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“I’m sorry she was taken from you, Kenny.” Abandoning the ache still throbbing in my belly, I rest my hand on his and lower my gaze. “I’ll remember her name.”

Lips tight, he sniffs and nods. “Thank you.”

Rhys returns to my side, holding two bowls of stew, one of which he passes to me.

I release Kenny’s hand to accept it, and my gaze follows the second bowl, as Six hands it off to Kenny.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll get my own.”

“Just take it,” Six insists, reaching around the front of me, as if trying to avoid spilling any on me.

Nodding a second time, Kenny takes the bowl from him. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

“Kenny, this is Six--I mean, Rhys.”

“I know. I mean, I know of him. There’s stories about him at Calico, too.”

Six snorts and shakes his head, drawing his knees up. “Not sure I want to know.”

“Nah, they’re good.” A hint of a smile stretches his lips. “You were like a hero to some of the subjects there. Like a myth.”

Catching the look of discomfort on Six’s face at the mention of hero, I smile. “I think you’re blushing.” Unamused, he looks away, shaking his head, and I chuckle at his obvious embarrassment, turning my attention back toward Kenny. “He’s not big on accolades. One of those brooding, modest types.”

“An Alpha, right?” Kenny asks, before tipping back his stew and wiping a hand across his face.

“Yes. He was part of Alpha project,” I answer for Six. I pick a piece of the meat out of the stew, handing it off to him.

As expected, he declines it. “You need the protein. Eat it.”

Rolling my eyes, I pop the meat into my mouth and wash it down with some of the broth. Within seconds, it relieves some of the gurgling ache in my stomach, but the underlying crampiness persists.

“The girl who escaped with Roz. She had three Alphas with her.” Kenny lifts the bowl to his face, slurping more of his soup.

My brows wing up at his comment, recalling what Papa told me about how dangerous Alphas were from S-block. How they were used as weapons. And how their needs were somewhat animalistic in nature, just as Six’s can be at times. “Did she survive?”

“Last I knew, they were sending Legion officers after her. She took one of the other Alpha project females with her.” The way he speaks about them, like some biology experiment, is fitting for those who lived through Calico. We rarely looked at others there as human beings, because doing so made the experience twice as unsettling. Subjects. Females. Males. Alphas. Mutations. The detachment in those words made it bearable.

“That was before they threw me into isolation.” His eyebrows flicker, and a sharp exhale through his nose silently speaks of the unseen panic behind his eyes.

“They punished you for helping her.”

He doesn’t answer at first, instead tipping back his stew, as if he needs the added time to collect the emotions I can see rising to the surface. “Two days of interrogations. They couldn’t kill me, of course. No one knows the computer system in that place like I do.” His throat bobs with a swallow, and he shakes his head. “I don’t know what you call those moments before death, though. When you wish they’d just kill you already.”

“They call it amusement,” Six says beside me. “I’ve always referred to it as endurance. Justification.”

“Justification?” Kenny lowers his bowl and rests his elbows on his knees. “For what?”

“For destroying all of them in the end.”

As if contemplating those words, Kenny silently nods, staring off toward the fire. “You’re absolutely right. All of them.”

Chapter 3

Cali

I lie in the back of the truck, tucked between Titus and Cadmus on a bed of sleeping bags, while Brandon sleeps in the cab. Camping by the fire would’ve been nice, but Titus didn’t want to risk that Tessa’s father would seek out the bullets stored in the back of the truck for the empty gun we gave him, and shoot every one of us in our sleep. It’s not as if I’m cold, lying between these two infernos. For the first time in weeks, my heart flutters with the first signs of life since the night I watched those doors seal shut, only shadowed by the guilt and anger I feel for Tessa.

A warm palm slides over my hip, and I feel Cadmus pressing into me from behind, his solid chest hard against my back. Arm crossed over my belly, he tugs me into him, and I close my eyes when he presses his face into my neck. While lying close to me isn’t new for him, touching me is, and I suspect it was incited by my hand on his skin earlier, when I reached out for him. Except for Cadmus, this isn’t about sex, or lust.