AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her nickname riled him, just like she knew it would. His smile dropped and he said, “Ten minutes.”
Daisy was still smiling as she entered her apartment and collected as many potted plants as she could carry before returning to Mary’s and Flint’s. Axel was in the same spot as she’d left him, hunched over with his head in his hands.
Grace and Evan were gone, but had left fluids on an IV drip feeding into Elena’s arm.
Daisy placed the plants about the room and then gathered Axel something to eat from the kitchen. She put the food plate on the bedside furniture, and then borrowed some of Flint’s clothes and put them next to the food.
“I’m going to be in the training room,” she said quietly. “If you need me, just ask AIMI and I’ll be right up.” She hesitated when he lifted his pained gaze to her. “Try to have something to eat. If you need a shower, my place is yours. I left some clothes.”
When he didn’t respond, she returned to the basement. It was fine. He needed some time. This would be hard for anyone.
Parker waited for Daisy on the exercise mat. He’d taken off his shirt and wore simple basketball shorts. His bionic arm glimmered under the halogen lights as he grazed metal fingers across the array of weapons on a rack behind the mat. But he didn’t pick any.
He turned her way and gave her outfit a disapproving onceover. “Jeans?”
She shrugged and removed her jacket. “Doesn’t matter what I wear. The Falcon will eat the Pigeon.”
Parker scoffed. “You sound like an old martial arts movie.”
“I watched a lot of them at Julius’s house.” She went to a side wall where a low, long bench stretched, and placed her jacket down. She toed off her boots and peeled off her socks, and then retied her long ponytail. The weight of Parker’s attention followed her every action, and she knew he wanted to ask questions, but held them back. Now wasn’t the time to worry about hurt feelings.
“What do you want to know?” she asked without facing him.
Instead, she padded over to a wall plastered with charcoal sketches. They must be Evan’s prophetic art. Parker sidled up to her, his brow puckered as he also scanned the pieces. He gave a breathy grunt as he folded his arms.
“He’s drawn so much over the years,” he said. “After we learned he’d dreamed about my retirement party and didn’t realize it, we thought all his art should be public so we can all study it. If you see anything familiar, let me know.”
“Like this?” She pointed at the note she’d pinned to Max’s chest when she left him in the municipal district with a bomb strapped to his chest.
“That’s actually the note you wrote,” he pointed out.
“Oh. It is?” She couldn’t remember much of the past few years. It all felt like a blur of despair, angst, and confusion. It made her sick in the stomach to think about. She refocused on the note and recognized her handwriting. The answer is in your blood. That’s right. Julius had, not only tasked Daisy to strap the bomb to Max, but he injected Max with poison despite Daisy’s protests. She didn’t like that and rebelled by writing this note. It might have been her first rebellion against Julius.
Through her scrawled clue, her siblings had deciphered the cure for his blood poisoning. As a mate, Max could accept Sloan’s blood via transfusion. Her advanced regeneration capabilities temporarily transferred to Max, helping counter the poison’s effect.
This healing process only worked between mates, and of course, one way.
Apparently, their maker had built this failsafe into their DNA, so they weren’t used in the future as some kind of regeneration cash cow to end world disease.
Didn’t stop Julius trying though. Daisy had lost count of the number of times she’d had her blood extracted.
Parker caught her distasteful expression and directed her attention elsewhere. “When you get time, check these other sketches. Let us know if you recognize any faces or places.”
“I’ll take a look.”
“Good. Let’s get moving.”
Daisy joined her brother on the exercise mat and shook out her hands. Just outside the room, she glimpsed some of the family gathered around Griffin’s cell. They’d inched back closer.
She returned her focus to Parker. To say the experience was weird was an understatement. Somehow, even after eight years of living in a lab, being told you were going to be warriors against sin, she’d never believed it. She’d spent her days wistfully imagining flying away, playing pretend, and singing songs. She’d been living a dream, even in the cold, small four corners of that room.
Decades had passed.
Her old stubborn brother who was too serious then was now a hulking brute—still too serious. She smirked at him. A twinkle entered his golden eyes, so much like a lion’s that she sometimes forgot he wasn’t one.
“What?” He squinted.
“Nothing. It’s just… you and me. We’ve come so far yet, some would say, we haven’t changed at all.”
