aggressively thinking in her general direction.”

“I’m checking parts.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Hate to point this out to you, but you’ve actually been holding the same firing pin for the past five minutes. You looking for gold in there or something?”

I look down.

Damn it.

Dakota’s eyes cut to us and Ewan smiles at her. She narrows hers.

Kaito, unhelpful as ever, says, “He’s brooding.”

I set the firing pin down and glare at him. “Don’t you have somewhere quiet to stand and terrify people?”

“I’m already doing that,” he points out.

“Very productive.”

“Efficient,” he corrects, never losing sight of the woman we’re down bad for.

Dakota points at all three of us. “I don’t actually have selective hearing. I can hear all of you just fine.”

Ewan’s smile widens. “That was the point, Tiny Terror.”

Her glare tries its best to sharpen, but it fails around the edges. She’s tired and healing, irritated by care but tempted by itanyway. She’s alive, and I hold on to that tightly. For one whole breath, I let myself hold on to it.

Then her hand goes to her chest again. Not to the place where the bond sits, but lower. More instinctive.

Her eyes shift past Ewan toward the open bay doors. Xeon stands outside in the yard, half-shadowed by the late evening light. His black hair moves slightly in the wind, and his attention locks on Dakota before it moves anywhere else.

She freezes. Not much, but it’s enough that I catch it. If I caught it, so did the others. His face gives away less than nothing, but his shoulders change. A small shift, some quiet answer he can’t send through a bond he doesn’t have.

Dakota drops her hand and Xeon looks at it. Then he looks at her throat. Then away. Pain moves between the empty space between them like a sound too low to hear and my bond with Dakota tightens. Not with jealousy. No. This feels more like the ground under my feet has just started noticing the cracks.

Before I can decide to move closer, Dakota turns sharply back to Ellis.

“I’m mobile,” she says sternly.

Ellis’s gaze flicks from her to Xeon and then back again. “Physically, yes. Emotionally? I’m actually not even licensed for whatever shitshow this is.”

Dakota scowls. “Rude.”

“Accurate,” Ellis counters, then she turns on her heel and leaves Dakota standing there glaring at her back.

That should be funny. It almost is.

But then the air changes.

At first, I think it’s just the smoke from the outer burn pits shifting with the wind, but the smell is all wrong. It’s chemical-sharp. Bitter enough to scratch the back of my throat, completely wrong for the garage, and wrong for anywhere near the Omega housing.