AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER THIRTY
Haina
I didn’t have a watch or any other way to tell time, and the sun was hiding behind a bunch of fluffy white clouds, so I wasn’t gone the hour Jorik gave me.
I was gone much longer.
Okay, I had a vague idea of how long an hour was and realized when that hour passed that I wasn’t ready to go back to the cabin. So I kept walking. I found a vast patch of wild strawberries, perfectly ripe, and I gorged myself for an hour while staring up at the clouds and watching them form different shapes. Then for the next hour, I picked more berries until my fingertips were bright red. Before I knew it, I’d been gone probably close to four hours, since it took me another hour to walk back to the cabin.
And the self-loathing that filled my head as I returned with my bounty was loud. I’d pined and worried for these men for days, was drenched in agony and despair that the addiction would claim them and they wouldn’t return to me, and when they did, I whipped out my blade and regarded them with a fear so paralyzing, I thought my heart might stop.
The way they were looking at me, the things they said about hunger and craving—what else was I supposed to think?
Surely, after their time on the boat, sex would be the last thing on their minds. Bathing, eating, and resting had to take precedence, right? At least for a normal person who’d just experienced severe mental and physical trauma.
Rest was best.
But they didn’t seem concerned at all about sleeping or bathing. And when I mentioned food, they looked at me like I was a mug of blood and they were parched to the point of pain.
Why couldn’t we just go back to that touching moment on the dock, when everything seemed right with the world again?
I’d considered more than once that I should just keep walking, see where my feet took me and whether I could survive on my own. At some point, I was sure I would find another abandoned cabin. I could just live out my days there until another Hellcat or a group of super soldiers was sent to collect me and caught me unaware while asleep or bathing.
At least then my boys would be safe.
But I couldn’t leave them.
My heart wouldn’t allow it, so as much as I dragged my ass returning to the cabin, my feet refused to take me anywhere else. They were only listening to my heart, and the three pieces of my heart were back in the cabin, only I had no idea if they were reallybackor if I was walking into an ambush and my inevitable death.
I felt their heartbeats long before the cabin came into view.
I’d made a pouch out of cow lily leaves to carry the berries and switched it to my left hand, while my right hand reached for the Yakku blade on my thigh strap.
One heartbeat was closer than the others.
Two of them were in the house; one was outside.
Swallowing, I took a deep breath and tuned in to my surroundings, blocking out certain things, like the acidic tang of the evergreen trees and the sweet floral scent of the pollen on the breeze. Two squirrels were up in the branches. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. I could feel their rapid heartbeats.
I tuned them out and focused on that heavier heartbeat, the slower one. A deep inhale brought me the gentle fragrance of lavender—from the soap in the tub—along with something inherently masculine and fresh.
Zane.
“We’d never hurt you, Kitten,” he said, coming out of the woodshed.Ourwoodshed. “Like Jorik said, our craving for you is … different.”
With less caution than I was sure his brothers would have taken, Zane stepped into my personal space with his imposing presence, forcing me to back up until my butt hit a tree trunk. Fear made agonizing steps through me.
I was scared, but also aroused. Zane’s forcefulness and the possessive gleam in his eyes did crazy things to my body. My belly flipped and warmed, my skin tingled, and that pulsing, hollow ache in between my legs was damn near crippling.
“I d-don’t understand how you guys can think about sex after what you went through. Aren’t you tired? Hungry?” I inhaled, determined to slow down my raging pulse. “I can see and smell that you’ve bathed. That must feel better?”
“Infinitely,” he said, his rasp making my nipples tighten.
I studied his face for a moment. All three of them looked like they’d been attacked by a grizzly bear. It was a little difficult to look at their faces with all the scratches and scabs, particularly around their eyes and on their foreheads.
They’d all arrived shirtless, and the bloody tracks and scabs on their arms and torsos hadn’t been something I could ignore.
They had to be in so much pain.
