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CHAPTER NINE
Haina
Iwrenchedmywristfree of Zane’s grip. “Saved your life?” I said with an incredulous tone.
His eyes widened and zapped back and forth between my face and the syringe needle still sticking out of his vein. I pulled it free and began putting it away in the canvas bag.
“You … you can’t do that,” he exclaimed.
“What? Save your life? Pretty sure I can and I did.” I was glad to see that he was getting his cantankerous disposition back, but the fact that he didn’t seem to be grateful even a little bit rubbed me the wrong way.
“Give me an entire vial,” he shouted, attempting to push himself up to sitting, only to growl and grunt like a wild animal as his hand slipped in a pool of blood and he fell back and his head smacked the deck with a painful-sounding thud.
“I had to. What you guys are taking, trying to spread out your doses, wouldn’t have been enough. You were going todie.”I helped him sit up, spinning his body around so he leaned against the outside wall of the cabin.
His throat moved as he swallowed, and I could hear him grinding his teeth. We only had a bit of water left, so I handed him the canteen. “Drink,” I ordered.
He snatched it from me with a snarl but put it to his lips nonetheless.
“How’d they find us?” I asked, throwing the blood-soaked fabric that was my shirt and his ripped shirt over the side of the boat into the ocean. There was no sense keeping them.
He lifted a shoulder and put the canteen down on the deck beside him. “Drones?”
I shook my head. “No, they knewexactlywhere we were. And I haven’t heard a drone since that first one.”
“That first one could have gotten satellite coordinates, and then they just expanded their search radius. You were probably better offnotshooting it down and alerting it to our whereabouts. Better to just let it fly overhead.”
I shook my head again. “You’re incapable of holding your tongue, aren’t you? Incapable of giving a compliment or recognition where it’s due.”
His blank stare was more infuriating than if he’d glared at me.
After a moment, he blinked, then spoke like I hadn’t said anything. “This was a targeted strike. The chopper, the divers. They knew ourexactlocation. And those divers came in on a boat or something, which you didn’t hear.”
Oh my God, I wanted to scream! I wanted to scream, tear out his stitches and watch him bleed out.
Okay, well, maybe not that last part, but I definitely wanted to scream. And maybe slap him around a bit, too.
“Chopper could have dropped them off elsewhere and they hiked, rowed or paddled closer? Moored a boat in one of the nearby inlets,” he offered, his voice hoarse as he winced and shifted the way he sat.
I shot him a look, but he seemed ignorant to the toothpick-size olive branch he’d just extended to me. I started cleaning up the blood by dropping a bucket on a rope over the side of the boat, lifting it up full, then sloshing the water over the deck so the bloody water rushed over the sides into the sea.
“I think they’re tracking us.”
His brows lifted. “Like a GPS chip?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“On the boat?”
“Boat, guns we stole from the compound…” I chewed on my lip. “Us?”
His eyes widened.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “Rix and Jorik need to get back here, and we need to leave. If we stay, they’ll know where we are and just send another strike.” I hadn’t realized it, but like before, my hands were shaking. My breathing was ragged, and my heart hammered in my chest like it was trying to break free. An icy chill swept down my spine, and suddenly I was having a hard time seeing straight. Bile coated the back of my tongue in a thick film, and my mouth flooded with saliva like I was about to puke. “What’s happening?” I stumbled on the deck, sinking down to my knees beside Zane, my body swaying.
“Shh, Kitten,” he said, grimacing as he reached out an arm. “You’re going into shock. Shh. Come here.” He pulled me into his embrace, and the moment his skin touched mine, the spots in my vision faded and that nauseous feeling in my stomach subsided.
I curled into him, my knees to my chest, his arm around me tight as I rested my cheek against his heart. “I killed four people,” I whispered, a shiver taking hold of my body and making me tremble.
