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“And later?”
“He begged us.”
Luca frowned.
“When Echols found out Dr. Dante wasn’t forcing us to undergo tests, he threatened to revoke Dr. Dante’s lab access and do the tests himself.”
“So, he forced you to do them?”
“Like I said, he begged. He’d give us pain killers, but we’d burn through them so fast they rarely worked more than a few minutes, and some tests took a while. But then Dr. Echols wanted to study a greater degree of regeneration.”
“How?”
“By amputating our limbs.”
Luca’s stomach rolled.
Nox shushed him.
“Did he?” Did Dr. Dante butcher Nox and Koda?
“He wasn’t going to, but I talked him into it.”
Luca had to replay what Nox said over in his head, and then he still didn’t believe he’d heard correctly. “Why?”
“Because I’d rather it be him than one of the others. Dr. Dante cared. He cared about Koda. He did everything he could to make sure he didn’t hurt.”
Luca sucked in a breath.
“He lasted about three weeks, then broke. I think Echols would have thrown him out of the facility, except Dr. Dante understood the ichor in a way even Echols couldn’t grasp. Then one morning, about a year after we started the military operations, Dr. Dante got into a screaming match over Koda with Dr. Echols. The next day, Dr. Dante wasn’t there.”
Heated water droplets pelted Luca’s skin.
Nox pressed the words against Luca’s temple with a kiss. “He cared too much.”
Luca didn’t doubt Dr. Dante cared about Nox and the other betas, but he’d loved Koda.
But then, it wasn’t hard to love someone like him.
“Dr. Dante asked me what Koda was like. I mean before.” When he’d been a son, a brother, a best friend.
Everyone had been someone before the Utah Facility.
Even Nox.
Yet Luca had never asked.
The softness in Nox’s gaze said he’d heard the thought. “It’s okay.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It wasn’t like we had much time to talk about it.”
“We did after.” During that one month on the road, they’d talked about everything, yet Luca hadn’t asked once about Nox’s life before. “And while we were at Isaiah’s camp. We laid in bed together for hours.”
“I liked the quiet.”
“Is that your way of saying I talk too much?”
