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I sit up and wiggle the fingers of my left hand. They’re swollen to shit and hurting. “Fine.”
“Fuck.” He rolls onto his side and comes around the fire to kneel beside me. He eyeballs my fingers and curses a second time. “Get undressed. Need to redress your wounds.”
“I’m fi…”
“Can smell the fever startin’ to set, Echo. Let you get away from this earlier today, but I’m not fuckin’ around. Need you to take off your clothes. Don’t make me order you.”
My lips tighten together and anger reminds me who he is and what I am and how this shittythingworks between us. Wordlessly, I start to strip. While I do, he rifles through one of the packs I put together until he finds a pot. He fills it with water from the Alphas’ forgotten jugs and sets it over the fire. When the water’s boiling and I’m down to a tee shirt, he stirs leaves and bark into it.
He also feeds what looks like roots and bark into the fire directly, burning them just enough that he can catch the ashes in a small tin. He adds a little water to the ash, stirring until it’s thick. When he returns to me, his gaze is focused on my wounds as he applies his poultice to the stitches slithering across the top of my forearm and over my shoulder, where Lou and Angel had to open me up and add plates.
I’m swollen bad and the pain isn’t great. Everything is all purple and blue and yellow and bruised and I get the sense that it isn’t healing properly.
“Fever, huh?” I say.
He just grunts. His face is grim determination as he wraps strips of a kinda clean shredded tee shirt around my arm, securing it tight. His fingertips and the strange electricity they send rumbling through me are the only things that help distract me from the agony of it. Occasionally, he curses under his breath.
“You ever been hurt this bad before in Paradise Hole?”
I shake my head.
His jaw clenches harder. A vein pops across the center of his forehead. “Lie back. Need to keep your arm elevated.” He props my pack under my arm and presses his fingertips to my chest until I’m lying prone. Then he wraps my top half with the sleeping bag before unzipping the bottom half and fanning it open.
“Gotta get to work on the stitching here. Won’t take too long.” Cool air rushes against my bare legs, but heat lines the insides of my knees — his own knees make that heat as he kneels between my spread legs.
I close my eyes, hatred a distant memory as I think suddenly and ravenously of other things. “Echo…” His voice is deep and magnetic. “Can’t have you goin’ into heat now. Don’t need you triggerin’ my rut.”
Just the words have my thighs quivering and I whimper wildly when his fingertips touch my left knee. “Echo…”
“You…” My voice is super loud and wobbly and embarrassing. I lift my injured arm to cover my face with it, but he reaches across my body and presses it gently back down, which only succeeds in bringing him closer. My head isfucked.When I inhale the scent of blood and his skin, I damn near moan.
“Omega,still.”
“It’s not my fault,” I say and I’m nearly teary again as I say it. It’s so humiliating. “Being an Omega sucks.”
He chuckles and the sound doesn’t help. My skin sizzles. His hand slides behind my neck and lifts. I blink my eyes open to the sight of him way, way too close to me, pressing a metal cup to my lips and whisper, “I can do it myself. I can do all of this myself.”
“Sure you can. Drink.”
I drink. After the cup is empty, he goes back to my legs and I lie down and stare up at the bright patch of stars peeking through the muted grey clouds looming high overhead. I almost never see stars. There are nine of them visible in the smallest sliver between the clouds. I count them again and again in the hopes of distracting myself. But it doesn’t matter. Because a question’s already entered my mind and the words are on the tip of my tongue. They launch themselves out into the open, firing with no safety to stop them.
“Wereyouever hurt this bad in Paradise Hole?”
His hands on my thighs stop in dangerous places, just inches below my core, which is covered by a swatch of sleeping bag and nothing else. These Alphaholes didn’t leave behind any panties in my size, apparently, and my Trash City panties are so dirty they’ve nearly disintegrated.
“I was, but not in Paradise Hole. Pain started when they got me to Dark City.”
“Why?”
“They wanted to know where my sister was. Wouldn’t tell ‘em.”
He doesn’t say more and I can tell by the bunching of the muscles in his back and neck that he doesn’t like talking about this. A small bulb flickers in the long, dark chasm of my chest. I slam my hand on the light switch, turning it off, but that bulb flickers regardless.
“She was an Omega?” I repeat, needing to hear the confirmation again.
He nods.
The bulb glows brighter. My hand slams harder. My heart squeezes. “What happened to her?”
