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Hands lodged in her hair, Wren snaps her attention back to me. “And you? Were you Alpha project?”

“Yes. I was taken to the lab multiple times a week. Endured painful procedures. All with the hope that I would eventually conceive.”

Tears glisten in the woman’s eyes, and when she places her hands at her belly, it’s then I realize why she’s asking me so many questions.

“You’re with child.” My eyes flit from her to the Alpha, who lowers his gaze from mine. “I’m sorry.”

Mortified, I turn away from her, but look back at a tight grip of my arm.

“Did anyone survive? The babies?” she asks, as tears slip down her cheeks.

“I’m not sure. I know the babies were kept in water suspensions, but I’m not sure if they lived, or died.”

“When you say you were modified. Was it surgery?” She wipes tears from her eyes, which rake over me like she’s searching for physical evidence of my alterations.

“Partly, yes. Along with injections.”

“Injections? What kind of injections?”

“Alpha. I don’t know what they were exactly, but apparently it runs through me. It allows them to recognize my scent.”

Gaze lowered from mine, she’s clearly trying to hide her panic, but the rapid rise and fall of her chest betrays her.

“I didn’t mean … I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were …” Remorse hammers through me, which I tamp down for fear of breaking into emotions. I don’t know these people enough to offer insight into my weaknesses. Something I learned upon my arrival to Calico all those years back.

Wrapping his arms around her, the Alpha glares back at me in a way that tells me I’m nothing to him. That he would crush me to bits for this woman, and I shift my gaze to Cadmus, who holds the same look in his eyes, as he watches the Alpha walk off.

Exhaling a shaky breath, I make my way back to his side and we take our seats by the fire. “We have to figure something out. Grab Kenny and get the hell out of here,” I whisper. “I don’t like how that other Alpha looks at us. Like we’re an enemy.”

“We are. I’ve no qualms about killing him.” He jerks his head toward the crowd still huddled outside of the tent. “What were the screams about?”

“One of their women had been impregnated by an Alpha. Common group. Not Alpha.”

“That’s unfortunate.” His eye squints as he sucks in a drag of his smoke.

“Cadmus …. She apparently had more than one baby. Two were attached to the placenta. She described them as underdeveloped fetuses.”

He stares off, looking both thoughtful and troubled, the tight knit of his brow telling me my words have taken him back to a dark place inside his head.

“That’s what you saw in the tunnels, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know if it was real, or a hallucination. If I just saw those things in my head.” He rubs his heel against his temple, and I’m reminded to tread carefully with Cadmus. There have been a few times he’s snapped into one of his fits, talking nonsense and lashing out at Titus.

Problem is, Titus isn’t sitting nearby to stop him.

“It’s okay. Let’s just drop it for now.”

“The woman I saw … the one who looked like you … she told me of the cure.” His brows furrow, eyes staring off beyond me, as if he’s seeing something, concentrating on it. “The samples. She kept begging me to save her.”

“The samples from the tunnels?” I’m beginning to think more and more that these hallucinations were designed to play on his attraction to me, and coerce him to seek out the cure with some level of enthusiasm. The manipulative mind techniques the docs at Calico used to get what they wanted out of subjects. “Is that what she meant?”

“I don’t know. You … I mean, she was crying. Reaching out for me. Begging me to save her. To find the cure.”

“You never spoke of the cure before, Cadmus. Are you certain that’s what she said?”

“Yes. I’d forgotten that part of it. Until you mentioned those things attached. That’s when those faceless things came after me. They knew I planned to take something.”

I remember the story he told back at the waterfall, of these things surrounding him, growing suspicious of him. “This cure … it might be useful to the rebels. The Alpha’s female is pregnant. She’s not an Alpha subject, either.”