Page 32 of Consume Me

As she bustled around the room, casting annoyed glances at Rachel, dread mounted inside me. Were they going to take someone else? Bring someone here to comfort me? Why bother? Why pretend at humanity when they had none?

I couldn’t even process the other possibility.

No friend of mine would be in on this.

No one I knew or loved could ever do this to me or Alexander.

But even as I told myself this, I knew it wasn’t true. They wouldn’t go to the trouble to take Belle or Edward simply to give me some company. I had plenty of that with Rachel hovering around my room.

I also knew one thing: whoever was coming was no friend of mine.

“I’ll be back to check on you this evening,” June told me, “but I need to get these to the doctor.”

After she was gone, Rachel peeked out from the shadows, her swallow face equally grim.

“That bad?” I breathed. Rachel had been a nurse. She’d been paying attention to everything June had tested me for, explaining what she could. Judging from her expression, time was running out.

She nodded slowly. “Your blood pressure is really high. They’ll need you to deliver the baby.”

I wanted to ask her why. I wanted to know how staying pregnant could be any worse for either of us. As long as the baby was inside me, he was safer than he would ever be in their hands. But she didn’t understand that. She couldn’t. To her, we were two nut jobs locked up for our own good. She would trust them.

Even so, she still knew more than me. “What happens if I don’t have him now?”

“You could die,” she said, looking like a child facing the prospect of losing her new toy.

Part of me wanted to comfort her—to lie and say it would all be okay. The other part of me had nothing left to give, because I had a feeling I was going to die either way.

“It’s nice that a friend is coming to visit you.” Rachel changed the subject in a doomed attempt to cheer me up.

“Yes,” I said in a clipped tone, not wanting to shatter her illusions any more.

When she’d first spoken to me, it had taken effort to compose myself when she told me what year it was. I’d considered telling her the truth—that ten years had passed—but how could I? And would she even believe me?

It wouldn’t do any good. It might push her over the edge she seemed to constantly teeter on. I doubted Rachel was insane when she came here, but this place? How could anyone survive this without losing bits of themselves?

Still, she was the only ally I had and I would use our new friendship if I had to.

“Rachel,” I said, “could you help me to the bathroom?”

I needed to speak to her somewhere without cameras. I knew they were watching us now and if I was going to plead my case, I couldn’t do it here.

I wasn’t giving up. Somewhere I knew Alexander was looking for me. I knew he was burning down the world for me. I owed him every ounce of fight I had left.

I owed it to our child.

Rachel helped me down the hall, but when we reached the door, I motioned for her to follow me inside.

It would look suspicious, but I could lie—claim I was having another dizzy spell and needed the support. I only needed a few minutes. I had to try to convince her and not simply for my own sake, for hers. They’d stolen her life as well. She deserved to know.

“I need to talk to you,” I said in a hurry. I had no doubt that we wouldn’t have long before someone came to check on us if we lingered. Someone was always coming around to peek into our rooms and check the corridor. Whoever was watching the cameras would have seen us go in together.

“Okay,” she said, looking frightened. Not of them, I realized. Of me.

She’d bought the lie they sold her so well that she still didn’t realize she was a prisoner not a patient. It was that lie that made her more scared of me than she was of them. It worked in their favor and kept her in line.

It also made asking for her help a big gamble. But I was running out of options. If she was right about the blood pressure reading, it wouldn’t be much longer. Once they took me into surgery—I didn’t know if I would wake up.

“I have to get out of here,” I told her. “The baby needs special medical care.”