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“Holden?”
“Yes?”
“Did we really make it out, or is this just some dream you’re giving me to help me let go?”
His fingers twitched against mine, squeezing harder, almost to the point of pain before he relaxed them. “If I was going to give you one last dream, don’t you think we’d be naked?”
I laughed even though it hurt. “Maybe you thought that would be too obvious. ”
“No. We made it. We’re out. ”
“I gave up, you know. ”
“No you didn’t. ”
“I did. I thought I’d seen you for the last time. I didn’t think I was going to leave that place alive. I gave up. ”
“You don’t know how to give up. ” He was stroking my hair, placing delicate kisses along my temple and cheeks. “You don’t have a quitter in you. ”
“When I saw Max…”
“Secret, shhh. ”
“I gave up,” I whispered, pressing my lips against the cool blue fabric of the gown he wore.
“If you’d given up, we’d all be dead. You didn’t give up, you just…let go. ”
Calliope had told me once my fatal flaw was my need to be a normal person, to act in a way that I could pretend I was human and not a monster.
But Holden was right. I hadn’t given up.
I’d just kissed my humanity goodbye.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Four days later
Government assets were not supposed to make demands.
I’d learned that much from the exasperated expressions I continued to receive from Tyler and Emilio whenever I asked for something new.
That’s what they got for labeling me as property.
A Dell laptop might not ask for a lot from its government-assigned owner, but if these two thought I was going to politely do their bidding and not ask for anything in return, they needed to be set straight sooner rather than later.
My first request had been to see Desmond.
I’d been denied.
My second through twelfth requests had also been to see Desmond, and each in turn had been shot down. They tried to be polite about it at first, but in the end Emilio and a military doctor had told me to stop asking. Desmond was a civilian, and it turned out architects do not merit military clearance. And certainly not walk-on privileges at a top-secret military hospital.
From what I gathered he hadn’t liked the news any more than I had, but his reaction had been a bit…stronger. For the four days it took for the doctors to be satisfied with my recovery, Desmond had been kept in the stockade.
Now that they were sure I was fully mobile and healthy, instead of rewarding me with a visit, I was being debriefed. Again.
I’d been left in a small interrogation room in the hospital’s basement. From what I could tell the hospital itself was one part of a much larger complex, but since I hadn’t been taken outside during my stay, I couldn’t figure out how big. Chances were good I’d never be privy to that information. The less I knew the better as far as they were concerned.
The same theory extended to discovering the wellbeing of others. Aside from five-minute visits with Holden each night, I hadn’t been allowed to see my father. The doctor said he was in no condition to receive visitors, which suggested I’d been wise not to see him while we were in captivity. Anything that would take a vampire more than five days to heal couldn’t be good.
