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Her nod was quick and jittery, her eyes still wide with terror.
“You promise to come back in an hour?”
She nodded again.
“Don’t leave us. Don’t take that boat … trust me, you don’t want to go inside it right now.”
Her eyes grew even bigger. “What—”
“Just trust me.”
Those lips that I loved to watch wrap around my cock pressed into a thin line, but she nodded again. “Okay. I’ll go see if I can find more wild strawberries.” She tilted her head toward a small bowl on the counter. “I picked those yesterday. Help yourselves.” Then she slowly backed out of the cabin, her purple Yakku blade still up and ready to stab if need be.
Once she was gone and the door closed behind her, Rix, Zane and I all released pained, sorrow-filled breaths.
“Fuck,” Zane sighed, shoving his fingers into his hair and pulling until he winced.
“How could we be so fucking stupid?” Rix croaked.
“Because we love her and we missed her and forgot what she might be thinking,” I murmured. We were all exhausted. Every muscle in my body ached liked I’d just spent the last five days lifting weights nonstop while also running up the side of a mountain in my bare feet. If I still had the serum in my body, I wouldn’t feel a damn thing, but I wasn’t enhanced anymore, so I felt every cramp, every spasm, every bruise.
Besides the first bit where Zane was kind enough to knock us unconscious, we hadn’t slept. The addiction doesn’t let you sleep; it punishes you with the constant feeling of your insides being set on fire, keeping you awake and in agony.
The pot of water on the stove that Haina had set to boil was bubbling. Rix wandered over, grabbed it and went to the bathroom to dump it into the tub. Not saying anything—because what the fuck was there to say?—I filled up three more pots and set them to boil on the stove.
Zane grabbed the cooked grouse, which smelled delicious, and like the barely reformed savages that we were, we dove into the roasted bird with our hands.
I’d never tasted anything so incredible in my entire life. It was juicy. It was savory. It was perfection.
Groans of pleasure trickled through us as we filled our furious bellies and dumped boiling water into the bathtub.
We didn’t talk at all, though.
To do so would be painful, and what was there to talk about anyway?
We knew what the other person had gone through, knew what they were thinking and how helpless and weak they felt.
Sure, we would eventually regain our strength after some food and rest, but we could never go back to what we once were. Super soldiers with enhanced strength, enhanced intelligence, enhanced speed, and enhanced reflexes and senses.
I couldn’t feel my brothers’ heartbeats anymore, couldn’t feel the air ripple and vibrate around me as it once did when someone prepared to move.
And we didn’t have the ability to heal quickly anymore, either. That was what I would probably miss the most. Kappa blood had ten times the white blood cells of any other person or strain, and they’d synthesized the serum so that when it was injected into a Verian, those white blood cells began to clone immediately, helping that person heal faster than normal.
If we had the serum in our systems, our cuts and scratches would have healed up completely by now.
But we didn’t have the serum, so it looked like we’d just been mauled by mountain lions.
I was an ordinary human now. A half-blood. An unenhanced Verian.
The only thing that separated me from an Amlin was the fact that I could take blood from a source and temporarily gain their enhancement, rather than just get high.
And surprisingly, I was mostly okay with that.
It was the one thing I wasn’t sure my brothers felt the same way about, though.
We hadn’t discussed it, and I wasn’t ready to do so anyway.
I was never taking the serum again, not unless someone held me down and shoved the needle into my arm. Because now that I knew what happened in order to kick the addiction, I never wanted to go back to that dark place, never wanted to meet that beast again. I didn’t want to be reliant on anything, least of all something that involved extracting blood from the woman I loved.
